Allspeak's Revelations
Loki Hears, Loki Sees, Loki Speaks, Part 1 - To the average user of Allspeak, it provides a flat translation - it maps the words onto the hearer's worldview, and if the meaning isn't translatable to that worldview, they simply hear an unfamiliar word. To a true student of magic, of Allspeak and the related mechanics of surface telepathy, someone who understands what Allspeak actually is, it's a whole different experience.
It's a wonder, really, that Thor manages to bumble through his brief exile to Earth, making himself understood well enough to gain not just the sympathies, but also the affection, of an otherwise seemingly fairly intelligent human woman.
He'd seemed incapable of listening. He didn't hear the weight of the oaths of kingship he swore, ignored the reasons Odin gave him for maintaining peace. He hadn't even seemed to hear the grief in Laufey's voice, the helpless exhaustion that underlay the burning hate.
It's soon after that, after Loki learns how different he really is from those who surround him, how alien to their world, that he wonders if any of them are capable of listening, truly, closely, the way Loki does, or if it is actually a skill beyond their capacity.
Here's the thing about Allspeak.
To the average user of Allspeak, it provides a flat translation - it maps the words onto the hearer's worldview, and if the meaning isn't translatable to that worldview, they simply hear an unfamiliar word.
To a true student of magic, of Allspeak and the related mechanics of surface telepathy, someone who understands what Allspeak actually is, it's a whole different experience.
If you open your mind, listen closely, there's so much more to be gained. The result is something like an accent, but more like a rich profile of color that spreads out under their tone of voice - like harmony to the melody of the base translation.
Odin's voice is a heavy chant, deep with history and the knowledge that all of Asgard falls into line with his words. It brooks no disagreement; it has no harmony, but merely reinforces itself endlessly, layer upon layer of the same tone. One simply has to get used to it, because there is no other choice.
Frigga's words are feathery, soft and yet tricky, always trying to slide between the two sides of disagreements, find the middle ground. Loki has always found it soothing on its own, but vaguely unreassuring when heard in concert with someone he disagrees with.
Thor... Thor, more often than not, sounds like nothing more than an enthusiastically out-of-tune drinking ballad. It pains Loki to hear how it jangles with itself, the ideas Thor has heard and repeated with the values that are at the heart of his nature.
Loki likes his brother, but he is as dumb as a brick and cannot be allowed to rule Asgard.
Loki knows how much words give away, if the right person is listening, and so he often chooses silence, in favor of being uncovered that way. When he does speak, it's careful, noncommital, slippery. It gets him out of a lot of things, but it also leads people to mistrust him, to believe him some kind of liar even though, so much of the time, he's not.
He isn't sure how much is cause and how much effect, because this has been true as long as he can remember. When Odin speaks to him, when Frigga speaks to him, and especially when Heimdall speaks to him, there is an undertone of suspicion, of wariness and dislike.
It is the nature of things. He is the Trickster, the Silvertongue. It has always been so, and it always will be so.
And in the minds of most people on Asgard, there is no reason at all to ask, Why?
Should he even have bothered to hide his intentions, to listen to the underlying meaning of these Aesir's words? Or would it have been better to counterfeit their blunt force of manner from the beginning? Pretend to be as deaf as they, take their words at face value?
This, he contemplates as he sits upon the throne, holds Gungnir, that focus of undeniable, echoing authority.
As he sits in Odin's place, he thinks now might be the time to try.
But, inevitably, he fails. Loki was never meant to be Aesir. No one believes in his right to this place. That he is truly one of them.
From there, Loki's life spirals out, spirals down, in increasingly desperate attempts to fix everything. Find a place. Gain Odin's trust, and so Asgard's, or die 'nobly' trying.
Nobility is one of the most nonsensical, hypocritical concepts ever to grace the realms, and it ever eludes Loki's slippery fingers.
He stops trying. Gungnir escapes his grasp. It's for the best.
Thanos breaks him, bends him, twists him backwards in time to a point where he strove for something, where he had an exploitable goal. To be like the Aesir, to wield blunt power like a hammer, to hear his words echo out through an unprotesting audience. To be the one whose word is law. Thanos needs him wanting, needs him striving. Not, as he was found, empty.
So Thanos finds that abandoned drive to rule, to be an Aesir and king, and he pulls it out with pain and magic.
Thanos's words are drenched in the magic that surrounds the line between life and death. He is obsessed. He is warped. Loki can hear the madness, and - he almost can't help but laugh at the irony - that madness is a mindset that Loki finds it much simpler to slip into, to imitate.
And then Loki sees it, he sees the joke, the terrible prank the universe has been playing on him all this time.
Because from the perspective of Thanos's madness, his disproportionate view of his own importance, his denial of the validity of any other perspective - from here, Loki can finally see the steps to Odin's throne, the stroll into irrationality required to become a tyrant like the Allfather.
It's all right there in front of him now. Thanos has broken him open and made his path clear. All there is to do now, Loki thinks, is follow it.
"Make a move, Reindeer Games."
Five words, simple on the surface, but they explode and fill Loki's brain with everything that's behind them, everything that's being packed into them. Tactical decisions, a dare - he isn't eager for a fight, but he is angry, and he would enjoy it to an extent. And the nickname, a play on the horns, obviously - a very old theme - but there's something else. A story, some kind of entertainment, with a central character who lies quick and easy and sly, who does what he has to and gets in trouble for it. Who can't seem to avoid chaos.
The density of those thoughts - just the projected, surface thoughts that Allspeak grants access to - the density of them is staggering.
The man knows he's throwing out only vague crystalline approximations, likely truly clear to no one but himself. But with the contextual richness of Loki's ear for Allspeak - it's like listening to a full orchestra, to a symphony of rhythm and movement and tones and harmonies. The words - the melody - they're only the beginning.
Loki wants. He longs to hear more.
And there's a freshness to the way the man speaks, a barrier-breaking lack of assumptions, that wakes Loki's brain and asks it to think free again. To reconsider everything he knows. It's like he's been splashed with water, woken suddenly from a daze.
Everything he's done, he sees from a new angle, sees what could have been, sees how many other possibilities there are outside of the Aesir way of thinking, or Thanos's madness.
His plans, his purposes, his intentions all break apart and begin to re-form themselves, somewhere in that period of time where they walk him onto their aircraft and begin their journey to the place where they will, most probably, torture him in order to find where he has hidden the cube that everyone is so fascinated with.
Having something new to want, to strive for, allows him to step outside of the cage that Thanos had built in his brain. To plot new goals, new means, new deceptions. To be himself again - or, perhaps, for the first time. The first time in his long life.
He needs time to consider, to absorb all this newness.
Luckily enough, his plan up to this point had already involved surrendering to the good heroes of Earth, going with them to their base. He listens. He listens, as close as he can, to the Man of Iron.
It's both worrying and disorienting to be facing Thor again, but he should have - and did - anticipate it. He did not expect to be involved in a radical reshuffling of his personal inventory at the time.
Thor is as always blunt and guileless, and Loki can't resist playing his foil.
"You think yourself above them?" Thor asks, and Loki nearly bursts into laughter.
"Well, yes." Loki wonders if Thor has ever actually managed to listen when the Allfather talks, even to the surface meaning, or have any meaningful thought at all about what those lessons implied. The Aesir are the guardians of the Realms. They must, logically, know better than the rest what is good for them.
"Then you miss the truth of ruling, Brother. The throne would suit you ill."
Loki's rage surges. Of course he would see the truth of that now. Not sooner. Not when it could have done some good. Loki's had to learn the hard way that there's no place for him in Asgard.
But now Thor's wise somehow. There's weight behind his words as there never has been before, weight of experience, of knowledge. He's beginning to sound like his father, and Loki calls his brother Odinson with a sneer and thinks of the things he's learned in the meantime, the things he's gained - the crazed, irrational side of Odin, apparently, but Loki can't exactly help that now.
Thor needs to stay far away from him if they are to have someone better on the throne when the mad Allfather leaves it for the last time. Loki wards him away.
Thor still wants to welcome him back, and Loki aches at the impossibility of it.
The Man of Iron buys him a chance to escape (albeit unintentionally), but Loki decides he needs to learn more, wait it out until he can see the fruit of his original plan, and start clean with nothing major in play. And so he listens.
Nicholas Fury is a madman as well, but thankfully not quite on the same scale as the others Loki's encountered. He thinks he knows best and should hold all the secrets. He shouldn't be terribly difficult to mislead.
Natasha's words are as slippery as his, her context as alien to the rest of her team as Loki's to the Three. Loki lets himself get distracted examining that, examining how she can be so loyal to Barton, given their differences.
And while he's studying that, she gets what she's looking for. Learns an element of his plans.
Loki's beginning to toy with the idea that these heroes could win. Wipe out the Chitauri army. Turn the tide against those who had broken Loki and who would use the Tesseract for near-infinite destruction.
A new plan is forming in his mind.
He still needs to get out of the Helicarrier to enact it. He's still fighting to clear his head, regain (or find for the first time) his sanity. But he spares a moment to hope that Tony Stark survives the coming fight.
Loki sets an irresistible trap.
This is Stark's home, where he makes and keeps his armors, Barton's told him. He'll come, if no one else does. And Loki does not doubt that the man who thinks with the force of a whirlwind but the delicacy and precision of an elven flute player is the man he wants facing off against the Chitauri, if he wishes them all slaughtered. And he does. He would like that very much.
He comes in, armorless. Loki is fascinated. They play, they flyte. Loki wants to know who will win. Tony Stark tells him. Tony Stark walks right up to him, unafraid.
But Loki is afraid. Loki is afraid he's wrong, that Tony and his Avengers will lose, that Thanos and his army are too much for any group Earth can muster. And Loki is afraid that if he doesn't fight hard enough, doesn't make the obvious move, that Thanos will still win, and Thanos will find Loki, and take away everything that he is, everything that he has been, everything that he now has a chance to become.
So he makes the obvious move, and tries to turn Tony. Although it sickens him to think of the possible results.
But the Tesseract will not take him. Cannot. Resistance, defiance. Mocking, heedless humor. The madness still has part of Loki and in his rage, he tosses Tony Stark away like a filthy rag.
When Tony survives, and regains his tactical advantage, Loki is back to himself enough to be glad.
To hear the man speak is an experience he would not want to lose.
Honesty. Clear and pure and almost accentless, and yet playing in idiom and reference as if it's a sandbox. Language that changes along with context, reevaluates and sidesteps the limitations of the spoken word.
Not as skilled, perhaps, at communication or manipulation as Loki. But to someone who can listen... it teaches, it changes, it breaks boundaries. It frames and sweeps aside new perspectives with every phrase.
Loki only wishes he had the leisure to listen at length. But the war has come.
Thor still believes they can stop this. Loki hopes he's right. But there's still part of his mind screaming that he's meant to rule, he's learned, he can do it. Thor wants him to come home as an ally.
Thor has too much faith in him. Maybe someday, he can be a hero, but today, he would be terrible for Thor. Thor needs to be kept safe from the madness that infects Loki.
Tears streaming down his face, Loki stabs Thor.
Just deep enough to warn him away, to make him give up and turn his attention to the Chitauri.
The battle is won, and Loki lingers as long as he can in Stark's residence, drinking the man's alcohol and listening to him speak. Willing his own muddy, rutted and battle-scarred mind to be cleansed, to become without lasting context like this. To learn to remake itself over and over in an unending struggle for clarity.
Loki is...not exactly content to go home a prisoner, but it is better than many of the other options he might have had.
If he has an opportunity, he will speak to the Allfather, try to get him to see his own hipocrisy and inflexibility. Now that he has some traction, a long enough lever and somewhere to stand.
He doubts it will work. But for the first time in Loki's long life...
Anything seems possible.