POV: Stephen
Chitauri. Some sort of alien language.
That was all that was said. I don't know why that made him pass out. Either one of the silly pranks from the Avengers led to this, or he has severe PTSD.
My mystic knowledge says he's fine. Of course, all that tells me is that he wasn't cursed. My medical knowledge says he's fine too, but I wasn't trained in whatever Asgardian-Frost-Giant things.
It hasn't been more than 35 seconds when he wakes up, gets off the ground wayy too fast to be safe and walks right out of the room.
"Hold up-" I said, but Cloaky- I mean the Cloak of Levitation- stops him, pushes him back to his chair, and stays on his shoulders like it'd done for me sometimes. I guess its worthiness rules were a lot more random than Mjolnir's.
"No," he said, his voice a bit more broken than it was normally. "I don't want to do this right now-"
"Loki-" I started, obviously the wrong thing to do.
"No!" he shouted, voice cracking, slamming his hand on the coffee table and spilling a whole bunch of tea. The Cloak of Levitation picked up his teacup before it got knocked over. "Just put me back in Avenger's tower and-"
"I need to know what happened," I said calmly. He stared at me, looking more helpless than I'd ever seen someone who tried to take over the world. Cloaky wrapped around him like a blanket, almost daring me to fight it on this. I sighed.
"I- I can't-" he covered his face with one hand, squeezing his eyes shut as if trying to erase everything he just remembered. "What did you do?"
"I made a couple modifications on our little spell," I explained. "I had to break through who knows how long brainwashing, so..."
"How'd you know?" he said, probably going through everything in his head wondering how he couldn't remember with all the plot holes he was noticing now.
"Who are you going to explain your rebellion schemes to?" I said.
"Fair point," he conceded.
"Can I-"
"No."
"But we have to-"
"I know! Alright?"
"Can you tell me when you're ready?" I finally ask, trying to ignore Cloaky's newfound protectiveness. He sighed, plastering a fake grin over whatever he was feeling .
"Sure. Why not? Let's get it over with."
"Okay..." I said, taking his word for it. It takes me an extra second to cast the spell, but it works okay.
He looks... terrible. That's an understatement, really. He stumbles to his feet, leaning against a stone pillar for support. I can tell he should be lying down for the next month and a half but I can read the situation.
They speak in some kind of space language... Chitauri, maybe? Loki tries to look okay, but even though it's obvious he's not whoever he's talking to doesn't notice or care. After a couple minutes of conversation, the mysterious figure takes out the mindstone staff- something that confuses him- and before he can tell what it is, mystery guy has it pressed against his heart. Loki's eyes go full black for a second, and when they're back to normal he nods, agreeing to whatever he didn't want to before. He takes the spear, and the memory fades to grey.
"Are you okay?" I asked real-time Loki. He probably wasn't, seeing as he' already passed out once and looked about ready to do it again. Cloaky pushed the tea into his hand and he gratefully took a sip, a little bit of color returning to his face.
"It wasn't full mind control," he finally muttered, most likely to Cloaky. "It- it hurt."
I was too busy mapping out possibilities at that point. From what I got, mystery figure was using the mindstone for some kind of mental torture- or a selective mind control. Which means I'd originally judged the whole situation wrong- and so had the entire planet. Fun.
"That doesn't explain your original... homicidal tendencies," I said. "What about the destroyer?"
He sighed, appearing to regret the whole ordeal.
"I... I was trying to stop a war," he said. "Thor would've killed all of Asgard- How was I supposed to predict his sudden change of heart?"
Cloaky patted his shoulder.
"I- I couldn't just-" He looked up, saw my face, and something snapped. "Every time there's an inkling of a problem, Father's like 'peace out, Odinsleep, have fun preventing Ragnarok for the twelfth time without me'. I'd been to fourteen funerals before I'd found a pocket dimension. And Thor was a great help, leading us into battle every free moment, ignoring our treaties for blood sport, ignoring everything about how sudden wars would start and how it was in his own genetics to underestimate his opponents- If I hadn't done anything, Two of the nine realms would've been nothing but an empty battlefield of carnage and death."
"That's... unlikely," I remarked, but I didn't exactly know the whole story. For all I knew, maybe that was how it was. "Fact check?"
"Go ahead," he sighed, drinking a bit more tea. I got a memory of a young Thor and Loki - probably six or eight years old (Asgardianified)- in a tree somewhere.
"When I'm king of Asgard, I'm going to kill all the Frost Giants," Thor said, hanging upside down from a branch.
"Okay," Loki replied hesitantly, reading a book a lot higher up.
"Everyone's going to learn how to fight. And school will probably be shorter," he said.
"You love learning about the wars and stuff," Loki remarked.
"I know. I think... I might get rid of art. I just don't see how it's useful-"
"You are not," he said. Thor got up on the branch.
"What purpose does it serve?" he asked.
"I'm leaving," Loki said, bookmarking his book. "Have fun planning to ruin Asgard."
He hopped down from the tree, and the memory faded out.
"That good enough for you, or do you need to watch my entire life to decide I don't want to kill everyone?" Real-time Loki asked sarcastically, shrugging Cloaky off his shoulders a little and sipping his tea.
"Is that why you keep stabbing Thor?" I asked. He laughed, setting his tea down so it didn't spill.
"Of course not. If I wanted him dead, he'd be dead."
"Comforting," I remarked, voting to ignore that. "Why, then?"
He grinned. "Well, there was this time when we were children, I was bored, so I turned myself into a snake because I know he loves snakes, and he goes to pick me up and I turned back into myself and go 'bleah, it's me' and I didn't know what to do so I stabbed him. We were eight at the time, and he didn't know what to do so he went to Mother and Father and they were talking and he kept tapping on Mother's shoulder and when she finally turned around his tunic was all bloody and he still had my dagger in his arm. He was fine, of course- it's not like I could've killed him with one dagger Mother'd put a safety spell on- but it kind of became an inside joke. Of course, Odin'd grounded me for a year or two- but to be honest it was worth it."
What the Darkhold.
"Okay then," I said. I'd have to ask Thor about that later. "I... I guess you're free to go."
"What, to Avenger's tower, or-"
"For now. I'll talk to Tony. Maybe you can get your daggers back, if you don't kill anyone."
"Really?" He sprung to his feet. "I thought-"
"No stabbing any Midgardians, though? That includes me, by the way-" I started.
"Of course, I- Thank you," he said. Then he noticed Cloaky. "How do I get it off?"
I smirked, opening a portal back to Avenger's Tower. "April Fools."