Who: Loki (narrative) What: Sometimes gods get the sniffles too. Where: Loki's rooms in a hotel downtown. When: After the outbreak. Warnings/Rating: Norse god freakouts, daddy issues.
It started with the headaches.
Headaches. Like he had sat too long with a pile of books, reading late into the night by dim magelight, the price paid by the voracious scholar. These headaches weren't usual things, which pounded in his temples and disappearing like fog in the morning. They were continual, a bar around his skull, and they worsened.
It wan't in him to seek an organic cause. No, he wasted time seeking a diagnosis of spiritual contagion, some targeted attack by a friend of the Avengers he had yet to meet, a sickness that had trembled up the line from one of the many puppets he had lately captured, corrupting their way into him through that long, thin connection. There was nothing to find. Curses, cantrips, enchantments, nothing. No sign of any tampering to his person no flicker of out of place energy.
And the headaches worsened. He didn't feel ill exactly, but he did feel out of sorts, weakened, not dying, no, his physiology wouldn't allow for it, but wrong. More wrong than the usual.
The floor of the hotel he had assumed as a residence since his escape from the charming 'Avengers' was dark and close at night, and no one ever came up the stairs to see him. He had purposefully designed it that way. When he heard footsteps on the stair, then, when he heard familiar voice echoing behind a door where no one could be there, it occurred to him that he had never looked for mortal illness. What sort of Earthly sickness could possibly corrupt an Asgardian? Ridiculous. He would accept it as signs of the madness his brother had so cheerfully and repeatedly ascribed to him before that.
The news reports came in one after another, and he found himself paying attention to the minutiae of human life he ordinarily would have cared little for. Murder, chaos, death in weeks. He didn't feel like dying, but the madness, like fits, came in waves now. He pored over every book he had on sickness, and there were a few, tucked away. He had sometimes been sick when he was very young, as one would expect from the runt of the litter. The healers had cared for him then, when he burned with fever, the tips of his fingers icing over, kissed by his mother to keep him from noticing.
The memory came unbidden, and he swept the book from the desk, wiping it away. He would not think of her, not now. There were no healers - he would find a cure of his own.
He did not know he had fallen asleep reading until the sound of someone weeping woke him, but he found no one. It kept him awake for hours, crying without end or catching a breath, until, in the early morning, it drifted away, and his headache abated a little.
Better. Yes, better. He groped for the bed and fell into it, asleep in moments. Whatever had sickened his mind, it seemed to be improving. Sleep, true sleep, would be the best healer now.
He awoke to find the Allfather standing over his bed.
Loki was on his feet in an instant, and he did not wait for idle talk. If Odin was here, then Thor would not be far behind. They would take him back to Asgard, and there would be no leniency from the man who deigned to claim he had raised his very own snake in the grass. But he would not go peacefully.
It seemed to him that Odin was trying to protest. How laughable, that the Allfather should look so afraid in that moment, so unprepared! He hurled a twist of green wildfire that caught him in the chest, carrying him over the floor and out through of the long windows to fall, screaming (screaming?) to the pavement below.
Screaming. That was all wrong. Odin was a soldier, and would face his end with stoicism and brutal force returned back on him. He hadn't even tried to move clear of the blast.
Loki stepped up to the window and looked down. The man lying on the sidewalk surrounded by shattered glass was...was no one, was an old man, but dressed in shabby Midgardian clothes, now charred. He was lying in a pool of his own blood surrounded by a gathering crowd. Who stared up at the window he had fallen from.
He stared back, pale and silent. He needed his mind to work, to have a plan, to find a method of escape before they inevitably sent someone here to find him, but his mind was an empty slate. He hated, hated when Thor was ever right. But he had been sure. And now, mad. Mad after all.