A Taste of Vengeance

“How did you do that, you bastard?” I snarled, throwing the door open to Loki’s containment. I’d like to say that he was surprised, but I don’t think he was, sitting on the floor with a smirk on his face, his green eyes glittering. “Answer me!”
“My, my,” he remarked, looking up at me from his tranquil position. “You do have a far greater temper than I could have imagined. Are you going to shoot me again, Agent Bane? I had thought us quite past this stage in our friendship.”

I snarled at him and threw the gun at him full force. He didn’t seem to expect it, for it hit him in the head just as he moved, blurring with speed. His temper took over his face for a moment, contorting his features into a deadly, terrifying snarl. But he seemed to calm and his face smooth to a placid marble before he smiled infuriatingly at me again.

“What did you do to the guards, Agent Bane?” he asked me, lacing his hands behind his back, walking in a circle. I suddenly felt that coming in here was not the right decision. His feline-like gait was too measured, to familiar. I realized that it was how a hunter walks when it has its prey surrounded. “Did you kill them, as you have killed so many?”
He was playing a game with me. I stalked opposite of him. “To your unfortunates, I did not. A simple nudge of the mind is all it takes, but I assume you already know that. Please entreat me, how did one such as yourself come to learn so much about how minds work?”
He grinned. He liked the way this was going. “Simple midgardians such as yourself know so little of the universe and of its workings. Even some asgardians, such as my dull brother, do not realize that the mind is fickle, and delicate. It isn’t difficult, to let my thoughts ring extra loudly into thin air when I know you’re listening, Agent Bane. Did I scare you, then? Did I worry you, that I had gotten inside of your head?”
“I would know if you had been inside of my head,” I lied, stopping to face him as he stopped to face me.
“Would you?”
“Yes. If you had, you’d be dead.”
“Do you think so?”
“I know so.”

Loki smiled and we stood there for a while, looking at one another. My anger had faded and I was in business mode. I couldn’t leave this chamber without looking like a scared fool and giving him the upper hand, but I couldn’t stay here either. Either way, I knew that Fury was probably standing in the control room, watching me as we speak. I needed to fix the mistake I had just made.

“You know,” I purred at him, changing my tone entirely. “You are not exactly what I expected, for a villain.”
He spread his hands out wide. “If you do not mind, do enlighten me.”
“You see,” I said, leaning against the glass, everything about my posture was casual. “Every… bad guy, if you will, that I had come across are not particularly charming nor do they resemble you in any way, shape, or form. You were right about one thing in Germany: there are no men like you. You, who are a God, even look to be above men. There is an air about you that breathes elegance and superiority.”
“Are you trying to seduce me, Agent Bane?” he asked, tone amused.
“If I were trying to seduce you, it would not be through compliments or pleasantries, Loki Laufeyson. You do not strike me as the type of being to be swayed by compliments or appearances. No, if I were trying to seduce it, I would seduce you with what you most desire, with what you most intimately crave.”

I approached him carefully but with confidence. To my slight surprise, he did seem quiet interested in what I was saying now. Whether it was because he genuinely wanted to know what I was going on about, or because he thought I was a silly mortal who was just entertainment, I didn’t know. Nor did I care.

I lifted my gun with my mind as I stood face to face with Loki. His eyes followed it, not fearfully, but still with inquisition. The gun floated between our faces, the light glinting off it’s cold, polished metal. It was a weapon, and though it was not the best of weapons, it still meant power.

“You think I most crave weaponry to control?” he tsked and turned his back on me. “What I most crave, silly girl, is power and to show your pathetic race what real power is. You think you know so much about ruling and how to wield what you are given, but you are so corrupt and volatile in your misunderstanding. You think freedom is power, but it is not; subjection is power. Giving up freewill is power, because it frees you in the most unimaginable ways, and if you do not have freedom to lose, you can not be defeated.”

I pursed my lips. “You must dream of it every night.” I crept towards the entrance, but paced back again, just not quite as far away from the door as before. Each back and forth pace I made, I made it closer to the door. “You must love the idea of using the tessract to rule, to make all creatures and universes kneel to your glory. What an image. I can truly say I see the beauty in it all. You, standing in your gold, glinting armor and your dung beetle cap, your green cape fluttering in the dark wind… you will be most pleased when you get the arch reactor and power the tesseract won’t you?”

Loki’s eyes flashed with a mad anger that I had never seen, but I was already moving and on the other side of the glass as he slammed his fist into the glass, causing it to shift. At the movement he moved away rapidly, not wanting to send himself thousands of feet down. There was so much wrath in his posture that I thought he would self-destruct any moment.

Loki had given himself up talking about power without even realizing it. The power that he spoke of was not the arch reactor by any means, but by getting him to talk, he had given me the idea of his plans without so much as a blip. I myself had expected I would have to make him talk far longer than that to say something that would hint at his plans, but I was far better than I thought I was.

“Does it pain you, to know that you’ve given that up without so much as me touching your mind?” I asked him, face level with the glass. My breath coated the glass as I stared at him with hatred. “Reach out to me again, Sith Lord, and I’ll obliterate your fucking mind.”
Although I knew that my Star Wars joke was completely wasted on the God, for he had no idea what I was alluding too, I felt a sense of pride. When people say they feel their chest puff up in self-admiration, they weren’t wrong. I smiled as I made my way to the control room, hearing Fury’s approval in his mind far before I got there.
But as I rounded a corner and entered the room, I was struck with the horrible feeling that Steve was going to hate me.