Chapter Text
The bioluminescent pulse of Asgardian night flickered against the healing chamber’s dome, casting golden halos across its glass-like walls. The air shimmered with the faint hum of soul-forged runes, ancient magic meant to mend what mortal hands could not.
Tony Stark—genius, billionaire, insomnia-addicted engineer—stood at the edge of a curved balcony, feeling thoroughly and completely out of place.
“Don’t touch that,” Thor’s voice boomed behind him, good-natured but serious. “That orb rearranges the skeletal system of frost giants. And occasionally goats.”
Tony retracted his hand. “Noted. You might wanna invest in some labels.”
Thor only chuckled. “You have my thanks again, Stark. I did not expect you to come willingly.”
Tony scoffed. “Willing is a strong word. I’m dying and your healing tech is the one thing not trying to short-circuit my nervous system. I’d say I was coerced by the failure of modern medicine.”
Truth be told, something had been wrong with him since the New York invasion. Untraceable tremors, vertigo, wild spikes in neural feedback. No Earth specialist had a clue. And of course, Stark being Stark, he’d hidden it behind jokes, caffeine, and increasingly wild engineering projects—until Rhodey and Pepper both staged a surprisingly tearful intervention.
Thor, visiting Earth to discuss something about the Nine Realms and broccoli tariffs—Tony hadn’t been paying attention—had overheard and offered Asgard’s help. Against his better judgment (and every self-preserving bone in his body), Tony had agreed.
Now he stood in a healing dome powered by a glowing Asgardian soul-forge while being examined by a floating priestess who hummed in E-flat and referred to his nervous system as “singularly impish.”
“You are fractured,” the priestess said at last. Her voice was music and thunder. “The mind has been cracked, not by force of trauma, but by something older. Something that does not belong to you.”
Tony arched a brow. “You’re saying I’ve been... possessed?”
“No. But something made a home where it was not invited. And though it has left... its shadows remain.”
Tony’s mind leapt—not just to himself, but outward. Barton had been taken fully—puppet strings and all. The others? They’d been affected too, hadn’t they? But he hadn’t touched the scepter. Not directly. So why was it still echoing in his brain like the world’s worst earworm?
Steve, with his sudden certainty and intensity, turning on him in Stuttgart like Tony was the threat. But what if they’d all been touched in subtle ways? Natasha? Bruce?
He clenched his jaw. If it had left shadows in his head, what did that mean for the rest of them? Did it change how he’d acted? Had it made things worse? Had it let him go on purpose?
“Wait,” he said, voice dropping. “I was never touched by the scepter. Not directly. Barton and the others? They were possessed. I wasn’t. So how the hell is something still in my head?”
The priestess only smiled like a storm waiting to fall. “There are many kinds of touch.”
What if it wasn’t about contact? What if it just needed to be near?
And if that was true—if residual exposure alone could embed something in him, a brain with a billion-dollar firewall—what did that mean for the one guy who held the damn thing like a personal accessory?
He frowned.
“Hey, that scepter,” Tony said, turning toward Thor. “That was Loki’s, right? Custom-evil. Carved from whatever fashionable dark-matter you guys use to enchant your murder toys?”
Thor blinked. “No,” he said slowly. “It was not Asgardian. We believed it to be Chitauri in origin. A weapon granted to him during his exile.”
Tony’s brows furrowed. “So... not actually his?”
“We do not know where he acquired it,” Thor admitted. “Only that it was in his possession when he returned.”
Tony looked away, something cold settling under his ribs. “There's no way you didn’t scan your own prince. Right? Like, you have soul-magic healing domes and floating hummingbird doctors—someone gave him a psych eval, right?”
Thor hesitated.
It was a small pause. Barely a breath.
But Tony saw it.
“Oh, you’ve gotta be kidding me.”
“So... an alien mind-control stick that turns people into compliant zombies shows up outta nowhere, and you never checked if it did something to the guy waving it around like a laser pointer?”
He tried to say it like a joke.
Tried.
But it didn’t quite land.
Thor stiffened. “Loki was already changed when he fell. His rage had consumed him. The scepter may have empowered him, but it did not make him what he became. His descent was... a continuation.”
Tony’s gaze sharpened. “Continuation, huh? So nobody thought maybe he needed a scan—just a cage?”
Thor’s expression darkened. “He killed, Stark. He sought to rule your world.”
Tony huffed, a laugh with no humor in it. “Right. Sure. Skip the trial, skip the analysis, straight to eternity in time-out. Very advanced civilization. Ten out of ten.”
Thor’s jaw tightened, but he said nothing.
Tony looked away, something gnawing now in the back of his mind. He didn’t like this. He didn’t like any of this.
But it was sticking.
Later that night
Tony didn’t sleep, not that he ever did, but Asgard made it feel like even the stars were watching. Which, in some god-tier mystical sense, they probably were.
Left to his own devices—always a mistake—Tony wandered back into the healing chamber after hours.
The soul-forge still shimmered quietly, unattended, glowing with warm golden latticework and layered runes that pulsed in sequence, like a heartbeat made of light.
“I wonder…” Tony muttered.
He tapped the bracer on his wrist. A hidden panel slid open, revealing a circular port. With a satisfied hum, he linked it to the external conduit he’d discretely cabled to the healing altar earlier, because of course he had. Jarvis’ voice buzzed through his internal comm.
“Sir, I must advise caution when integrating untested magical systems with your cybernetic interface.”
“Yeah, yeah. I’m doing science, Jarvis. With a soul-battery. Be excited.”
The moment his system pinged, the forge reacted. The lights shuddered, then aligned—recognizing his interface. Information poured through: holographic glyphs translating themselves, half-machine, half-spell, a data stream carved in language and sensation.
Tony’s eyes widened.
“Holy... That’s not just tech. It’s sympathetic bio-construct mapping. No servers. No processors. It's all encoded in frequency and intent. Like the power grid listens to your subconscious.”
He grinned.
“Oh, I’m gonna steal so much of this.”
He accessed deeper layers, writing a translation matrix on the fly. Jarvis catalogued everything, adjusting StarkTech's systems to process the incoming data. Magic was just physics with better branding. He could work with this.
His fingers paused when he found an unusual link: a scrying weave embedded into the network—an internal Asgardian surveillance grid, disguised as a ceremonial projection node.
“Aha. Knew you had a Big Brother system,” he muttered, coaxing the image orb to life. It hovered, glowed, and opened like an eye.
The orb flickered... then showed a room. Clean. Barren. Disturbingly normal.
No dark dungeons. No chains. Just sterile white marble and soft ambient light. There was even a bed, a desk, a shelf of untouched books.
Loki sat cross-legged on the bed, unmoving. Like a statue made of silence.
Tony watched. He didn’t know why. Maybe because he’d been thinking—he hadn’t been checked out after New York either. Not really. Not beyond vitals. And he’d barely slept for months. What if there was more inside him than anyone realized?
Loki hadn’t looked good during the invasion. Pale. Sunken-eyed. He moved like his skin didn’t quite fit. Tony had assumed that was just how sociopaths were styled.
But now...
He couldn’t unsee the similarities.
“God, did no one in this world run a post-war psyche eval?” he muttered.
He studied the feed. Loki still hadn’t moved. The stillness was unnatural. Not like meditation. More like a machine on standby. Waiting to be turned off or turned back on.
Tony shook his head. “He’s not a prisoner. He’s a relic. You people just boxed him up and filed him away.”
He paused. Then, with a snort: “Very humane, your highnesses.”
He stepped back from the orb, fingers twitching.
This wasn’t just about the scepter anymore.
He tapped his comms. “Jarvis?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Pull everything you can on psychic energy residue. Cross-reference with what we just learned. And queue up the data on Loki’s physiological readings—assuming Asgard bothered to keep any.”
“Initiating scan now.”
Tony nodded, jaw set. “We’re gonna solve this. Starting with the one guy I never thought I’d say this about... but might just be the other victim.”
He turned.
Time to ask Thor some very uncomfortable questions.
The central hall was quiet at night—if Asgard had a night. Its skies swirled in aurora-colored twilight, casting the high-vaulted golden ceilings in soft glows like light through honey. Tony sat on a stone bench flanked by gold-cast roots of Yggdrasil winding up the walls, like the palace itself had grown from a storybook.
Thor arrived silently. Well, Asgardian silently—which meant a storm cloud, boot thuds, and a shoulder-wide stride like he was always in battle posture.
“You’ve been busy,” Thor said.
Tony didn’t look up. “You left me in a room full of magical tech and no adult supervision. You knew what this was.”
Thor’s jaw worked. “You are not the first to question our decisions.”
“But maybe I’m the first who actually got an answer,” Tony said. He turned, eyes sharp but not angry. “You said Loki changed when he fell. What does that mean, exactly?”
Thor folded his arms. “It means what it sounds like. He was different. Unstable. Twisted with bitterness, as if everything inside him had been sharpened into a blade.”
“Right. But he didn’t fall into a vat of villainy. Something happened.”
“Yes,” Thor said tightly. “He found out he was a Frost Giant.”
Tony blinked. “That... sounds like a slur.”
Thor ignored that. “Our enemies left him to die as an infant. My father took him in. He was raised as my brother. As Asgardian. And when he discovered the truth, he... unraveled.”
“Or maybe he broke,” Tony said quietly.
Thor’s gaze snapped to him.
“You saw him as rage,” Tony continued. “But rage is never the first layer. There’s fear under it. Pain. People don’t turn that cruel unless something was done to them first.”
“He chose this path,” Thor said. But his voice wasn’t angry—it was defensive. Desperate. “He betrayed us all. Tried to take the throne. Lied to my face.”
Tony tilted his head. “And you think locking him away without even checking if he was influenced—that wasn’t a betrayal?”
Thor’s jaw clenched. “You don’t understand. You weren’t there when he let go. When he fell from the Bifrost.”
“And neither were you when he came back,” Tony countered. “So what did bring him back, Thor? The rage? Or the scepter?”
The words hovered between them like a live wire.
Footsteps echoed across the hall before Thor could answer.
Frigga entered, silk and shadow, her gown trailing like moonlight on still water. Her presence softened the air around her, but there was no mistaking the iron under it.
“I heard you were speaking of my son,” she said, voice calm but expectant.
Tony stood immediately. “Queen Frigga.”
“Just Frigga will do, Tony Stark.” She gave him a small, tired smile. “I’ve heard your name often. Even before New York.”
Tony glanced at Thor. “All flattering, I’m sure.”
“I know you’re here because something is wrong,” Frigga said gently. “And I know what you’ve seen.”
Tony hesitated. “If there’s any chance Loki wasn’t fully in control... someone needs to find out. Someone needs to ask him.”
Frigga’s eyes shimmered, almost wet. “I’ve tried.”
Thor shifted uncomfortably. “Mother—”
She turned to him, and he fell quiet.
“I stood before him,” she said, voice low, “and I saw a stranger with my son’s face. But sometimes, just sometimes, he would slip. A glance. A word. Something broken, not cruel. Something hurting.”
Tony nodded. “Then maybe that part’s still in there. If it is... I can find it.”
Thor’s frown deepened. “Father would never allow—”
“Your father has allowed too many things,” Frigga snapped, her voice suddenly sharp. “He allowed the lie. He allowed silence. He allowed my son to rot in a cell while the rest of us healed.”
Thor looked away. “He was a threat.”
“He was your brother,” Frigga said, softer now. “And my child.”
Tony watched the exchange quietly. It was all too familiar. Hurt being mistaken for malice. Anger covering grief. Fathers pretending righteousness while sons drowned under expectation.
“I know Odin doesn’t want me near him,” Tony said. “So let’s not tell him.”
Thor looked horrified. “You would defy—”
“I defy authority before breakfast most days,” Tony said breezily. “This just adds royalty to the mix.”
Frigga’s hand rested on Thor’s arm. “Take him,” she said quietly. “You know I would, if I could.”
Thor looked between them both, jaw tight, chest rising with slow breaths. Eventually, he gave a terse nod.
“He won’t be kind to you,” Thor warned.
Tony’s lips quirked. “I’m not known for inspiring kindness.”
“He may try to manipulate you.”
“I’m not known for being easy.”
Thor blinked. “...That is true.”
Frigga almost smiled.
Tony met her gaze. “What are you hoping I’ll find in him?”
She looked past him, as though to some far-off time only she could see.
“Hope,” she said simply. “Before even that fades.”
Which was how, twenty minutes later, Tony Stark—still clad in a silk robe he’d borrowed from somewhere in Frigga’s closet—stood outside the prison wing of Asgard.
“He may not speak,” Thor warned. “Or worse—he may lie.”
Tony shrugged. “So do I.”