#26
"And you didn't think of telling me this until now?" Loki yelled, his voice climbing at least two octaves. "See? This is exactly what I am talking about! Even though you have all witnessed the stones' doings in one way or the other and have even acknowledged that it was the Mind Stone itself manipulating you, your tiny mortal brains are incapable of processing what threat they truly pose to your entire existence. Not because Thanos or anyone else wields them but simply because they exist!" Loki drew himself to his full height and, while Steve mimicked his movements, both Tony and Shuri shifted uneasily.
"Why can't we all—" Bruce began but fell silent when Loki glowered at him with his blood-red eyes. "Why can't you just admit that magic is something that is beyond the faculty of your imagination?" Loki snarled. "What makes you think you can dismiss my advice on a subject I have studied for almost a millennium as inconsequential?" He snorted a contemptuous laugh. "You sit here, throwing words in your fancy Midgardian language around, thinking that your hilariously insignificant findings matter in the grand the scale of the universe but, in truth, you know nothing!" Loki laughed again but his face was still warped in pain. "The very purpose of magic is to twist things out of proportion by drawing energy from other dimensions in order to disrupt whatever code it is that you think programmed your reality!"
Shuri's lips parted in what might have been shame, confusion or horror; and the remaining Avengers looked no less distraught.
"I think we should all calm down now," said Thor. He held up the scepter with its suspiciously glowing tip for emphasis. "We need to stop allowing this thing to rile us up."
"Oh yes, really?" Loki scoffed. "Then why don't you do something about it? You are a God and yet you are standing here with that scepter in your hands as if it were a damned walking cane instead of trying to wield it! If you want to use it to defeat Thanos, then why don't you use it?"
The emotionally scalding truth of his brother's accusation hit Thor like a mace into the gut. Loki had been right about everything, of course. It was up to him now to follow in the footsteps of his father, who undoubtedly would have known what to do with the Infinity Stone he was currently holding. Odin had kept the universe safe for an unthinkably long time but ever since he had disintegrated into particles of golden stardust, Thor had made one mistake after the other. Asgard was gone—more than half of its people dead; the wisdom stored in the Royal Library reduced to atoms; the healing stones almost consumed—and Thor found himself almost paralyzed by the weight of his failures. His throat ran dry. His chest tightened. Suddenly, there seemed to be no air left inside the room for him to suck into his lungs. Is this what Tony calls anxiety?
"If you have all the answers," Valkyrie demanded, "which I very much doubt, why are you just standing here instead of telling us what we need to know?"
"You made it very clear that my advice is not wanted," Loki shot back with a defiant stare as if he was an eight-year-old child trapped in a grown man's body.
"And do you truly blame us for this?" Valkyrie's lips were trembling with anger. "All you do is withhold information from us in order to keep up the illusion that you are smarter than everyone else in this room because you need to look down on others to feel better about your wretched self!"
Loki's jaw gaped open. Even Thor winced at her words; bristling at her audacity to use the words he had confided to her in secret against Loki now, when half the people present only waited for his brother to commit a mistake.
"Hey, calm down, angry girl," Bruce cautioned softly but the air left inside the room was palpably quaking now, pulsating with the invisible energies emitted by the stone. Thor could feel the scepter's hilt vibrate against his skin. He tried to focus all his thoughts on the stone—tried to wield it, as Loki had commanded him to, willing it to stop—but the scepter's tip only started glowing more fiercely.
"Is that true?" Steve demanded. "Are you withholding information because you enjoy lecturing us about how we are supposed to rescue the people that we lost?"
Loki glowered at him. "Contrary to what my reputation might have you believe, I do not enjoy wasting my time with you any more than you enjoy wasting yours with me."
Tears pooled into Shuri's eyes for the first time since Thor had met her after the fateful battle against Thanos and he remembered once more how he had failed to save her brother and all the others from disintegrating when he had aimed for the Mad Titan's accursed chest.
Loki sneered. "But let us not forget that Thor and I are only here because you insisted we accompany you, so if anything—"
"Brother, please," Thor pleaded softly. "Not now."
Shuri took a shaky step towards Loki, and the tears began to spill out, streaming down her cheeks. "Your brother is all you think about, isn't it? Why can't you understand what is at stake for us?"
"How could he?" Steve hissed. "There is nothing at stake for him. He only ever had one person that cared about him and that person is standing right beside him."
Loki bared his teeth but whatever he might have wanted to say caught in his throat. Shuri sniveled, her eyes still on Loki. "Steve is right. Your brother is right here but I lost mine! We all lost our families, our friends. They are waiting for us to rescue them and you stand here, high and mighty, ridiculing our efforts, even though you have no idea of our suffering!"
"Alright, stop," said Tony. "Thor's right. We all need to calm down."
A great, heaving sob tore through Shuri's chest, reminding Thor that, despite her achievements, she was still a seventeen-year-old mortal girl who had endured unspeakable cruelty and had been burdened with the responsibility of ruling her country after T'Challa's passing. Valkyrie was beside her in an instant, pulling the young woman into her arms. "It's not fair," Shuri sobbed against Valkyrie's chest.
"No, it's not," whispered Valkyrie.
"Fuck," mumbled Rocket. Nebula turned away and continued her pacing in the back of the room.
Thor turned to Loki. His brother had sat down on the edge of the table, his eyes shimmering with that accursed sparkle of madness. Thor knew what that stare meant and put a hand on his brother's shoulder. "Please, calm down."
Loki squirmed beneath his touch, fighting against whatever it was inside of himself that was probably itching to burst out and insult everyone into oblivion, but eventually, he jerked away from Thor's hand and closed his eyes. Thor felt the scepter stir inside his hand before it too jerked away and then—suddenly—simply vanished into the air. The Avengers let out a collective gasp.
"What did you—" Tony started but stopped himself when the tension in the air dissolved with the scepter's disintegration, as if sucked into an invisible black hole. Thor found himself able to breathe properly again. Shuri's shoulders sagged and her hand slowly traveled to her mouth in horror and astonishment as she whispered, almost tonelessly, "What did I just say?"
"I secured it in a pocket dimension," Loki replied. He stretched out his fingers, opened a tiny rift in the air where the scepter was hovering against a bottomless darkness, then closed it again. "It is trying to manipulate you. Us. You experienced it. For what purpose, I do not know." He paused thoughtfully. "Yet. Maybe this is Thanos's doing. Maybe the stone itself is trying to get to me for some reason."
"And we're just gonna have to trust you that you're gonna pull it out of that dimension again and not use it for some ulterior plan of yours?" Steve asked.
"Yes." Loki smiled at him and pushed himself off the table as Steve muttered a response under his breath.
"Terrific," Valkyrie remarked.
"Listen," Loki began softly, focusing Valkyrie and Shuri with his intense stare. "You are right, all of you. You have every right to judge me, every right to doubt me."
"Okay, this is creepy," mumbled Tony and Thor had to agree that indeed it was.
"I was not expecting you to believe me or appreciate my advice when I came down these stairs," Loki continued. "I too am sure your intelligence has taken you very far in your life and that it will take you even further. I did not mean to give the impression I was ridiculing your efforts. Far from it. Unfortunately, that does not change the fact that you are wrong this time."
Shuri opened her mouth to speak but Loki silenced her with a wave of his hand. "I know, however, that the only reason you reject what I am trying to tell you and cling to your natural laws and your computers is because your minds cannot comprehend the devastating effects of energy drawn from other dimensions that you have been forced to witness." He paused and a compassionate smile that seemed almost genuine to Thor appeared on his lips. "But if you want to win this war, you need to admit the existence of these baffling powers and you need to admit, too, that they cannot be explained with the formulas you have used to explain your reality up until now."
To that, no one had an answer.
Loki's eyes swept the table and focused on a decanter of water. He stretched out his hand, pulled the decanter towards it with his mind and then reached into it, his blue fingers drawing out the liquid in a single stream and freezing it into the approximate shape of a corndog. "I need time to think," he announced and strutted towards the glass doors leading onto the porch beyond the meeting room, which he also opened with his mind.
"What a drama queen," Tony snorted with a faint but unmistakable grin creeping around the edges of his lips. "What is he going to do with that ice?"
Thor smiled half-heartedly. "Eat it."
"So, what now?" Steve asked.
"Can you try to reprogram the algorithm of your machine to access layers instead of, well, what you tried to do earlier?" Valkyrie asked.
"Even if we tried to do that," replied Bruce, "do you really think we should after what just happened?"
Loki exhaled a long, exasperated breath when the glass doors slid closed behind him. He stood still for a moment, briefly contemplating the thought of shapeshifting into a mortal person and simply slipping away into the night to leave the saving of the universe to those who could trust themselves not to be overpowered by a foul-mouthed darkness inside of them anytime they felt vaguely threatened. He found the idea so compelling that his fist clenched tightly and his magic started to crackle between his fingers. Unfortunately, he knew that he would only be running away from himself and that this was a path without a destination. He also knew that the indignities the Avengers had hurled into his face only moments ago were the Mind Stone's words, not theirs, and that his itch for retribution was both childish and misplaced.
Loki sighed. No, unpleasant as it might be, he knew he would have to go back in eventually.
Now this is going well, his inner God of Mischief voice chided him. You tricked the Avengers by creating the illusion of a time rift because you were driven by the desire to carry out the Mind Stone's commands. You ridiculed Thor for his stupidity, angered him on purpose several times just as you have always done, and started to insult the Avengers when they made it clear that their trust would not come easy. Is that truly how you are proving that you can play along? Is that how you are planning to vanquish that evil-tongued turd?
"What are you talking about? You were the one who told me that I was acting out of my own free will and that I was …" Loki's voice trailed off when he realized that the Mind Stone had probably imitated his inner voice before it had embarked on its quest to pit himself against Thor and the Avengers. "All be damned."
The Mind Stone is trying to control you and if you had not acted—
"But I did act, did I not?" Loki snapped. "Now, shut up." He sat down on the stairs of the porch, bit a chunk off the ice and chewed hastily. He was so hungry that his stomach started to growl in protest when he had gobbled up the meager piece of ice he had brought with him. He swept the porch for some water to transform and found nothing. He briefly entertained the idea of going back inside to grab one of those bags filled with ice cubes that the mortals seemed to be storing in their refrigerators, but decided against it. Instead, he rose to his feet and walked a few steps into the garden that stretched out before him, encircled by the single buildings of the Headquarters complex. He considered extricating some moisture out of the air to create more ice but decided against that too since the very air seemed to be filled with soot. Tony Stark had been right. The sight, even by night, was devastating.
What was even more devastating, however, was that even though Loki had suspected the Mind Stone's assault, he had not anticipated the extent of it. He had ridiculed the mortals—Yes, ridiculed, but who needs to know?—for underestimating the power of the stones but, ultimately, he had committed the same mistake. He had been aware of the risk that the stone might want to take possession of him once it was inside his head and he had fought its assault with every fiber of his being, but he had never once considered that taking over his thoughts might have been its principal motivation from the beginning.
Loki sat down on the grass, closed his eyes and reached into his own mind to feel for the magic of the Mind Stone but the accursed thing had fallen silent the second its energy had left his body. So much for being smarter than everyone else in that room, he thought grimly before he devoted his attention to the questions that truly mattered. What could it possibly gain from controlling me and what in the All-father's name does Asgard have to do with all this? Apart from those troubling questions, Nebula had been right as well, of course. Now that the Mind Stone was free, there was no way of knowing the fate of the remaining five and, by extension, of Thanos. And even though Loki highly doubted it, there too was no way of knowing for certain whether Steve damn-him-to-hel Rogers had not been right all along and the entire threat of the universe unraveling was nothing but a giant cosmic ruse orchestrated by the stones themselves—or Thanos—to obtain power.
Loki sighed again. The exhaustion was beginning to catch up with him. He limbs began to tire, his head was still throbbing and he was too famished for the intricacies of a healing spell. But most of all, he found himself overwhelmed by the longing for a home that no longer existed and the comfort and counsel of a mother who no longer dwelled among the living. Frigga would have known what to do. She would have known a spell to purge his mind of the accursed dark voice that had begun to snarl at him again in the meeting room only moments ago. If only he had confided everything to her when he'd still had the chance. She might still live. Odin might still live. The Golden City might still stand. He and Thor would not have to face the ancient magic of the Infinity Stones without the wisdom of Asgard's most powerful beings if only he had broken free of Thanos's influence and had told them the truth.
Loki willed the tears that were clawing at the back of his throat into submission. What is past is past, he thought grimly, knowing that there was only one way to obtain some answers. Even though he loathed the mere thought of going back and was sure that it was only going to exacerbate his headache, Loki ignored his empty stomach and sent his astral projection into the accursed dreamscape for the third time. After the Mind Stone had turned out to be everything but trustworthy, he decided to make his inquiries from a safe distance this time and so his dream-self landed on one of the forested mountain ridges overlooking the valley. Thanos was still sitting on his rock near the cabin's porch, a purple speck in the middle of the grass, the demolished Gauntlet by his feet.
Even after all those years, the very sight of him still sent Loki into a peculiar state of irate fear but he forced himself to calm down. The Titan had not sensed his presence earlier and he would not sense it now. Loki closed his eyes, focused on the Gauntlet and felt for the magical signatures of the remaining stones but their glamour seemed almost extinct. Among their paling colors, he sensed a faint trace of dwarven magic and finally realized that the subtle waves of spellcraft he had noticed aboard the Statesman were of Nidavellirian origin. Despite the intractability of the situation, Loki smiled to himself. Whatever Thanos had done to coerce Eitri and his people to forge the Gauntlet for him, the dwarves had ensured that his atrocious plan would prevent him from the using the mighty weapon for long. The side effect of universal destruction was unfortunate, of course, but, as Loki never tired of reminding himself when his own absurd plans went awry, it was the thought that counted.
Loki surveyed the landscape, committing every detail to his memory, as he pondered his next move. The Mind Stone might have tried to take over his mind and destroy the young scientist's computer program but at least it had not lied to him about what was at stake. Enslaved to the Gauntlet, the stones would eventually perish and, if they did, so might the universe. Their almost non-existent magic gave proof of that. Whether the liberation of the Mind Stone had suspended or hastened the process, however, was another question altogether.
Loki closed his eyes once more and reached deep into himself, calling for the Reality Stone, which—with the benefit of hindsight—was the stone he should have freed in Mind's stead since it not only granted its wielder absolute control over reality itself but was also the main source of Loki's magic. Not to mention the fact that Reality, by sheer definition, would not have tried to take over his thrice-damned mind. Loki carefully opened one eye and saw a faint trace of red shimmering around the Gauntlet. He squeezed both of his eyes shut again and, even though he felt his strength and concentration waning, focused harder. When he opened them again, the incarnation of the Reality Stone was standing in front of him in a state that redefined the very meaning of translucence. In contrast to his last visit, she was barely there at all and Loki could clearly see every detail of the landscape through her shimmering red form. Reality crossed her arms and an almost sardonic smile appeared on her lips. "You came back."
"You tricked me," Loki admitted with a sour taste on his tongue. "I have to say, the illusion of my mother's love and the sham encouragement about how I have absorbed your signatures into my own magic in a way not even the mightiest of stone wielders has accomplished were masterfully woven together." He chuckled grimly. "But then again, it is not really a feat if you can breach all my layers of mental protection and just draw out exactly what you need to manipulate me."
"What I showed you of Frigga and your transformation into an Aesir was not an illusion," Reality replied with a stern expression. "As for the rest?" She gave a half-shrug. "It is too bad you did not even consider which one of us would be the most helpful to possess and chose Mind without thinking twice about it, isn't it?"
Even though he was fully aware of how foolish this decision had been—even if, come to think of it, it had not been his alone—Loki huffed fretfully. "I chose nothing. The humans built a containment vessel for the Mind Stone, not for any other. What was I supposed to do?"
"Are you sure that this is true?" asked Reality. "That the same process could not have worked with either one of us? Especially considering that my natural state is that of a liquid?"
Marvelous, Loki thought, cursing himself once more for the blatant ignorance he had exhibited when he had chosen to free the Mind Stone instead of the Reality Stone even though he himself had once trapped the Aether in a container as mediocre as a magically sealed brass lantern. "Yet, you did not show the slightest inclination to intervene, so I suppose you were not overly troubled by Mind's attempts to manipulate me," Loki shot back, a train of thought slowly beginning to move just below the surface of his consciousness.
"At this point, we do not have much of a choice," Reality replied solemnly. "Sadly, you are the only one who heard our pleas and it was a worth a try; however slim the hope of its success."
Loki hazarded another glance at the Titan, who had picked up the Gauntlet and was now inspecting the faint reddish glow surrounding the broken weapon with a suspicious frown.