A/N: Hi guys! Dude, two chapters in three days, what is even happening?! Heh!
Thank you Erikstrulove, Envoy, j-swan and Guest for reviewing the first chapter! I hope you enjoy this one as well!
Masks
"It's all so bloody ridiculous—I can't even keep track of all the different groups… I would've eliminated the lot—made it all illegal!" Loki ranted, pacing animatedly around his cell, gesticulating with his hands, and generally looking like he was giving a very angry Shakespearean monologue. "I mean, really, humanity is envied realms over for their versatility and diversity—their ability to adapt to different environments—but what do they do with it? Become an intergalactic laughingstock by acting like animals and refusing to align with those whose adaptations differ even slightly from theirs! You creatures are so… so ludicrously petty!"
"You know your planet's screwed up when the alien trying to take over the world makes more sense than most of its leaders," Darcy commented dryly.
"Honestly," Loki sighed, sitting back down cross-legged in one fluid motion, "if you could just get over fighting yourselves like an unruly pack of bilgesnipe, you might actually be a formidable opponent. As it is, no one can really take you seriously. Thus far you've been protected from the majority of attempts at interstellar imperialism because the would-be emperors have neither the time nor the patience to deal with all of your petty squabbling."
"Huh, nice," Darcy huffed with a smirk. "Note to selves—keep being assholes, it's saving our lives."
"Not quite the point I was making," Loki muttered, raising an eyebrow disapprovingly. Darcy stuck out her tongue impishly.
Over the course of the week or so she'd been staying at SHIELD HQ, she'd visited Loki for several hours every day, and he'd started to really warm up to her. Of course, he wouldn't talk about Thor or his history, and wasn't too divulgatory about his reasons for attacking the earth (confining himself to brief evil-overlord style monologues that Darcy didn't find very convincing).
However, he was extremely talkative otherwise, content to explain anything she wanted to know about the Nine Realms and what he called "peripheral worlds," which made up the known universe. It was about as much of a large-scale SNAFU as she expected. He was also curious about earth—about culture and government and history. It was incredibly refreshing to Darcy to be able to be one of the experts in the room, for once, able to talk about stuff she understood instead of listening to Jane and Erik ramble about science.
Of course, they wouldn't let her stay with him all day, for some weird reason; after a few hours, Ward would turn up and tell her Jane needed help in the lab or whatever—and it was always something a SHIELD grunt could've done instead; it was just that Jane was getting concerned because she was "spending way too much time with a crazy mass-murderer."
Thor would invite her to the boring meetings—probably trying to be nice—and she would sit in the corner with Tony Stark playing the dirtiest game of hangman she'd ever played. He also gave her access to his computer system, JARVIS, so she could basically watch free TV on any online service she could think of, use the fastest internet known to man and, she realized after clicking around for a while, access SHIELD's security footage and other records.
She felt a little high on power when she noticed this, and browsed through some of the files. Everyone who entered the Triskellion had a file, from Fury to the janitors and all the way down to her. Her entire history was efficiently summarized in a little computer folder. But reading about herself was boring. Loki's file, on the other hand, was much more interesting.
Since his arrival was fairly recent, most of the info was in the form of video clips—not much had been written, but plenty had been captured by networked security cameras which SHIELD had accessed, copied and wiped. The footage was pretty awful, of course—the Chitauri hacking and blasting their way through civilians while Loki impassively surveyed the carnage from a chariot or the upper levels of Stark Tower. It struck her as a little odd that they seemed more interested in shooting at the cars than the people, but she knew they'd been a hive mind—maybe they were too stupid to realize that the bigger moving things weren't bigger enemies.
She watched a hastily edited compilation of security footage and cell phone videos from Stuttgart, and then the SHIELD recordings from when he first arrived. The Tesseract glowed to life, depositing Loki's kneeling figure on the black floor. He looked up slowly, a wide, manic grin spreading across his sweat-streaked face. Darcy was taken aback. He had deep hollows under his eyes, and his skin looked like wet concrete. His movements were slow, ungainly. At the least he was exhausted, and probably sick. At the most…
The trouble with having so many conversations with someone clever was that her mind was sufficiently exercised to actually put the puzzle pieces together. His physical condition. The nonsensical rhetoric in his "bad guy speeches." The flippant, glossed over, almost disoriented way he talked about the invasion of New York.
And his eyes.
She paused the recording on a close-up of his face. She'd spent the last few days trying absentmindedly to decide on the exact shade of his eyes. Were they green, or hazel? Were they like grass, bottle glass, poison, mulch, avocados and hash browns? But they were definitely either dull green or bright hazel.
They definitely weren't blue.
But the security recording… her pulse thundered loudly in her ears, and she could feel herself distancing from the world around her, fading out as she stared into the clear, intense blue. His eyes were the color of the Twitter icon—too bright for eyes, even for natural blues.
She was pulling up Hawkeye and Erik's files before her brain had really organized her thoughts into anything coherent.
That vibrant blue… that was the color peoples' eyes turned when they were being mind-controlled. Her breaths were coming faster and faster without her consent—if she hadn't already been sitting, she would have fallen.
She'd thought privately that his plan was a bit stupid for someone she'd found to be so brilliant. She could have come up with that, and he was a genius.
Someone was talking to her, she realized belatedly.
"Darcy, are you ill?" Thor was asking. What did her face look like, she wondered, looking up like a deer in the headlights to stare into the concerned face of the blond Asgardian.
"I… no, I…" she floundered, not knowing what to do with this situation. Thor's eyes strayed to the tablet in her hands, and his face fell, his eyes filling with sorrow. He sat down beside her on the sofa, shoulders drooping, and sighed.
"He was not always like this," he murmured. "Once he was pure and clever and kind… for all his mischief, he solved more problems than he caused. I loved him," he continued, voice echoing with raw pain. "Had I any inkling of his distress… well," he admitted, "perhaps I wouldn't have noticed. You remember me when I first fell to earth, do you not? I was hard-headed, self-centered, and cared more for my own pride than for anyone around me. Perhaps it is my own fault he got so out of hand…"
He looked so dejected, and Darcy realized that if there was anyone she should tell about her discovery, it was Thor himself, the one person in this building who would immediately take Loki's wellbeing into consideration.
"Thor," she began, handing him the tablet and zooming in on Loki's eyes. "I don't think this is on you. And I don't necessarily think it's on him either."
-0-
The council was in uproar within the hour. Darcy stayed mostly out from underfoot while the Avengers and SHIELD high command shouted at each other, frantically pulling up footage and reports and calling in experts. Thor wanted his brother immediately released. Natasha and Fury wanted him thrown down a deep dark hole. Banner began reviewing the arrival footage on loop with increasing agitation. Barton was furious, but it was unclear whose side he was on. Captain America had sat down slowly and rested his forehead in his palm, looking ever moment of his ninety-some years. Tony was running his mouth as usual, but like Barton, he was unclear on what exactly he was arguing. Sundry other important-looking SHIELD suits threw opinions this way and that.
After perhaps an hour of this angry cacophony, Darcy slipped out, unnoticed. The guards by Loki's cell knew her by now—knew that for some reason this odd girl had clearance for this area—so they let her in without question. As the door opened, she felt nearly as intimidated as she had the first day. Her knees wobbled as she entered, and the lightheaded feeling she'd developed when she first saw the blue eyes had never really gone away.
"Darcy?" Loki greeted her, frowning and standing from where he'd been sitting against the slab that served as his bed. He approached the glass quickly, eyes roving over her face. "What's wrong?"
"Why didn't you tell anyone?" she blurted out, mind still reeling too much to be clever or diplomatic about it.
"What?" he asked, frowning deeper in confusion.
"We finally noticed your extreme eye-color change," she explained. "Green eyes your whole childhood, then suddenly Twitter-logo-blue when you come here, and they don't go green again until you got Hulk-smashed."
By the time she was halfway through her sentence, his face had gone blank, walls slamming into place in an instant. But Darcy knew enough about reading people to surmise that she'd hit a mark.
"A side-effect of using the scepter, no more," he snapped, turning away and pacing to the back of the cell, folding his arms.
"Uh-huh, and Santa Clause is having an affair with the Toothfairy," Darcy snapped. Before Loki could ask what the hell she meant by that, the door slammed open and Thor strode in.
"Brother, why did you not tell anyone?" he demanded, pressing the side of his fist against the clear cell wall.
"Oh, just barge right in, make yourself at home," Loki groused, gesturing widely at the big blond man.
"We were kinda' getting there," Darcy started to explain, but Loki cut her off.
"I owe you nothing, 'King of Asgard,'" he hissed venomously. "My actions were my own, what does it matter the reason? Regardless of the circumstances, you will return me to Asgard for punishment, and I shall spend the rest of my days paying for my crimes, all hail the justice of the king.
"Do not forget, my would-be brother," he continued, approaching the partition to snarl into Thor's face, "that I also committed great crimes against Asgard and Jotunheim. No matter where I go, I will be surrounded by those who seek to punish me. So what use is it to anyone to make outlandish claims about my guilt or innocence, based on what, a trick of the light, a camera angle? You are trying too hard, oaf."
"Actually," Thor responded evenly, "the lady Darcy made the discovery." Loki rounded on Darcy.
"Yeah, and I know the difference between blue and green, thank you very much," she added, taking a seat in the computer chair which no one bothered to put away anymore. "Why is it a problem that people know you're innocent?"
"Pride, miss Lewis," he bit out before turning away again. "Something you wouldn't understand."
"No, I wouldn't understand why pride would be worth letting yourself get locked up when you were actually being framed," she shot back. "How is that a good idea?"
"Because I won't be free, you insignificant mortal!" he roared, turning on his heel again, skin even paler than usual.
"I could talk to father, I am his heir, I could have you pardoned, brother, please just—"
"I AM NOT YOUR BROTHER, THOR!" Loki nearly screamed, cutting the bigger man off and pounding his fist against the cell wall. He glared at the blond man for a long moment, panting, expression nearly deranged, before turning away again.
"Leave," he croaked out.
"Loki," Thor rumbled, but the green-eyed man cut him off.
"I cannot bear the sight of you," he snarled, and then sat down on the opposite side of the cell, back to his two visitors. "You repel me—the both of you! Leave me in peace—or am I to be denied even the comfort of silence?"
Thor's shoulders drooped, and Darcy was struck by the way that a man over six feet tall—a god, no less—could look so much like a kicked puppy. He slowly turned and walked away, glancing sadly over his shoulder as he reached the door.
"Are you coming, lady Darcy?" he called softly.
"No," she responded, folding her arms and getting comfortable. "I'm staying."
A/N: My Tom Hiddleston kick is bleeding into my schoolwork—I'm using that 2015 Jaguar commercial in a presentation tomorrow. Well, later today, I guess it is. Heh. I should probably go to bed.
Anywho, drop me a review and tell me whatcha think!
Next time…
Chapter 3: Truth.
She sat in what she now referred to as her office chair, arms folded, legs crossed, staring holes into Loki's tense back. His neck was tight like the muscles were clamping down on a torrent of unwanted words, not letting them reach his mouth. He hadn't spoken a word to her since Thor had left, but simply stood with his back to her, hands balled into white-knuckled fists. Anyone else might have assumed he was angry.
But Darcy Lewis wasn't anyone else.
"What are you so scared of?" she asked quietly.