Titans Bearing Gifts
Chapter 4: The Lust for Gifts
Loki's breath fell still in his chest.
"Midgard, as those you grew up among called it."
"I know of it," Loki answered slowly, carefully. Thanos knew he knew of Earth. He'd already told the lackey about his most recent encounter with that wretched realm before coming to his senses and regaining control of his tongue.
"This world has something I want."
"A trinket?"
Thanos nodded and gave Loki a glimpse of those bright teeth again. He reached for a leather pouch that hung from his belt and emptied the contents into his massive hands, then held it out in front of Loki. "Do you recognize this?"
Loki looked at it for a long moment, then, affecting a bored expression, looked back up at Thanos. "Should I?" He had no idea what it was, this oblong blue stone that glowed faintly, but he wasn't about to admit that, not when he didn't know what any of this was about.
"It's related to the item I seek. A weaker, imperfect form of it. It will grow stronger when it's brought nearer to its superior. You will go to Earth, you will obtain my trinket. In exchange, I will give you an army with which to take Earth as your own, to rule as you see fit. To show the one who sits on Asgard's throne which son was truly worthy of it. To remind the true Odinson which of you is more powerful."
Midgard, Loki thought, mouth literally salivating at the thought. He wants me to take Midgard. His supposed realm. The one he demonstrated the depth of his love for by smashing the bifrost apart, abandoning his beloved realm for the rest of his mortal woman's life. The one that has always been under Asgardian protection and is now unreachable by Asgard…
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Thanos watched the transformation of the boy's face. A starved child presented with a steak. And a very sharp knife. He had never bent anyone to his will more quickly.
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Thanos's gift-giving began almost immediately. Unfortunately, it continued in his rather unorthodox teaching methods. After Loki made his way back down the stairs – with considerably more difficulty than he had gone up them, now that his back was injured – he gave the blue stone to the lackey as instructed, and the lackey in turn pressed a cup into his hand. Loki looked at the cup. He was thirsty, but he'd never eaten or drunk in front of this creature before and didn't intend to start now.
The lackey with the strange metal grating over his face, a mockery of armor, held the stone and stared at Loki. Loki tasted coolness over his throat and looked down to see he'd drained the cup. He looked at the stone with suspicion and growing anger, then threw the cup to the ground and advanced on The Other, who lifted his hand. Loki stopped short. He knew the agony that hand could bring. "What are you playing at, Nameless One?"
"You will learn to do this. You will need to soften amenable wills. When you take this stone to Earth, its power will be magnified. You will control wills, whether they are amenable or not. You will gain allies. You will take the trinket. You will open a pathway for our army. You will secure Earth as your own. You will send the trinket back to him."
"What is this trinket?" Loki asked. He was curious, but he didn't really care. Midgard was by far the bigger prize. Loki would loot every vault in the realm and deliver wagonloads of trinkets to Thanos if he wanted.
"He calls it the Cosmic Cube. You will learn more later. First you will learn to influence ignorant minds. Come."
Loki waited a moment to make a point, but then followed. Several minutes later, he recognized where they were going, and he couldn't stop the feelings of trepidation. He doesn't want another child, he told himself. This isn't his gift.
The lackey opened the giant metal door, and Loki stepped inside the room. It looked exactly as it had before, down to the woman's body on the table. She was clothed now – tall black boots, simple black skirt that did not quite reach her knees, silver chain belt, fitted sleeveless black tunic. In fact, he realized he had no way of knowing that it was the same woman. But the shape of the legs looked the same, the pale skin tone looked the same. She had long, bright red hair, which he hadn't seen before. Only a single manacle fastened her right wrist to the edge of the table, but she lay still as death. Green eyes fell on him and stayed there, ignoring the lackey and tracking Loki as he approached.
"You will practice on her. She is malleable now."
Loki felt as though his heart skipped a beat. Was her body broken for me? Was she made "malleable" for this? It was an unpleasant thought, but what had been done had been done. No one had cared for him, and he had no cause to care for this woman, another nameless being on this nameless rock. Loki was already talented at influencing ignorant minds using nothing more than his famed silver tongue. If Thanos wished to teach him another way to do it, using no words at all, using whatever magical power was in that blue stone, well… Knowledge isn't a bad thing, is it? Something burned in the pit of his stomach at that distorted echo of his mother's words, and he snatched the stone from the lackey's open palm to stamp it out. Weakness, the desire to please others, guilt…he was done with all of it.
He turned to the lackey. "What must I do?"
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Loki spent the following days learning. Drawing on the stone's power, he was soon able to influence the woman in small ways, to place suggestions directly into her mind, suggestions that more often than not she would accept. The lackey had called her "malleable"; Loki would call her "broken." That didn't bother him. He hadn't broken her. Over time she grew stronger, though, and more resistant to his suggestions. She was aware of what he was doing, and the more he did it the more she recognized the thought as a foreign one and rejected it even though she wasn't opposed to the thought itself. By that point it didn't matter. He'd learned what he needed to.
The small blue stone had more power than his "hosts" had initially told him, and Loki worked to improve their initial design for a vessel for it, something that would harness and direct that power, something that was very loosely reminiscent of Gungnir. While they worked, he practiced mastering the influencing magic without the stone, magic he'd been granted again once he'd accepted Thanos's "gift." It wasn't easy, but the first time he got the woman to stand up and pick up the brush from the small number of items left in her reach while he stood hidden in a shadowed corner, he grinned in triumph, even as she realized what had happened and turned to fix a murderous glare at him. He strode out the door, then collapsed against its shaped rock wall, exhausted. Sickened. It was possible without the stone, but would be much easier with it. Much less unpleasant.
He couldn't wait to see its effects once it was fully activated by being "brought near its superior," the "Cosmic Cube." He would rule Earth's wandering simpletons. They would bow down before him, grateful that he'd come to simplify their short, frantic, desperate lives. If he had to force them at first, if he had to enslave a few of them in the beginning, that was perfectly acceptable in order to achieve the greater glory.
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Notes
In terms of writing, this for me was the most painful of these five chapters. This was me really really not wanting to shy away from Avengers-Loki. This is, in my mind, Loki at his darkest. And something I could write a book about here, but, you know me, I go for millions of words of fanfic instead. This chapter also contains one of the most tragic lines I've ever written, in my opinion; I hope it gave your gut a twist like it still does mine.
A note on movie canon: while I stated earlier that this story could work as canon beyond the Avengers time frame (which is all it's meant to be compliant with since this is part of my family of stories that were conceived of following Avengers but before The Dark World and Ultron), I'd forgotten about the explanation of the stone is Loki's scepter that I use in Beneath and so again used here. In Ultron we get a different explanation, that this stone is an Infinity Stone, but this story predates Ultron so that idea wasn't incorporated here. (With some stretching you could say it's still true, and Thanos is simply wrong is his explanation, but that wasn't my intent at the time.)