Anthony Edward Stark

"Tony?"

Bruce was scared.

"Tony, Tony, don't move," he muttered, keeping a hold of Tony's arm as he tried to press his fingers to his throat, timing his pulse. "Alessa, go find help. Now."

"Got it." She reached out to the closest mark she had left and disappeared.

...And reappeared in front of Thor, regardless of where he was. "Tony's collapsed. Where are the doctors?"

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"Gnidnamed yrev erouy," Tony complained, finally giving up on his thoughts of pulling himself up. He laid instead in Bruce's arms, eyes half closed and sweat soaking into the other man's shirt. His pulse was only a little faster than usual, which likely didn't make sense. Dizziness tended to come from rapid heartbeat and hypertension.

Despite the sweat, he was shivering when Alessa brought Thor, the latter touching down outside with quite a clamor as Mjolnir finished it's swing and seemed to disappear from his hand.

"Tell me all that has happened!" the former prince demanded. "What was it that has been touched?" Oh Man of Iron, why did you put your hands on everything?

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"I-I don't know." Bruce pushed some of Tony's hair out of his face, still trying to get a clear read on his vitals. "I didn't think to..."

All at once, the ball with the universe floated off the shelf, the woman at her desk reappearing, and the amulet Tony had been messing with floated off its table, both pieces presenting themselves to Thor. "He was touching this," Alessa said, shaking the amulet gently, "and then we both looked at this ball."

Bruce sighed in relief. At least one of them had been paying attention. Damn it, Tony, he can't take you anywhere.

"We just came here to find something to let us read the books..."

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"I do not recognize either," Thor said with a troubled expression. His brother would have known immediately the cause and remedy for what befell Stark, but Thor was at a certain loss as he gazed at the objects and then picked up the ailing man bodily. "Bring those. We will seek the proprietor of this shop after we see Stark to the healers."

In Thor's arms, Tony looked like a child, cuddling up to the blond's massive chest. He complained unintelligibly about something, causing Thor to frown.

"He speaks mirrored," the Thunderer intoned as people gathered to watch the quick paced procession of the humans and their prince. "It is a strange infliction."

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“Mirrored?” Bruce asked, clasping his hands and running his thumb over his knuckles anxiously, keeping his hands close to himself as he followed Thor. “What does that mean?”

Alessa followed with the objects in tow, looking up at the adults around her with a carefully neutral expression. “Where do you think the shopkeeper is? I can try to find them.” Or, perhaps, find ‘Odin’. He would probably be able to identify the objects. The trick was getting him alone without any of the undoubtedly many people clamoring for his attention.

She didn't appreciate the stares they were getting. All the rubberneckers got a solid psychic shove to get them to keep on their way. Bruce would have scolded her for it if he weren't so worried.

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Thor smelled like leather, and while that wasn't exactly unpleasant, it was the sort of scent that stuck in your nose and throat. Tony was only half paying attention, trying to focus on if he was cold or warm. But Thor's words make him smirk. He was speaking backward? He wasn't hearing backwards. That was a relief. "Sdrawkcab," he replied three times in a row, slowing each time until Thor caught on.

"Backwards." Not a word he would use but at least he could translate. "I am unfamiliar with the keeper of this particular store but there are others that would know. That the wares were left unguarded is worrisome, however. You said that you had come for a device to allow you to read Asgardian? A simple thing and cheap to purchase. You should have come to me."

Tony protested again but Thor hushed him with a glance and laid him upon a table to be scanned. Eir was not present but one of her proteges was.

"His entire body is unstable. A normally easy fix but the anatomy of Midgardians--"

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“Backwards?” Oh, joy. That wouldn’t be frustrating to understand at all. “Well, at least he can understand us.”

He followed Thor, ignoring how Alessa kept pushing anyone who stopped to stare for longer than a second, continually fidgeting with his hands even as Thor laid Tony down and scanned him.

“Tell me what unstable means in this case. I understand our anatomy. I might be able to help.”

“And tell me who might know about these.” Alessa waved the wares gently in the air. “I can move around faster than any of you.” She probably wouldn’t be the most gentle interrogator, but if someone was within acceptable range of her body, she could find them, and she could find them quickly.

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"My mother or my brother," Thor said stoically, "would have been knowledgeable about those objects. There are others, I will have Heimdall seek them out." Thor didn't wait for acknowledgement, he just left, striding from the chambers as Tony babbled on about something his tongue was almost too thick to pronounce.

That left Bruce with the healer once Alessa had gone off to follow Thor or perhaps seek someone herself. The woman looked uncertain. "He is both suffering from excess heat and cold. It is likely that he is seeing inverted colors--" And at that, Tony nodded, trying to turn over. "His speech is backwards."

In otherwords, Bruce, whatever is affecting Tony is neurological.

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His brother or his mother?

Well, Alessa could work with that.

She picked up the pieces again, the ball changing to show ‘Odin’ wherever he was, and marched out of the room. Bruce assumed she was following Thor and instead concentrated on Tony. “So what’s happening is in his brain.”

He was in doctor mode now. He adjusted his glasses, looking around at all the equipment he couldn’t hope to figure out without a few years to sit down with them. “Can you give me an image of his brain?”

Alessa, meanwhile, was hunting down Loki. She knew exactly where he was. He left behind memory and emotion like a cat left behind fur.

Odinking, she projected her voice to him as a whisper, lilted with the slightest sarcasm when calling him by his adopted name, I need a word.

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The image of Tony's brain was nothing if not utterly disturbing. The left hemisphere was completely dark, the right firing entirely too quickly for most neurons to maintain at any level, adequate or otherwise. Tony was almost drowning in right hemisphere charges. No wonder he had trouble speaking and seeing and standing. Even lobotomy patients were that bad off.

The voice in Loki's head was unwelcome and he sneered against it, the whisper in his ear like a gnat. He took his leave of the massive golden throne and waves off his guards. He was Odin. He was strength and power and he needed no one.

Gruffer than usual, Loki saw the disquiet in their eyes. It mattered not.

Alone for a time, he turned towards a polished mirror, conjuring the image of the girl there to see while they spoke. "I am aware of Stark's condition if you must know." And he grinned that Cheshire Cat smile.

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Well… that wasn’t good.

Bruce took a deep breath and started asking the healers for help gathering materials for what neurological tests he knew how to administer. Neurology was not his area of expertise, but what could he do but try?

He wasn’t losing Tony. Not yet.

Alessa, for her part, did not like the way Loki was smiling at her.

The moment she could see him, the ball she held with her mind shifted again to the image of the woman over the desk.

“Thor said that it was caused by something in a store we went to. He said that his mother or brother could have identified it.” She narrowed her eyes at him suspiciously. Did he have something to do with it? “Can you?”

The amulet and the ball floated over her head.

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"I'm not sure you would understand such things," Loki said, the green flashing behind the uncovered eye. "I owe a debt. I've since paid a debt. He will not die, if that is what you fear."

Loki owed both Stark and that monster. He'd seen the two interact, seen their futile attempts at closeness. He could not openly hurt the monster but he could hurt the mortal.

How? Well, that had been up to Tony Stark himself with whatever device he had chosen to touch.

"Though he may be...changed."

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Alessa’s face became still, her expression as neutral as a doll’s. It was impossible to tell by her face alone whether she was angry, surprised, bored, anything.

“I owe a debt as well.” Her voice was similarly calm, lacking in any kind of inflection. “Fix this now.”

Or so help her, she would unleash fury that would make the Order proud.

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Would she be able to, no longer on Earth? Could her minions reach her? Her powers were still formidable, but only because they were tied to her. And Loki knew ways around that. He'd been in a cell that nullified much of his abilities for two years.

He was rash. And too young. And not fit for many things. And yet, he still insisted on playing games he could not hope to win.

"And to whom to you owe a debt? To those men? For what reason? They are using you as they use each other. It is their way."

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"Of course they're using me. Do you think I'm stupid?"

The room was getting warm, but her face was just as impassive as always.

"Stark wants me because I won't leave. He wants me to prove that he can be a father, that he can be better than his was, but what he doesn't understand is that fathering me is incomparable to what fathering him was. He thinks he can relate to me and my pain, when in reality, he doesn't have any idea what it was like. What it's still like. Because as bitter as he is, his father always loved him, and always had his best interests at heart, even if Tony never understood that. Even if you never understand that for yourself."

Despite the subject matter, she sounded like she was talking over tea.

"Banner uses me to fulfill a fantasy of fatherhood he clung to ever since he was young so that he could prove he wasn't the monster that his father made him out to be. The monster everyone makes him out to be, now. He likes me because I understand what it is like to be afraid of people who are supposed to protect you, and he has a delusion that he can someday fix everything that is wrong with me the way he could never fix himself. He's wrong. I will always be violent and mean and just as much as a monster as he is afraid he is. To the both of them, I am a project. A project that they will fix and make anew, the way they can't fix anything else in their lives."

Her eyes sharpened and she crossed her arms. "I know all this, and I will happily be their project, because they are the reasons I saw the sun again. I owe them a debt for that, no matter what their reasons were." The temperature was rising. "I repeat: fix this. Now."

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There was no eye rolling from Loki, just a small sigh. "And you don't mind being used because they let you see the sun?" Okay, sure, now he was going to roll his eyes. It couldn't be helped. Alessa didn't intimidate him, though perhaps she should. He was all powerful here, or at least powerful enough to contain one little girl.

Likely.

His head turned ever so slightly as he watched her emotionless face, greeting it with a smile of her own. Her temperature however...that was uncomfortable. The room was becoming steadily too warm for him. The Jotun blood running through his veins left him swallowing thickly.

"I am afraid that I can not. Your precious Stark brought this upon himself and I am not capable of righting any damage he may have caused himself. It was his choice to meddle with what he knew not the properties of. He will suffer for that, not for anything I have done."

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"Try going four times your lifetime without it. Then say you wouldn't do the same as me."

She shrugged, but now the room was definitely hot. Enough to make a human sweat.

"Then I am afraid I have to take reparations, Odinking. And I will be just as capable of reversing it as you are."

She knew exactly what she was going to do, and no one involved would enjoy it. But she is a lady of the Order, and the Order always gets its pound of flesh.

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"Now, now, now. I know you are not threatening this realm," Loki said carefully, unimpressed by her threats and rendered extremely uncomfortable by the rising heat. "I will have you and your parents seized if you do not return the temperature to it's proper levels."

Loki wasn't bluffing. A word from him could make Alessa parentless...well. No, that wasn't true. He could rob her of Stark, but not Banner. The monster would always be, wouldn't he?

Perhaps it would be interesting to try that out.

"Take your fathers and the body I allowed our healers to renew and go. Now."

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"And then I will tell everyone who their beloved king is. Do you think people haven't noticed that Odin seems just a little off? Don't you think that many of them have tried to explain it away as his deep grief for his wife and son, but still, in the back of their heads, they wonder? Do you think everyone believes that Loki Silvertongue, famed for his tricks and illusions and magic, really died at the hands of the Dark Elves?"

Alessa wasn't bluffing either. She was ready to drop that hammer. She was ready to carve it into every surface of Asgard before stealing their children because their king dared to threaten the caretakers of the incubator of Ragnarok.

"I can destroy you. I can destroy the people of Asgard. You are ready to throw your people away over a petty grudge against some mortal men?"

Her lips curled up in her first expression. One of complete disgust.

"If you are, then the real Odin was right. You were never cut out to be king."

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"I never wanted the throne!" Loki shouted, angry, hostile, everything Odin always saw in him, part of his blood that he could not contain. Finding out that he was the very monster mothers told their children about at night had broken him into little pieces.

He was not as strong as Thor was. He never would be.

Even now, this had all been for revenge, not to rule. Ruling... He was terrible at it. It was boring. He couldn't help but find the plight of the kingdom anything but worthy of his time and his effort. "I simply did not want him to be king. He would be a worse ruler than I. But go on. Tell them. I died in Thor's arms. From what he has told me, you are violent and unreasonable. No one would believe you."

The green left his singular blue eye.

"Go now."

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Her eyes stayed narrow. “Fine.”

Further posturing would do nothing. Action would.

She vanished, the trinkets she was holding dropping on the ground.

Alessa assumed that Tony and Bruce would disapprove of her cursing all of Asgard, so she would at least try to do something other than that. She could localize her ruining to just Loki. But if no one listened to her? Well, they deserved what they would get, at least in her mind.

She came from the same culture that shrugged its shoulders at the idea of an entire town being punished for one man not killing his son. She wasn’t one to worry about collateral damage.

She reappeared in the healing room, and Bruce, still running tests, didn’t even flinch. He was getting used to her popping in and out. “Please tell me you found something out.”

“Well, I found out he won’t die.”

Bruce let out a soft sigh of relief. “But?”

“But we really should talk to Thor. Has he come back yet?”

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thunderboltsandlightning

Not dying was good, but Tony didn't really want to live like this. He couldn't think, sort of like how he was on alcohol, but instead of a pleasant deadening of the constant stream of consciousness and a million ideas that could never all be written down, he felt like he was swimming in thick, white haze.

What was worse, however, was that he felt like he might be forgetting things. Banner...what was his first name? And Ashy...she looked worried when she came back, but he was pretty sure he was putting that emotion on her because her face looked so blank. Was that normal? Projecting like that--

He closed his eyes to clear his head.

As if on cue of hearing his name called, Thor did indeed return with a willowy young man in tow. He insisted, and kept on insisting, that he'd shut up his master's shop for the afternoon. His master was no where to be found, however.

"I am... I am new. I only started my apprenticeship yesterday," the boy said as he followed Thor into the healer's.

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Bruce found himself pausing briefly in his tests to take Tony’s hand, running his thumb over his knuckles. Alessa floated over Tony, coming down in front of the lanky young man and holding out her hands. “Do you recognize this?”

She made a perfect projected model of the amulet between her hands.

“I was just told that it was something he touched that did this. This is what he touched.”

“You were told?” Bruce looked down at her with a furrowed brow. “Who told you?”

“I’m going to need to talk to you and Thor about that in a second,” she said, her voice so flat that Bruce couldn’t help but shiver. It reminded him of the first time they met, when she told him there were rules to obey and consequences for breaking them.

He let go of Tony’s hand reluctantly and went back to his testing. He wished he knew more about neurology.

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thunderboltsandlightning

After the initial nod of the head to indicate that he was well aware that he had been stupid and that the item he had been messing with was indeed the one Alessa replicated visually for them, he let his eyes close again. To hold them open for too long made him feel dizzy and panicking about that would solve nothing other than to work him up. He didn't need to have reduced brain functions and be in full blown freak out mode too.

Besides, Thor was getting no where with the small apprentice he had brought with him to the healer's pavilion. The young Asgardian stood back when the Thunderer turned his eyes towards Alessa at the sound of his name.

"What is it you would speak to me of?" Gruff and angry, he had trouble pushing off the malice at the moment, though his restraint was far better than Alessa's.

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