Archive of Our Own ^beta

When the smaller made to viciously kick the other man, Loki knew he should probably do something about it. If he didn't stop this sooner rather than later, one of them might die, and if it were the host, then the parasites likely spread more quickly. Loki waved his hand, and the aggressor fell asleep where he stood...who just happened to be leaning towards the man he was been accosting, causing the aggressor to fall directly on top of his victim. The victim made an 'umph' sound when his assailant fell right onto his chest.

Midgardians and their weak stamina. Even after he had been beaten by The Hulk, he had been able to stand only a little while later. The guy groaned in pain as he pushed weakly at the man on top of him. Loki gazed briefly around the place as he heard the man's grunts. Dim lighting, wooden tables, and wooden stools.

Loki looked to the man again as he heard sounds of freeing himself. The conscious Midgardian's eyes were wide and alarmed as he pushed the man off of him. The man in the now-stained red shirt stood up as quickly as he could and moved several feet away from the unconscious man, not taking his eyes off him. He looked as if he feared that the man's eyes would open and he would charge at him again. Granted, due to the damage caused, it was not a completely unreasonable fear.

That's when the Midgardian's eyes locked onto his. The guy looked at him scared, but not because he recognized who Loki really was. No, Loki always wore a face other than his own in public. He didn't like it, but he realized if he was going to make sure the Armarks never took him as host again, it was a necessary evil. He also wasn't scared of Loki's magic, because Loki had made sure that he was invisible when he had teleported in. He had only taken off the invisibility when he was sure that neither one of them was looking in his direction.

"What happened?" he asked the conscious Midgardian, acting like he was a fool who had no idea. It burned him a little to have to play the fool, but sometimes the truth would not be helpful in certain situations, and this was one of those times.

"Tyler just came out of nowhere and for no reason started wailing on me." The mortal man was lying. It was often easier for a liar to spot one himself. The man knew exactly why the now unconscious man had hit him, but he didn't want to admit it. Loki didn't really care though about petty human squabbles; all he cared about was that he suspected the unconscious man of being a host, and as far as he could tell, the other man wasn't.

Loki shook his head, annoyed, but took out the Stark communication device he had been reluctantly given by the agents this morning just before Stark's arrival. He had mastered it easily enough, even though it had taken him a little longer than he might have thought for something so primitive. Loki made a mental note to disassemble it sometime to see how it worked. He scrolled down the preassembled list of his contacts. There weren't many, admittedly, but he knew he didn't want to talk to Stark or Thor. He pressed down instead on the one that said Captain America.

"Hello," came Captain America's voice over the line. He wasn't sure why they always started with 'hello,' but right now he didn't care.

"I'm in town, and I think I have found one," Loki said even though he was almost sure that he had. He looked down at the unconscious body on the floor for a moment before looking back at the bloody, still startled-looking mortal who was also looking down at the mortal.

"Where are you?" Loki scanned the interior again, and despite the differences, he was fairly sure he was safe in saying.

"I'm at a tavern," he said. The place smelled strongly of spirits, and a glance behind the counter showed bottles of liquid he knew were meant to imbibe. There were a few of what looked like shattered glasses on the counter and dripping over onto the floor near where the scuffle had taken place. They were probably the first casualties in the attack. The victim was lucky that he hadn't fallen onto the glass when his aggressor had knocked him to the floor.

"A bar?" Captain America asked.

"Just get here," he said, irritated, and hung up the phone. He had to wait a good five minutes before the Avengers actually got there. Loki never did like waiting, and the still bleeding man kept trying to convince him that he had no idea why he was attacked, unsuccessfully.

The three of them, plus Thor, whom they had apparently told, walked in. The Midgardian didn't seem to notice them right away. Apparently, without their little outfits added to the fact that Stark was wearing sunglasses and a hat, they weren't nearly as noticeable in their everyday clothing. Thor still looked strange in Midgardian clothing to him, but Loki was getting more used to it as the last few days had worn on. After the first day, Thor had worn real Midgardian clothing, but this time, rather than a cheap suit, he was wearing those blue pants...jeans, he thought they were called, and a more relaxed shirt.

"What took you so long?" he snapped.

"Sorry, but we can't all teleport," Captain said softly, so that the other mortal couldn't hear. He then turned to the man who had paused, and was now taking in the plainly dressed Avengers with a slightly confused look in his eyes, like he knew they were familiar but just couldn't place them.

"What happened here?" Rogers asked authoritatively. For some reason, the captain was in charge. Although he wasn't quite sure how that happened, the rest of the group had agreed to work with him when he hadn't even been there. He didn't have to say anything, though, because the man began to claim again that the unconscious man had attacked him for absolutely no reason and how he was just an innocent bystander in the whole thing. Loki rolled his eyes. The guy was not lying well.

"Tell them the truth," he spoke, cutting off the man's lies. The man looked from Loki to the Avengers and back again. Then he smiled weakly.

"I don't-"

"Tell them the truth," Loki snapped, and he made it obvious that this was the last time he was going to ask nicely. The man stared at Loki for a long moment before he looked down at the hardwood floors, embarrassed and a little ashamed. He cleared his throat before speaking, barely above a mumble.

"Tyler's not usually the kind of guy who stands up for himself, so I- and everyone tends to take advantage of him. I guess he finally got tired of it." And he understood now why this Midgardian, Tyler, had been the first to react to the Armarks. Anger could give you courage or an unclear mind that didn't think about consequences. It made sense.

"Tyler is one," he said to the others, and they nodded. It was funny, he had suspected so when he had met him on the first day. He had run into him in the hardware store. He had avoided eye contact with all the other Midgardians, but he had stared at Loki almost the entire time he had been there. All of them did when he was around them.

"What should we do with him?" the alter ego of The Hulk asked, and even though he hadn't been asking Loki, he responded anyways.

"I have an idea."

Loki did have an idea, but his idea had been overruled by Fury (who wasn't even there yet). Granted, Fury's idea was better, though Loki would rather eat nails for breakfast than admit it aloud. Fury's idea was to quarantine the town like there was actually a sickness that could spread. It wasn't a complete and total lie...

S.H.I.E.L.D needed a place away from prying eyes, so Loki had suggested his warehouse. S.H.I.E.L.D and his magic quickly turned the main room of the factory into a makeshift hospital. More S.H.I.E.L.D agents had arrived within the hour to set the town up with cameras. They didn't want to start a panic until absolutely necessary, but they also didn't want to lose any people in the town.

Loki looked at the human, Tyler, who was behind a thick wall of plastic, even though the plastic wouldn't help keep the Armarks from spreading. Still, it was clean, and there was a bed in there. It wasn't a terrible place for a human to be kept until such time as he could leave. Loki shook his head. A cage was a cage, no matter how it looked; his own cell in Asgard was proof of that.

His idea hadn't been much different, just holding them in cells rather than hospital rooms. The Avengers hadn't liked the idea of caging people, though. But apparently, they didn't mind holding them in hospital rooms even though they weren't sick, at least not in any kind of way that most doctors on earth could understand. They had no problems when they had caged him. Then again, he'd been a host a long longer. He wondered how the Avengers would react as the parasites were fed more.

The Midgardian Tyler was not happy about being in the cage/ hospital room. He had spent 30 minutes a few days ago, when he had first arrived, yelling about how his Dad was going to sue them. He raged on about how he knew his rights, and he wanted a lawyer. His face was still red, and his eyes looked like they could melt steel. Perhaps he was extra angry because of the magic shield around his cell? He hoped so. It was the strongest magical shield he could construct. Loki had to just hope that it would keep the creatures in if it went that far.

He found he liked, well, maybe liked wasn't the right word, but he felt compelled to watch the human Tyler. The first day all Tyler had done was pace up and down the small room like a caged tiger. Where had that comparison come from? He shook his head and pushed it out of his mind as he looked at the enraged human in front of him.

Loki could tell the human had a lot of pent-up rage inside of him that until now he had been too scared to let come out. Was that him? Granted, he had usually let some of his rage out in the form of pranks and some in sparing or magic, but he had also done his fair share of bottling and hiding his emotions.

Loki blinked as he heard someone enter the room. He looked up to see the Hulk's alter ego step into the room, holding food. The Hulk's alter ego didn't look all that surprised to see him there, even though it had been Captain America who had given the Midgardian sustenance last time. He looked at Loki, who waved his hand, and for a moment the shield faltered. Bruce slid the food into the food tray. There was biohazard gear on the walls, but since the human Tyler wasn't actually contagious in the normal way, there was no point in using it unless someone came in who didn't know what was going on. Loki put the shield back up and looked around the room.

There were 25 quarantined rooms in each large room and 5 large rooms, one on each floor. Due to SHIELD and his magic, it looked the same as the picture they had shown him of an apparently normal Midgardian hospital. He hoped that there weren't more than 125 of them. As it was, he hadn't been able to do much more than essential magic until today. Creating material from thin air was much more stressful than he remembered, and doing it on such a large scale made it even worse.

The other quarantine rooms would probably get their residents soon, although how soon was anyone's guess. Tyler had only been in his room for 38 hours, and no new people had shown themselves. When there were more humans, it was going to be more taxing to keep the magical shields up. Not to mention, Loki was going to see even more versions of himself playing out. Loki waited for Bruce to leave him again, but he headed straight for him. Loki rolled his eyes. Just perfect. What did Banner want?

"Why are you in here?"

"I'm keeping the spell going," Loki lied poorly. Eventually, he was going to have to leave when the next person showed themselves, and then they would know that the shield did not require his constant attention. He was usually a better liar than this.

"What do you think about Tyler's situation?" Bruce asked. Loki's eyes narrowed at him, trying to figure out exactly what he was trying to ascertain with a question like that.

"If you're asking, do I feel guilty about Tyler's predicament? I do not." Loki said, although he wasn't entirely sure whether or not he was being truthful with that statement.

"So you're fine with the fact that Tyler may die if we don't find a way to stop it?"

"Your human lives are so fleeting anyway," Loki said blithely, like he didn't care. He heard someone else open the door, and his eyes narrowed as he saw Thor. Thor had renewed his attempt to talk to him in the last 12 hours had tried to talk to him about 5 times in that period. Loki wasn't sure what Thor wanted to talk about, but whatever it was, he did not want to hear about it. He got up off the chair he had magicked himself long ago and pushed past Thor.

"Loki-"

"I don't want to talk to you! I may be forced to work with you, but I don't want to talk to you!" He didn't because he was still confused about everything, and Thor was the one most likely to get him angry enough that he admitted the truth. He would not let that happen. It wasn't an option.

He exited into the familiar and unfamiliar hall. Loki barely remembered the warehouse that he had spent the last few months in, but he had gotten rid of anything that might show that he had lived there previously before he had brought the Avengers there. Somehow, he doubted the Avengers would like finding out that less than a week ago, he had planned to blow up all of Midgard, and he had made the bomb there.

Loki made his way far enough down the hallway, then ducked into an empty room. Did he know this room? He had lived here for months, but had he ever been in this room before? He wished he had even half the amount of answers that he had questions. It wasn't sitting well with him, the not knowing. Loki looked around, made himself invisible since he did not want to appear to The Avengers as weak, but couldn't help curling into a ball.

He was not going to cry; he was above that, but he still felt...lost and confused. He didn't have much time to contemplate it, though, when he heard Thor's loud, boisterous voice echo through the Warehouse.

"Loki? Loki, where are you?" Loki sighed. In a way, he was glad that Thor interrupted his bleak thoughts. Not that he was going to tell the Thunderer that. Loki made himself visible as he stood up and put on a good face.

"What do you want?" Loki snapped; he couldn't talk to Thor. Not in any real or deep kind of way, not until he figured out whether or not he was at heart a villain or not.

"To talk to you, Loki. You've been acting very strangely," Thor said with concern. Loki took that in. Acting strangely? Had he been acting strangely? Did he even know how he was supposed to act anymore? He had spent years so driven mad by the Armarks. How was he supposed to act now that they were in him no longer? Loki shook his head. He was forgetting that he couldn't talk to Thor until he had answers, so he pushed past him and back into the hallway.

"No, I'm simply not acting how you want me to act," he said and left Thor behind him yet again. Where was he going to go now? If he were apart much longer from the other Avengers, then they would probably suspect him of some wrongdoing.

Why did he care? Because they were helping to get rid of the Armarks, he reminded himself. Was that the only reason? Did he care for his b-Thor? He still had a hard time calling Thor brother even in his head. He still felt rage at him, still hated him most of the time...but not always. There were moments, even if they were outnumbered by the hateful feeling where Loki wanted to talk to his brother to tell him the truth. Loki wished he could know his own thoughts, but he didn't.

Loki froze in mid-step and frowned as he felt another alarm go off. Another one of the humans was triggering their alarm. He walked into one of the larger but not quarantine rooms. It was headquarters, at least that what the humans were calling it. It had a great many S.H.I.E.L.D people talking to other people using the Midgardian cell phones and a bunch of people hunched over computers, maps, and books.

Loki, however, passed by all of that to a smaller room. This was the room that the Avengers had chosen as their own, at least during the daytime. Loki frowned as he saw the brand new stuffed leather couches that looked horribly out of place in the middle of the abandoned factory with a dusty and cracked cement floor. This section hadn't been renovated like the others. The couches certainly hadn't been there before today, and he had a feeling about how they had come to be there. He looked at Stark, who just smiled back at him and lifted his eyebrows at him like he was taunting him but Loki didn't rise to the bait.

He was slightly startled to see Black Widow and Hawkeye both there and both glaring at him, along with Banner. He wasn't overly surprised to see the glares of the Black Widow and Hawkeye, but a little surprised since no one had told him that they were coming. Then again, he supposed that maybe he wasn't on their top list to tell about such things. Loki looked at Banner and wondered if he was still irritated, maybe even angry, about his comment. However, apparently not enough for Loki to be meeting the scientist's other side, which he supposed he was grateful for.

"There's another one. I'll call you with the details when I get there," he said, then teleported himself to the source.