Mischief and Magic

Chapter 4

Loki tried to get up, to get the healing stone to Morgan. He saw the pool of blood around her growing. Unfortunately, the Hulk had smashed him into the ground too hard. Loki needed to heal before he could even move. His healing factor was fantastic, but he wasn't sure that he could heal enough to move before Morgan's lifeblood ran out. He willed his body to heal faster, willed himself to move. All he could manage was a dying whale noise.

He kept trying, though had to stop when the team arrived. The battle was over. They had won and stopped the portal and invasion, just as he'd planned. Though he had planned more gloating and less being in a crater made of his own body.

Thor dragged him to his feet after Tony nearly killed him for the state Morgan was in. Loki tried to insist that he hadn't hurt her as the medical humans wheeled her off to try to save her. He tried to tell them about the healing stone.

No one listened to him.

No one ever listened. It was like being back home, spoken over, ignored. The lesser prince, the villain.

Only Morgan had seen that he was mind-controlled too.

And he couldn't even help her.

Thor made damn sure of that by growling at him to shut up and gagging him on top of the humiliating handcuffs. The only reason that Tony hadn't kicked his ass all the way back to Asgard was by Thor promising he would face Asgardian justice and Tony being too preoccupied with making sure Morgan would live.

So Loki was dragged back to Asgard in chains. He was led through a farce of a trial. Odin had already decided what would happen to him without listening to a word that Loki had to say. Of course, Odin wouldn't believe that Loki had been tortured and mind-controlled. No one on Asgard did.

Odin tossed him in the dungeons to suffer through solitary confinement for the rest of his days.

Day after long day passed with no one to visit him besides the guards and his mother. He said such hurtful things to her when he was first locked away, due to pain and grief. She never stopped loving him and the pair spent long hours together repairing their relationship.

Loki lost track of the days, his mind occasionally returned to the little Midgardian, the only one who had believed him, who had been the first to truly see him in years. He hoped that she had survived, but had no way of knowing.

No way, until two years after he'd been locked away, after two long years of being basically alone, of his mental health shattering even further from such an existence to a brilliant mind. Only then did he receive a glimmer of hope when his mother told him he would be getting out of the cell to serve 'penance' on Midgard, working with the Avengers.

It was the best she could do. It was awful, but he wouldn't be trapped in a single cell for his entire existence. He would be able to properly come home and visit. He could be a person again, could be himself again.

And while he was on Midgard, he would find out what had happened to Morgan Stark.

Two years later and he still needed that mystery solved. She was only one little Midgardian, a girl who should be beneath him. But she had seen him, had understood him, and she had magic.

Surely that was enough of a reason for the god to care.

Surely.