'Any news from your brother?' Stark asked.
Loki shook his head. 'If he has something worth sharing, he and Rogers will report it directly, not through me.'
Despite his severe case of pneumonia and lingering effects of a bad concussion, Nick Fury had managed to offer up the first piece of genuinely useful information they'd had - after San Francisco Fury had found a nest in Tunisia where Gamora, Tyr and Ebony Maw could plot their next move. Thor and Rogers had immediately left for North Africa in case the Maw had found his way back there. Unfortunately, when they arrived they reported that they had found no sign of him or the Tesseract. Rogers decided he and Thor would stay longer, perhaps a day or two, to properly investigate the area in case some clue revealed itself, but his tone made it clear he doubted this would be the case. Everyone else had similarly low expectations.
In truth, Loki was just glad he and Thor wouldn't be in the same room in the immediate future. Thor couldn't content himself with what he'd had to say when he cornered Loki in the cafeteria and his continuing scrutiny left Loki ready to blast apart every piece of furniture aboard the helicarrier.
'Is the sound on this thing even on?' Stark reached for the volume controls, but stopped short and swallowed a breath.
Loki leaned in and nudged the sound up on his behalf. Stark had left Switzerland with fractures to several ribs, a concussion, four broken fingers and about a dozen other injuries. It would be months until he recovered fully.
Could've been worse. Had Ebony Maw truly cared to kill him, he could have ripped out the arc reactor.
Stark's eyes narrowed. 'What's that look for?'
'You look like you should be on bed rest,' Loki replied. He pushed the volume up again until the speakers finally beamed in Doctor Prothero's inane inquiry about Gamora's opinion of her breakfast.
'Yeah, 'cause you look like you're back from a six-month sabbatical in Hawaii.'
Loki offered no response. Although he had avoided the bathroom mirror the past few mornings, he had caught his reflection in the glass walls and the endless polished surfaces to be found on the USS Gibraltar. The purple bags beneath his eyes were unmissable.
'What does breakfast look like on your home-world?' Doctor Prothero continued in a smooth, soothing tone. Coulson had introduced her as the preeminent criminal psychologist on SHIELD's payroll. Her voice carried a faint trace of familiarity for Loki, but neither her face nor her name stirred recognition. There had been many SHIELD personnel rotating through his cell before Thor took him back to Asgard. 'Is it customary among your people to eat breakfast?'
Loki rolled his chair back a little so he could have a better view of the screens that dominated the small, dusty room. SHIELD, as ever, weren't satisfied with a single video feed. One camera tracked Prothero, one was narrowed in on Gamora and three more covered her cell from various angles. There was no possibility of privacy for Gamora, who presently lay on the narrow bench opposite the cell's entrance.
'You think this'll work?' Stark asked.
'Prothero's methods?'
Stark made a vague gesture with his less mangled hand, which Loki construed to mean agreement with his question, but he had no easy answer for Stark.
In Loki's experience, Midgardians had a strange attitude to interrogation techniques. There were many worlds, including in certain cases on Asgard, where torture was considered merely one of the standard options to get information out of a prisoner. Yet many Midgardians looked queasy when the possibility was brought up. Certainly, SHIELD had allowed a bit of roughening up and a great many threats, many of them delivered by Thor, but they hadn't acted on them.
Threats were never going to make an impression on Gamora. She had once pulled out all ten of Loki's fingernails in punishment for subordination and grinned through every moment of the procedure. But then, Loki wasn't sure whether pain would produce results when it came to Gamora even if SHIELD were to embrace such techniques. For most of her life, she had been Thanos' victim as much as she had been his tool.
And yet, they had at least received insults, filthy insinuations and warnings about Thanos' wrath in reply to the threats. With Thor and Rogers, the two most capable of matching Gamora physically, out in Tunisia, Coulson's higher-ups decided it was time for a change of strategy. Thor was now to be relegated to the surveillance room where Loki and Stark presently sat, and Prothero would take the lead. The results so far: Gamora's resounding silence.
'Coulson said it'll take time,' Loki said half-heartedly.
Stark rubbed his chin with the knuckle of one of his unbroken fingers. 'De-radicalisation has been proven to work for terrorists. We're on new ground with aliens.'
There was a distinct lack of snark in those words or arrogance in Stark's expression. Loki peered at the man for a moment before he understood. Stark had peeled off his smirking playboy persona - this was work and he wanted an opinion from someone with more expertise than he possessed. Loki had seen hints of this side of him back when they prepared for Ebony Maw in Switzerland, but that had been on matters concerning communications technology and engineering, and certainly never directed at Loki.
Trust him to warm up to anyone who can exasperate SHIELD.
'It's not something we do back on Asgard,' Loki said. He paused while Prothero prodded Gamora with another set of questions that she failed to answer, then went on. 'I understand Prothero's approach in theory. There is something cult-like about Thanos' followers and their fervour can approximate that of your religious fundamentalists. But I can't say whether this approach would work with Gamora.'
'And we mightn't have time to find out.'
'Exactly.'
Loki pressed his hands together and clenched his fingers. At every admission of their continued peril, a traitorous thought ingratiated itself deeper into his mind. He needed only to extend his hand. He needed only to walk into the cell and let the stone do the work. Ebony Maw had torn into Loki's mind; Loki was perfectly capable of tearing apart Gamora's.
Don't. This isn't about that.
The door behind Loki and Stark was flung open.
'Loki?' Coulson called out as he strode into the room. His eyes flicked to the computer screens, then back to Loki. He went on more softly, but with no less urgency. 'I need you to have a look at something. Stark, you too.'
'Have you...'
Loki gave up on his question when Coulson swivelled on his heel and motioned for Loki and Stark to follow him. Saying nothing, Coulson pursed his lips through two levels of the helicarrier and along five corridors until they reached a wide, L-shaped room where the helicarrier's science team was headquartered. Coulson ordered for the staff in the room to take a break and once they had filed out, he hurried towards a cluster of four computer screens that showed aggregated data of every spectrometer SHIELD had tapped into.
'There was a spike in activity about a ten minutes ago,' Coulson said.
Loki minimised the current data and brought up the analytics for the previous hour. 'Yes, I can see it.'
He hoped neither Coulson nor Stark noticed the slight tremble of his hands as he and Stark worked through the analytics. A single spectrometer in Western Hungary had picked up the rapid spike in gamma radiation, then an alarm came from equipment in Bavaria, then, within five minutes, spectrometers all across Europe reacted. SHIELD's technological reach was impressive considering the general level of Midgardian scientific understanding. It certainly gave Loki enough data to quickly pinpoint the origin of the radiation spike - a hydroelectric plant in Austria.
Norns, why do you torment us so?
'This was the place he used,' Loki said, pointing to a speck on the topographic map he had brought up. 'Hardly matters really. The Maw's gone.'
'Are you certain of that?' Coulson replied. 'Tony, what do you think?'
Loki tuned out Stark's reply as he tried to focus. He supposed he wasn't certain. It was possible that Ebony Maw brought down reinforcements to replace Gamora and Tyr. Loki peered at the radiation measurements once more. 'It was a brief spike. One person travelling, by the looks of it, not many. By all means, send a scouting party out to Austria, but I would wager they won't find much.'
Coulson pulled off his suit jacket, moving gingerly over his still-healing arm and hung the jacket over the back of a nearby swivel chair. He leaned against the edge of the table. 'Do we count this as a good thing or not?'
'Phil, we lost him,' Stark replied and clenched his teeth together so firmly, the tension was obvious in his stiff jawline and the taut tendons in his neck.
'Lost?' Loki's chuckle came out humourless and bitter. 'Do you really think he's been spooked off by the might the Midgardians? He still has the Tesseract. And he's not accustomed to disappointing his master, he will try to reclaim the sceptre. How that'll look, I can barely begin to guess.'
Switzerland was merely a skirmish in a bloody war. What we achieved there might be meaningless in another week.
Loki sucked in a breath in an effort to calm himself, but it was no use. The lights overhead flickered and every computer monitor in his vicinity exploded.
Chaos, barely contained panic and desperation had dominated the rest of the day. Coulson ordered a scientific scouting team to Austria, who quickly confirmed what Loki had already concluded - Ebony Maw had harnessed the hydroelectric generator to open a portal and left Midgard. The Tesseract, of course, had gone with him.
By nightfall, Thor and Rogers were back aboard. Their continued presence in Tunisia was useless now and they had been recalled. The focus turned to attempting to plan for the Maw's next move. SHIELD abandoned all semblance of patience with Ebony Maw's accomplices or, reportedly, with Fury. Loki too found himself cornered in Coulson's office and inundated with questions about what else Thanos might have in his arsenal that could be a threat to Midgard. The more answers he gave, the grimmer Coulson's expression grew.
Loki would have been amused by the man's distress if the thoughts in his own mind didn't leave him just as uneasy as Coulson had become. The flurry of activity on the USS Gibraltar had quietened down as the clocks crept towards midnight, but Loki's mind had refused to still with that small voice whispering into his ear, prodding him towards paths he refused to contemplate again. And so this night seemed to stretch into a thousand nights, each as long as a galaxy's circuit around the black hole at its heart.
Pursing his lips, Loki walked slowly along the edge of the helicarrier's unmanned deck. The USS Gibraltar presently hovered at an altitude where the air was too thin for Midgardians. The crew did have oxygen masks on hand, but they didn't venture out in these conditions unless they had to.
Yet, he wasn't alone, he realised. A magic, neither the intimately familiar magic of Asgardians nor the wild magicry of the frost giants, drifted over the deck like smoke in a summer breeze. Loki didn't care for its signature. The wielder had it under control, that much was certain, yet there was a wild undercurrent. It was an animal that obeyed its master, but was far from tame.
'Does the sceptre whisper to you?' asked the Sorcerer Supreme as her astral projection emerged from the empty air in front of Loki.
'I'd wondered if we'd be seeing you again,' he replied, taking half a step back.
'The Earth is open to many dangers.'
Loki gathered he wouldn't get a more concrete answer for what she had been occupied with since she muttered two words of farewell and opened a portal back to Kamar Taj while the rest of them waited for the helicarrier to finish its descent into the valley. He supposed it was none of his concern anyway, Thanos was enough to deal with. On the other hand, it did irk him that while she told him practically nothing, she expected an honest answer out of him.
'Does it whisper to you?' he asked, not bothering to mask his irritation.
'It knows it doesn't tempt me.'
It knows you've already succumbed to temptation and draw power from a different trap. One no less dangerous than an infinity stone.
'That stone needs to be rehoused within a different vessel,' Loki said with a sigh. 'One like the Tesseract, which was designed to actually contain its powers. The sceptre was created so the wielder can make full use of the mind stone's powers and now...'
She drew her hands together in front of her stomach. 'One day. Soon. But not yet.'
'What would you have us do then?' Loki asked, although he wasn't enthused to have to voice such a question. While he had learned his lesson about the mind stone, the Midgardians had little idea of what they were dealing with. 'Do you plan to take it for yourself? You'll have to battle SHIELD for it, I expect.'
'I don't think you'll let me if I tried. You can be very creative when pushed into a corner.'
The Sorcerer Supreme's projection smiled as she spoke, but Loki found nothing pleasant or amusing in her words. He bit down a string of curses and instead asked, 'You know, don't you?'
'It's difficult not to notice how threads of time are spun and twisted around you,' she replied. After a moment, when Loki didn't respond to her words, she went on, 'This I don't know, but I suspect - you've wielded the mind stone before.'
'It was a complicated relationship.'
'You're wiser now.'
Loki let out an exasperated huff. 'Wise enough, I hope, to know that having a sceptre in my hand isn't a good idea.'
'That was a different timeline and you were a very different person back then.' The Sorcerer Supreme's projection crossed the narrow space between them and pressed her ghostly hand against the left side of Loki's face. 'You're on the right path here.'
He frowned. 'Have you seen it?'
She grinned - a cheeky look that belonged on the face of a child about to steal a pot of honey from the pantry, not on the face of the sorcerer who has lived several times longer than what was the natural lifespan of her species. But that silent expression left Loki breathless. So there was still the right path to follow. One out of how many? Strange claimed back on Titan that he had found one out of several million and he had died for it.
A thought Loki had somehow never considered, despite all the times he had mulled about what he was attempting to do back in the past, struck him then. What if he still followed that same path Strange had seen back then? Strange had sacrificed himself for Stark and it had been Stark's message that nudged Loki to abandon all caution and try the time travel spell. It was a uniquely comforting thought - it offered meaning to all the deaths along the way.
But as the Sorcerer Supreme slid her hand down, her sling ring cold against the skin of his cheek, there was something in her expression that warned Loki off basking in good spirits too heartily.
'You've come tonight because you've something to tell me.'
'Nothing you don't already suspect,' she responded. 'Victory seldom comes without its price.'
He chewed on his lip for a few seconds, then gulped in a lungful of the thin air. 'And this path exacts a bitter toll. Yes. I... I think I've known that was a possibility for a while now.'
'I'm sorry, Loki.'
How's sorry going to help?
Not trusting himself to reply with anything civil, he merely nodded. The Sorcerer Supreme seemed to realise that she wouldn't get much more out of this conversation. Or perhaps she had foreseen it. She muttered a quiet farewell and began to turn away, only to pause.
'Tell your brother the truth,' she said, glancing back over her shoulder.