Anthony Edward Stark

"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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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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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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“We should really by alone for that conversation.”

Somehow, she doubted the healers and random Asgardians would react well to the news that the crazy prince they had arrested years ago was actually now their crazy king.

“You remember what you told us about that doomsday prophecy? The part you said would never happen under your watch?” The usurper on the throne part?

Bruce’s hands froze in his work. His throat became dry.

He did not like the implications of that statement.

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Thor just looked confused. "There are many such prophecies," the former prince contended as he motioned for the pair to follow him. "If they have not yet removed my privileged to my chambers, we may find a place to speak there. Do you believe Stark to be part of it now?" That was unsettling even for Thor. To have so many of Midgard responsible for possibly bringing about Ragnarok seemed inevitable, however.

He had done his best to read the old prophecies but giving up his right to the throne and accepting banishment had limited his resources intensely.

It was not smart for a warrior to limit himself. Love, however, even the momentary love of a mortal, had been worth it at the time. It was easier to take the warrior out of Asgard than the warrior out of Thor. Jane, it seemed, would end up suffering no matter what.

The chambers were as Thor had left them, though being in the palace, the potential for ears listening in had grown. Was Loki watching them? It was difficult to predict the Trickster.

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“No, that’s not it.”

Bruce was reluctant to leave Tony, but after assurances from the healers, he followed Alessa and Thor. Even all the gorgeous books and knowledge couldn’t keep him from clasping his hands and rubbing his thumb against his knuckles. “Then what is it?”

Alessa looked up at the chambers, at the books and beauty, and raised her hands. Loki isn’t the only one with magic, and his is of frost giants. Heat crept into the room, darkening the light and targeting magic that didn’t belong there, working to melt anything a frost giant might have put there recently, although she didn’t consider warding it from Heimdall, who she knew nothing about. “When Thor told us about Ragnarok, he said that a sign was there being a usurper on the throne of Asgard. He said that he knew for a fact that that wasn’t the case for now. He was wrong. On a related note, your brother is alive and he is the one who cursed Tony.”

Bruce’s jaw clenched. He closed his eyes. He took a deep breath.

He was angry.

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"Impossible." Thor was visibly disturbed as he stared at Alessa, and a moment later, angry with her. "Do not taunt me. My brother is dead. He died in my arms. You have little right to make such accusations! I am sorry Stark has been injured and we will find a way to rectify this."

He could not believe, not for a second, that his father had been compromised. Again. Or that Loki would choose to fake his death.

Thor, like a wounded bear, let his anger and rage out in a single vocalization, his fingers gripping the side of a beautifully wrought dresser. "Your lies will not be tolerated!" And yet, he knew it his heart, this was truth.

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Bruce tensed, waiting for an explosion, but none came. Instead of taking offense, as he expected her to, Alessa just stared up at Thor with a neutral expression.

“I’m a lot of things. I’m mean and bitter and angry. But I’m not a liar.”

It was true, after all. Lies only left behind superficial hurt. Truth was what cut the deepest. Truth was the only thing Alessa dealt with.

“He made a deal with me not to say anything if he let us pass in and out. But he cursed Tony, so I’m not going to keep to that.”

“When did you figure this out?” Bruce asked, taking long, deep breaths and struggling to remain calm.

“As soon as we got into the palace the first time.”

“And you didn’t TELL US?” Bruce punched the wall, and for a brief moment, green flashed around his pupils, before he immediately withdrew, walking to the other side of the room and turning his back to them both. He breathed. Focused on reining everything in, and not on the horrible pit of rage and self-loathing that had suddenly appeared in his stomach. For a heart-sinking moment, he had wanted to hit her. Hit her for letting them all walk into the lion’s den.

His disgust and horror at himself helped him stop focusing on how angry he was.

Alessa stared at his back, her expression completely neutral. “His lies are keeping the planet stable.” She looked up at Thor. “But they won’t for long. He’s letting grudges get ahead of the good of Asgard. People will die if he stays on the throne.”

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It was rather typical of Thor to decide to up and leave because he thought he knew best, he thought he had it all figured out and he thought he could handle it on his own. Whatever was going on with Alessa, that was a scenario that had nothing at all to do with him for the moment.

Loki-as-Odin? That was a far more pressing concern of his, something he could wrap his head around at least.

While Thor was rampaging, Bruce and Alessa still had a very important member of their family ailing. What, exactly, were they to do with that? Thor couldn't help with a cure to a curse. And Tony...Tony could not live the way he was.

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Well, Thor was off to possibly kill his brother. If he was successful, Alessa would have dealt with her vengeful duties and she could be content with not having to curse the shit out of Asgard.

But Tony wasn't so easy to fix.

After Thor stormed out, Alessa approached Bruce quietly, her expression still neutral. "I know what you wanted to do."

He tensed up, curling in on himself and covering his face with his hands.

"You don't need to feel so guilty about it. I understand." She began to back away again. "Tony needs us."

Bruce took a deep breath, then scrubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands before crossing his arms and nodding.

As soon as they got back to the healer's room, Alessa leaned over Tony and Bruce shoved all his feelings into a little black box while he started talking to healers.

"We found out that this is a curse. We don't have curses like this on Earth, so what do you usually do to fix those?" he asked.

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