Ebony stepped into the mouth of the Convergence. One of them, anyways, and the last step he needed to take to get to their base in the Solar system. Ironically, the humans of Terra had named this cold moon of their neighboring ringed planet Titan. The Children of Thanos had only learned the local name some years after claiming it for their own. Gamora had thought the bizarre coincidence quite amusing when Ebony told her of it. Ebony had thought it was fate, a sign from Lady Death. Their father had agreed.
Ebony carefully shuffled forwards across the jagged yellow ice, his way lit only by the faintest, diffuse glow of sunlight reflected off the nearby great, gaseous planet and filtered through an atmosphere thick with nitrous fumes. He grabbed the metal railing circling the exterior of the base as soon as it was within reach. As usual, his glove immediately froze to it. He inched his way around the structure to the entry way one tacky handhold at a time. Finally, he reached the door, let himself in, and rejoiced at the warm darkness and quiet when the hatch closed again behind him. He removed his helmet and breathed deeply, wrinkling his nose at the stale air of this moon that always smelled of ammonia no matter how much they filtered it. He walked down the short corridor to the small common area.
Gamora and Nebula were both waiting for him, their green and blue complexions illuminated by the cold violet light of the Power Stone, still encased in a porous stone sphere the size of two fists. Ebony was surprised Gamora had managed not to break it, not even a crack. He looked to Nebula. "You have Time," he rasped. He could feel it, hear it screaming for its energy to be released, just as its sister Power did.
Nebula reached into her pocket and pulled out a blood-stained medallion on a thick, braided cord. The green glow stemming from the center of the artifact blended with the light from the Power Stone to produce a harsh white florescence with colored shadows.
"Where's Cull?"
"Dead. The Asgardian killed him," Nebula said expressionlessly. "There was nothing I could do."
"It seems you're the last Son of Thanos, Ebony," Proxima said, slinking up behind him. He hadn't heard her open the door, but he could feel from the cold air that she must have come after him. She pushed past him to stand behind Nebula. She impatiently stripped off her protective outer layer and dropped it on the floor before taking a seat with her sisters. Only then did her proud and stern bearing break. Ebony could clearly see tear tracks glinting in the light of the Infinity Stones, marring her otherwise determined visage. She pulled the shining orange Soul Stone from an inner pocket and squeezed it in her fist. With her other hand she drew a long dagger which she set across her lap. She slowly stroked the flat of the blade with her thumb. It was the weapon she used to sacrifice her husband, Ebony realized. How right that she would kill him with a knife. So much more intimate than her usual weapons.
Ebony stepped forwards to settle into his own place near the head of the table. He reached across towards Nebula, intending to free the Time Stone from its ridiculous container.
Proxima stopped him, slapping her dagger onto the table between them. "These are for Thanos' hand, not yours," she said coldly.
He withdrew his hand calmly. "You think I would turn against our father? I?"
"Turn against him? No," Gamora said. "Against us, perhaps. Do not seek to take the Other's place in our father's favor, Ebony. You might earn his fate if you do."
Ebony grinned. "No one here could do to me what I did to that Chitaurun."
"No, but any one of us could cut you open," Gamora said.
"Your skin isn't near so thick as his was." Nebula added neutrally, black eyes glinting in the mingled light of the three stones.
"Nor is your skill with manipulation, despite what you may think," Proxima said harshly.
"You could never have made the Puppet," Nebula said.
"You could never have made us," Gamora said darkly.
"I have no quarrel with you, my sisters," Ebony said.
"Nor we with you," Proxima said tightly. "Yet. We are still united in the Black Order."
"Of course," Ebony soothed.
"But you will do me the courtesy of not speaking to me except as needed for the cause," Proxima finished. Gamora and Nebula nodded, both glaring at him.
He nodded slowly. Ebony had never encountered this strange solidarity amongst his sisters before, but he knew better than to try to resist them at present. The daughters of Thanos were different from his sons. Ebony, Corvus, and Cull all began as unwilling conscripts to their father's cause, bent and broken into submission only to emerge with a feverish faith in their lord and master. Ebony worshipped Thanos because this was a being greater than himself. Thanos was a god, or at least the only creature Ebony had ever encountered worthy of the title. In a way, Ebony envied his sisters; their love for Thanos and Lady Death was purer, he thought. More genuinely familial. Each of Thanos' daughters had volunteered for that same, unspeakable tempering, for various reasons but ultimately all because of love. Thanos accepted Ebony's devotion. Thanos returned Gamora's, Nebula's, and Proxima's love. There was a difference.
By unspoken agreement, there was silence. They would wait for Thanos. There was nothing to be done, no move to be made, until he came to unite the Stones.
Loki watched the door for a long time after Thor left. There was a loud chorus of errant thoughts and questions from his subconscious and his hallucinations, but these were fairly easy to ignore as he instead focused on his strange feeling of... trepidation. The origin of the feeling was unclear. It was possible he was worried for Thor's sake, since he and his brother had only narrowly escaped two battles today. Thor could take care of himself (assuming he was real), yet none on Asgard including Thor had been prepared for the dark elf attack. As far as Loki could remember, Svartalfheim was supposed to be a dead planet: clearly not so. Thor, Loki, Odin, Frigga... everyone was wrong about that. Therefore, Loki did not trust the dark elves to die this time either. And then there was this newly met and dispatched agent of the "Black Order," which neither Thor nor the Avengers had heard of before, so they said. Loki didn't think he had heard of them either, but he trusted his own memory even less than the assurances of his compatriots. There was his newfound vague memory of the Avengers to contend with. There was the thief of the Time Stone... There were many unknowns accruing today.
But perhaps his fascination with and trepidation of the closed door had less to do with Thor's safety and more to do with Thor's ability or lack thereof to sense the lost Infinity Stones through an anomaly. It was of course impossible for Loki to know whether his brother possessed the finesse to separate one voice from the chaos of far-flung magical and astronomical signals merging into the cacophony of the Convergence, but Loki had a very strong suspicion that Thor didn't. Thor couldn't manipulate the Reality Stone, at least not without the aid of his secret Infinity Gauntlet. (Loki's lip twisted in mistrustful hurt.) Thor didn't sense the Time Stone until Loki told him it was there. (Was it there? Or was a phantasmal Thor-like imposter merely agreeing with him, confirming his own bias? Thor's discovery of a dead magician seemed to confirm Loki's observations, but as always, the question remained as to whether Thor or some other malevolent external force thought to trick him, or if his own wayward mind was the Deceiver.) Thor remained reluctant to allow Loki to use the Mind Stone to clarify his uncertainties... justifiably so.
It was also possible Loki was simply worried about being stranded in an unfamiliar place away from Thor. Loki was getting a better sense of linear time, particularly today, which had been so extraordinary in so many ways, coming face-to-face with three Infinity Stones, getting physically injured, and transporting to Midgard... These were events that only made sense consecutively. That was the key to remembering correctly, the way other people remembered things, Loki suspected. Memory landmarks and milestones. But there was an obvious flaw to the method: Loki could still imagine a memory, and the only way to verify the truth when he did that was to check with Thor. Thor was the cornerstone without which the whole memory palace collapsed in on its own weight. If he wanted to live in the real world, Thor's world, he couldn't count on mortals who barely knew him to fill that role.
And Loki did want to live in Thor's world, he realized with a jolt. It mattered less that Thor's world was real so much as it was Thor's. Thor's world was... changing, and therefore beautiful, and therefore comforting, he thought, falling back into the simplified conceptual framework his battered consciousness had first devised upon awakening to light and dark and time. Comforting and therefore desirable and good.
Someone touched his shoulder. "Loki, she's talking to you." He glanced around to see Jane standing beside him. She raised her eyebrows and nodded in the other direction. He followed her gaze to see Thor's other mortal friend, Lady Natasha, watching him. He shook his head, as did several hallucinations of Thor and various other Asgardians sitting around him and watching him disapprovingly. This was why he couldn't be trusted with any external matters of consequence. He was too easily lost in his own mind to constantly pay attention to the world.
"I apologize." This time, he didn't say it as a question. He was getting better at social etiquette, he decided. Frigga would be pleased; his imaginary Thor certainly was, applauding vigorously. "I was thinking. You will have to repeat yourself."
"I asked what was the last thing you remember before waking up on Asgard."
Loki blinked. It was a difficult question. The answer depended a great deal on what the human meant by remember. How literal was the question? He tried to cast his mind backwards sequentially so as not to drift over to imagination, a laborious prospect he usually avoided. When did he wake? Arguably, he was thinking before he was truly awake. He briefly envisioned the fantastic arrays of patterned light he had entertained himself with for so, so long. He once again paused to experience the enormity of such concepts as existence and time... Lady Natasha might not be interested in that though. Most people weren't particularly, although for the life of him Loki couldn't understand their blasé attitude. But no, from Natasha's perspective, he probably wasn't thinking until significantly after his awakening. His thoughts were nonverbal for a long time after he was damaged, and he had had very little success describing them even to ever-patient Thor... Illusions of both Thor and his friend Fandral groaned at him. Loki shut them out and shook his head. Before he could get lost trying to come up with the correct answer, he needed to clarify. "I'm not sure I understand the question. Can you be more specific?"
Natasha stared at him. A slight pink colored her cheeks. "What don't you understand?" she asked calmly.
"Well, what do you mean by 'waking up'? What do you mean by 'remember'? That kind of thing."
Natasha's eyes widened, but she smiled slightly. "I can see why this might be a challenge." Her eyes flicked towards Jane. "You remembered meeting Jane before today?"
"I think so."
"Tell me what you remember."
Loki thought for a moment. "Thor was banished to Midgard after we attacked Jotunheim. I think." He was fairly certain Thor had only been banished to Midgard once. He was more certain of the reason. "He fell in with Jane somehow. I...saw them together several times. I'm not sure I ever spoke with her." He could easily imagine a conversation with the scientist concerning the engineering of the Bifrost or various other magical and scientific topics, but he had a feeling they were exactly that: imagination. None really fit with his other, more dire memories involving Thor.
"You didn't," Jane confirmed. "I never actually saw you, but Thor said you had sent an astral projection or something once that was invisible to me and also that you were watching through the Destroyer robot thing, fighting with Thor."
"Yes," Loki saw it instantly as she described the sequence of events.
"What happened next?"
"Thor returned to Asgard, I presume via the Bifrost. He met me there. I was very angry at the time after discovering my origin as a spoil of war which Odin, Frigga and presumably half my acquaintances of their generation had kept secret from me for thousands of years with dubious motives. Thor and I fought. I fell. I experienced a total identity collapse in the wake of the debacle and in the absence of spacetime. After that, I have few clear memories until recently. There was thought disorder and time dilation that between them very much complicate my recollection of the experience."
"Time dilation?" Jane inquired excitedly. "When and how and why did that-" Then she noticed Natasha's pained expression. "Nevermind. I'll ask you later. Also that was a very, er, impressively succinct summary."
Natasha rolled her eyes. "Hmm. Let's try something else. Just a minute. I'm going to show you some of the footage from when you were here. Tony should have it saved still. Jarvis, can you help?" She picked up the computer tablet Jane and Loki had previously abandoned. The screen flickered to life and displayed a selection of blurry images. Natasha glanced through and touched one with her finger. It expanded to fill the whole screen as she tilted the image to show to Loki. It started playing a video. It was difficult for Loki to tell what was going on in the video at first: it was a dimly lit cityscape passing beneath the camera at breakneck speed. Agent Romanoff, did you miss me? Tony's tiny voice whispered out of the device. A targeting array lit up as the vision slowed slightly, centered around... Loki. He was standing before a crowd of cowering humans, and he looked quite pleased with himself, until an energy blast slammed into his torso and knocked him off his feet. The camera appeared to be mounted on Iron Man's suit. Your move, Reindeer Games. The phantom Loki raised his hands in surrender as his armor dissipated.
Loki furrowed his brow and looked up at Natasha who was watching him expectantly. "This is what happened when my body was under the control of the Mind Stone, I take it?"
"Yes."
"Very interesting... Please continue."
"Did you recognize it at all?"
"I don't think so."
Silently, Natasha moved on to the next video. The lighting was still quite poor. The new setting was the interior of some kind of vessel, the noise of the engines drowning out most other sounds. There was a noticeable thump, however, which seemed to frighten the two humans in the vision. The Loki of the past looked up with a knowing and wary expression. There were another series of thumps, then the door at the rear of the vessel screeched open, revealing Thor's unmistakable silhouette. Loki frowned as he watched Thor manhandle him out of the humans' custody. He didn't like watching himself as a prisoner, even in the past, even when he clearly deserved it from a moralistic point of view. A Thor to his left started protesting his eternal brotherly love and that he would never, ever, bring Loki to any kind of harm. Another Thor walked up on Loki's other side, elbowed him, and shook his head at the increasingly ludicrous monologue of the original, silently judging the poor simulacrum. Loki tried not to roll his eyes. The real Thor as well as Odin, Frigga, and Lady Eir had instructed him not to engage with his own hallucinations, but it was very difficult sometimes. He forced his attention back to the screen.
Eventually, the Man of Iron caught up to Thor and Loki again. Natasha skipped past most of the short fight that ensued until Thor had apparently allied with the humans, and they approached Loki as a group. Loki, interestingly, was sitting perfectly still in the snow until they were within a few feet of him, at which point he suddenly stirred back to life, just before this particular video ended.
"Odd," Loki commented.
"How so?"
"Why didn't I run?"
"Why do you think?"
Loki raised his eyebrows. "If you're asking if I remember this, the answer is still no. If you're asking for my honest opinion, I'd say it looks like the spell controlling him was malfunctioning."
"That wasn't it."
"Oh?"
"No. You wanted to get caught, it turns out. That way you could sabotage our group from inside our base."
"That seems unnecessarily complicated."
"It worked, though."
"I'll take your word for it."
Natasha sighed. "I guess autobiographical recall isn't really working."
Loki smiled politely. "No, but I do appreciate your efforts. It is very interesting, after all."
"I'm not done yet. Jarvis, where's the invasion?" The screen shifted again, with a new selection of images. "Just show me stills, Jarvis." The resolution suddenly improved. Loki's eyes widened.
"Chitauri," he said, softly. "With leviathans." The names came to him easily. Just as easily, the Midgardian lobby melted away to the bridge of one of the leviathan vessels.
Natasha stilled. Oddly, the human didn't look at all out of place in this alien environment. "You do know them."
"Apparently. I do not recall when I learned of them, but I know them."
"What can you tell me about them?"
Loki thought. He knew rather a lot about them, it seemed. He looked around and could see every detail of the command stations and weapons control rigs, as well as the organic material comprising the hull. He rested a hand against the wall and felt the slow pulse of the jument. He studied one Chitaurun soldier, carefully discerning the cybernetic armor from the underlying reptilian flesh. His pulse quickened slightly. He found his vivid recollection not a little disturbing, as if this clutch of information were someone else's dirty laundry piled in the corner of his room. That was an apt metaphor, actually. This knowledge wasn't his, not really. He raised a hand and summoned an illusion with his thoughts: another Loki appeared next to him, clad in war-blackened silver armor with a high, horned helmet. He nodded at the illusion, willing it to know and to speak these strange memories that didn't feel like his own. "Ask Reindeer Games," he instructed Natasha.
The spy blinked. "Okay... what can you tell me about the Chitauri, er, Reindeer Games?"
"They are carbon-based and aerobic organisms. They are bipedal vertebrates, sexually monomorphic and despite their reptilian features could be considered humanoid. They are primarily carnivorous yet also rely on artificial synthesis of several macronutrients not otherwise available in their diet. These additives allow them to increase the tensile strength of various connective tissues including bone and hide, making their warriors more durable even against magic-wielding species, although they still struggle when forced to take their battles to the planetary surface, being an entirely space-faring race at this point in their evolution. They have no home planet anymore but rather survive on the backs of a fully self-sufficient and mobile ecosystem of several less intelligent sister species, including the leviathan you saw. Most are cybernetically augmented from a young age in order to maximize coordination and adaptability of their forces. Although a solitary Chitaurun functions capably, they are much more effective as a hive intelligence, and most effective when the hive serves a single royal. Of note, this groupthink tendency has been exploited numerous times by telepathically gifted foes, as the Chitauri themselves are magically insensate with few exceptions. As a result, they are a species cut off from civilization by their own xenophobia."
"He sounds like an encyclopedia," Jane commented.
"Er...why did they follow you here?" Natasha asked.
"They are my slaves," the illusion answered instantly. "Borrowed from my creator. Bound to me to carry out his bidding."
"Your creator?" Loki asked his own illusion. That wasn't something he had expected to hear, so he wasn't sure if he was imagining it. Although he apparently retained some information in between his fall into the Void and regaining consciousness on Asgard, he remembered absolutely nothing about his lived experience. Yet, strangely, Reindeer Games seemed to. In theory, the spell he had cast merely allowed the Reindeer Games illusion to access memory, not develop its own back story. Either he had somehow given the illusion access to autobiographical memory that he, Loki, did not possess, or he had given the spell unintended agency, or he was just hearing what made the most sense regardless of what the illusion was actually saying. After all, assuming he and the false mind held in the Infinity Stone and the Chitauri all existed as he currently understood... the false mind must have come from somewhere, been created by someone. That someone could reasonably be conflated with the leader of the Chitauri. That was a logical leap, though, that Loki wasn't willing to make. Reindeer Games could, on behalf of his creator, just as easily have been the agent that most recently subjugated the Chitauri, based on what they now knew of the species. Or Reindeer Games' creator could have been a mere ally of the Chitauri. Or one of the rare Chitauri sorcerers could have been the creator. Too many possibilities, none terribly comforting. Loki clenched his jaw, twisted around, and grabbed Jane's arm. The vision of the leviathan interior shattered as he did, the Man of Iron's lobby snapping back into place. "Creator. Real or not real?" he demanded.
"Er, real I think?"
Loki let go of her and turned back to the illusion, mystified and a little unnerved. "Who is your creator?" he whispered.
Reindeer Games grinned maniacally back at him. "I am the Gift, child of One and the Other. I am the Puppet Strings. You are what's left, the child of Death. You are the Puppet King. You have no future. I have no past."
"You speak in riddles," Loki muttered unhappily. So do you, a voice whispered in his ear, possibly Odin's.
"What does that mean?" Natasha asked.
"I don't know," Loki admitted. He had not intended the illusion to have a personality, let alone a vaguely threatening one. "The facts about the Chitauri were familiar, like a review from past study. But this... it's saying things I not only didn't expect but also don't understand. I- I need Thor." He waved a hand to dissolve the illusion, although Reindeer Games remained in his mind's eye, recalcitrant, laughing at him. One of the Thors started fighting with it, loudly. Loki closed his eyes, even though it didn't really help against hallucinations. He growled in frustration. "That thing toys with me. It blurs the lines of memory and imagination too far. I need Thor," he repeated. "Thor explains what is false and what is real."
"Are you okay?" Jane asked.
Loki threw up his hands. "I have no idea. Probably. I have hallucinations all the time. That one's just weirder than normal. It's another trick from the Deceiver." He raised his voice a little to hear himself over Thor's and Reindeer Games' irate shouting.
"He mentioned the Deceiver before, back on Asgard, but I'm not sure what it means," Jane said worriedly.
"When Loki talks about the 'Deceiver,' it's because he sees so much inconsistency in reality," Thor explained helpfully. "He's not sure whether the problem is with the world around him or with his skewed perception, whether he is imagining only some of the cosmos or all of it. He's looking for the holes in the world that would expose the illusion for good. So far, he's decided to trust me and believe that my reality is true and his is false, but he is still trying to prove me wrong."
"I'm not deliberately trying to prove you wrong," Loki objected.
"Yes, but the oh-so-clever-and-methodical part of your brain won't let you take my word for it on blind faith, so here we are. It's okay. I won't say I understand, but I don't hold it against you, Brother."
Both of the humans stared at Thor. Loki suddenly remembered the real Thor had left and that this one presumably was a hallucination he had just made visible and audible. He quickly reigned in his magic, and the calm, smiling Thor vanished. He looked over sheepishly from one mortal to the other, both frowning at him. "He's not fine," Natasha said. "Can you stand yet, Loki? Let's get you to Thor."
Loki eased out of his chair, despite the protestations of his abdominal wall. He quickly crafted a leather brace for himself, wrapped tight around his core underneath his coat. "I can stand."
Author's note: Surprisingly, we haven't had much occasion for alien world descriptions yet in this fiction. I shall try to rectify that going forwards, and with this little taste of Titan, the largest moon of Saturn. It is a rocky and icy moon with a nitrogen-based atmosphere and frozen oceans with a liquid water subsurface that have a high ammonia content.
I apologize if the rest of this chapter is confusing with the active hallucinations, but it could be worse; he could have less insight into the hallucinatory content.
A note on "memory palace:" this is a technique people use to help remember large amounts of information like strings of numbers. It was popularized in BBC's Sherlock television series. It is also called the "method of loci," loci meaning places. It is not a technique that Loki is employing in this particular chapter, but it is an ironic title.
Further notes on memory, since I can't remember if that's come up this explicitly before: there is declarative and nondeclarative memory. Declarative memory is what someone is actually able to articulate on demand, and this comes in two flavors, semantic memory and episodic memory. Semantic memory is knowledge of things. Loki's in-depth knowledge of the Chitauri is an example of semantic memory that he didn't realize he had until he got the visual cue to help retrieve it. Episodic memory is the memory of personal experience and chain-of-events. That's something Loki is fairly bad at right now. Nondeclarative memory is different, involving automatic procedural and cuing processes, and it's actually not that impaired for Loki at the moment, as evidenced by his effortless magical finesse. The issue is there's a huge disconnect between the nondeclarative and declarative memory processes. Loki "knows" many things and knows how to do many things... but he is like a library with no book catalogue and only one experienced but very distracted librarian. He has trouble recalling the context most people do; as an example of what I mean, you can ask anybody what they know about the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, and they'll be able to tell you quite a lot about it. Ask them how they know it though, and some will say they remember watching the news as the events unfolded, some will have read about it after the fact, younger people will have learned about it in school. Ask Loki how he knows what he says he knows, and he shrugs. "I just do."
