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"How will your friends have time for me, when they are so busy fighting you?" Loki sneered at him, crossing the distance between them in two quick strides. He moved with a sort of inhuman liquid grace—like a panther, perhaps, prowling towards its trapped prey—green eyes glittering maliciously.
The raven-haired male towered over the brunette, and Tony tried not to flinch away as Loki leaned forward, into his personal space. Loki flicked his tongue over thin lips as he smirked down at the mortal. Tony backed against the counter, toppling the glass of scotch.
“Well, I do have protocols in place for, uh, these kinds of situations. Gotta account for all the, ah, occupational hazards, y’know. So, you can’t exactly use me ‘cause JARVIS won’t allow it.” Tony shrugged, affecting an air of false airiness in spite of his jackrabbiting pulse.
"Well. We shall see, won’t we? You have heart, Stark. I will enjoy breaking you, shattering you, until you can be remoulded for your true purpose." Loki crooned into the shell of his ear, almost gently, like the calm before a storm.
Tony curled his lip in the mockery of a smile, daring him to try, glaring defiantly at the god. Loki chuckled, then his arm shot out and to close around the shorter man’s throat, holding him in a stranglehold. Tony pried at Loki’s hand as he dangled midair, gasping for breath, to no avail.
Just as Tony thought that this would be the end of him (how ironic, with all that he had survived he was going to die choking in the hands of a manic god in his very own tower with his suit mere feet away from him) Loki touched the sceptre to his chest with a metallic clink.
Cold. Blue.
It was cold, as if Loki had pressed an iceberg against his chest. Blue tendrils snaked from the staff, curling around his heart before settling in his arc reactor. The tendrils slithered through his veins, filling him with a tingling sensation, his muscles twitching and his toes curling. His pupils expanded until the whites of his eyes were momentarily gone, before they refocused into an otherworldly blue. Ice blue. Electric blue. Tesseract blue.
Tony had thought being mind controlled would be like being trapped in a cage, watching his body move without command. But no, it was nothing like what he hypothesised. He understood what Clint had meant when he described how it felt to be under Loki’s control. He couldn’t fight, because thoughts started pouring into his head, thoughts that weren’t his own, of subjugation, where the contradiction of freeing himself from freedom made perfect sense… The icy veins spread across his body and vision until the world was a bright searing blue light, before everything refocused.
“How do you feel, Stark?”