Growing love and the seventh stone | Loki fanfiction

Chapter 4 - An explanation

Loki's lips tighten as he stares at the tabletop in front of us. I wait and take a sip from my tea.
"How much do you know about the Avengers and their story?", he asks.
"Probably most of it", I say. "I have watched all the movies, but it's been a while."
"Well", Loki starts and looks into his tea, "what happened is ..." He stops. "I can't. I don't want to tell you this. I can't tell some mortal about everything ..."
I try not to be offended. "You don't have to speak about every detail", I offer. "Besides, it doesn't end well for people - humans and gods - to seal like an oyster and keeping every bit of their story to themselves. It hurts." I take a deep breath. "It's okay. And if you regret this, you can just murder me later, right?", I smile halfheartedly. "I am sure you can understand why I want to know. Why I have to, for my own and your safety."
Loki breathes in. Apparently, he still doesn't like the thought of having to be protected by a mortal. But what could he do? I wait again.
"The infinity stones", he says finally. "You know them, right? Six of them, different colours, in charge for space, power, time, reality, mind and soul. After the fight against this big purple douchebag they got destroyed. But there is something that is happening right now." He looks at me. "If my information is accurate - what it is, I am pretty sure - then in the beginning, at the creation of the stones, were formed little crumbs to make them. And while the six stones were riping, something else formed, out of the crumbs of the six other stones. The seventh stone."
My eyes grow big. "Oh my gods", I whisper.
Loki's voice sounds a little dry as he continues. "The seventh stone is more inconspicuously. His purpose is to dispense the power relationships in the universe. It is the stone of emphasis." He breaks eye contact and takes a sip from his tea. "Three days ago, it was discovered. In the battle against Th- Mr. Purple, it appeared here on earth. Because here was the place where the emphasis was being restored. The Avengers found it. They thought, emphasis might be worth preserving. They put it into a little cube, much like the tesseract. You can imagine what my plan was at that moment."
I nod fascinated. "Stealing it."
"Of course", Loki says and he can't help to chuckle a bit. "The Avengers were transporting it to a base unknown to me, and I met them before the transport arrived. Here over your forest, to be exact."
Instinctively I look out the window.
"I fought them", Loki tells me. "All of them, including my brother. If you wondered why the storm is so ... alive."
"So Thor is responsible for all of this ..." I glanced through the window at another blue lightning flashing over the sky.
"Yes", Loki says. "But my mistake was ... I damaged the case of the stone and it fell out. I tried to take it and ... touched it. And in that moment, everything felt different. I felt my body in a weird way, every inch hurt, my armour was suddenly a lot more sticky and heavier, I just felt so ...", he shuffles unsettedly on the sofa, "vulnerable."
"And then you escaped to my house", I finish the story.
"After an uneven and humiliating fight, yes", he says.