Who: Louis (Narrative) What: How to get down from a skyscraper, or, Louis has some problems on his hands. Where: Downtown Manhattan (Marvel Door) When: Immediately following his forum post, and leading immediately into meeting Anton at the warehouse. Warnings/Rating: None.
Louis had gone to the hotel with the assistance of a compulsion that dragged him from bed in the middle of the night. Everything about it had felt wrong - the force of it, like there were hooks in his sides, Loki’s silence, the dark, shuttered eyes of the hotel itself.
Then he had gone through the door.
The feeling was like a weight settling on his shoulders, like flickering from cell to cell and setting matter on fire. Everything was deeper, darker, the world bending in his sight.
Something was wrong.
He stayed very, very still, because if he didn't, he would surely fall, and clung on for his life.
Louis was in New York, atop a building. It was night, and the air was cold, and he vaguely recalled Loki being here the last time he was called through the door. Stark Tower was only a short distance away, stretching even taller into the sky than the roof on which he was now trapped.
He stood on one of the scalloped architectural steps leading to the building's antenna, nearly at the tip, behind a large gargoyle. Leaning forward just a short way, his vision tipped and pitched as the street below came into view. It looked like miles to the ground. He leaned back quickly and shut his eyes, pressing against the wall, hand wrapped tight around the corner of the building.
Terror coursed through him, and his mind moved faster than he could mark it, bouncing back and forth from point to point. The strangeness was pervasive - the world that he had seen stretched out below, his thoughts, his very body felt wrong. He was through the door, and he wasn’t normal. Nothing was the same. Every breath of wind felt connected to a wider pattern that had been felt a million times before.
And under the surface, the crackling snap of energies with no name, the well-practiced ease with which words he had never heard sprang to his lips, the potential in the air around him. The stars above, hundreds mapped as easily as if there weren't a billion of them beyond counting to mingle in. Everything was different, and nothing was right, but it was all so familiar, and it encroached like a black tide.
Louis had never had power in his life. He had joined the police force in part to feel as if he did have some, as if he could affect the lives of others, and be of some significant use. That feeling was to this as this planet was to its sun, or a million other planets he could now name were to the massive stars that they belonged to. At the tips of his fingers, under his tongue. In his bones, waiting, slumbering, but twitching to be used. He didn’t know why he was here, or why this had happened, but he knew this power, though it ought to be Loki’s, belonged to him, and that he was as Loki had been, down to the very elements that made him up.
He hunched a little closer to himself, eyes still shut tight. He felt as if his mind was splitting at the seams, bursting at the edges where knowledge and power that wasn't his own poured in. He tried to think only of his own breathing.
The journal in his lap, a sleek tablet, made a soft sound. He looked down, and read the address left for him by Anton. If Louis being here meant he was somehow himself yet Loki, with all that Loki was in his possession but his name, that meant Anton was Bruce Banner, in his own way. And he would be able to protect himself. Whatever happened to Louis, whatever the sinuous comfort of giving in and letting go of fear might make him, Anton would be safe.
Louis stood, very carefully, up on the gargoyle. He tucked the journal into his pocket, took a breath, and tried not to be sick, looking down at the ground. He could see scarlet taillights and headlights moving in the dark. He could see the buildings growing up around him like cement trees, and he could feel his fear begin, slowly, to ebb. That seemed, distantly, very bad.
He took a step forward, sliding, until his right foot was between the gargoyle’s ears. Then, he took a breath, and reached down, and produced a thread of power, as simply as turning a key in a well-oiled lock. He did not run it - it ran him. Loki spoke at last in his mind, snapping something about allowing fear of his own potential to scare him like a child in the dark, but the charged path was already firing out ahead of him, and, in the air between the gargoyle and the ground, a dark mass expanded and widened, sizzling, bending light sickly at its edges.
The power was still connected to him, and, like a magnet, pulled him forward. He almost didn’t realize what he was doing as he stepped off the edge of the gargoyle into thin air and plummeted down. Only then did fear return, as he spun and watched the gargoyle pull away from him, flipped upside down in the fall. He had just enough time to begin to shout before he dropped straight through the portal head-first. It snapped closed behind him, and then the air was whipped through his lungs as he fell and was dragged and yet was still, and space moved around him like a conveyor at blistering speeds in a place that was nowhere, and he moved through space, and there was no air to scream with, just frigid cold that left blue crescents at his fingertips, and then he was stumbling, tripping, breathlessly making a sound of guttural dismay, as he was ignominiously thrown out of the other side of the portal which had just appeared in Banner’s warehouse.