🖤BUD🖤

Chapter 1

I get out and help Aunt Amalia with her bags. "hey gorgeous!" She throws her bag in and hugs me tightly. "How have you been? Any boys since everything went back to normal?" she stares at me as we get in the car. "What's been doing on with you, Al? Why do you look so gray?"

"The saying is; why do you look so blue, Amalia." I sigh. "Just everything that happened recently. Did dad ever talk about what happened that day New York was attacked?"

"No, I just remember seeing all the destruction and the evacuation warnings on the news. I tried coming down but Nate didn't want me to leave, he said that you would need me when it was all over." I tightened my grip on the steering wheel and stayed quiet for a moment. Aunt Amalia put a hand on my shoulder. "Honey, come on, you  can tell me. Hey, I'm the cool one, remember you can tell me anything."

Bit my cheek. "That guy, Loki, he can control minds and do all sorts of things... and he played his trick on me, made me his puppet. he told me to start a fight with dad and I wasn't able to stop until he was dead. I-I tried fighting it, I really did. I even begged for him not to make me do this." I felt tears rolling down my face as the images of me taking aim at dad's Arc Reactor flash before me. "I had th-this ringing in my head and it was just Loki's voice echoing, getting louder and louder making sure I wasn't going to back out."

She starts tearing up. "I had no control over my body when I came to for a second I heard dad's pain behind his screams. T-there was so much blood on his face, I almost couldn't recognize him. I somehow fought his compulsion and convinced dad to kill me before I was used for killing others. If dad didn't put his suit and helmet on you would've seen how broken he was. I was almost gone when Loki stopped dad from landing the last blow."

There was silence for a few moments. "This Loki... he stopped your dad from killing you?"

I nod. "And the weirdest thing was I could see this like smoke behind dad and I went to reach for him before I blacked out and felt nothing but pain, guilt, and anguish flooding my body. I remember grabbing my chest and screaming out as loud as I could. The same thing happened when I looked at Loki as he yelled out for dad to stop, there was a smoke behind him too. I'm sure it was from being slammed to the floor and hitting my head too hard.

"Smoke? Maybe you did hit your head hard." she had a suspicious look when she said that. "While I'm staying here I can help you, has Tony talked about you getting a therapist?"

"Yeah he said I could get in with the therapist office he goes to. Everything that happened that day messed him up pretty bad too. He's better at hiding it than I am."

Aunt Amalia nods a little. "I could be your therapist for free and just refer you over when I'm done with my stay. Plus it'll be a lot more fun with me than with a divorcee with more issues than their patients."

"Yeah..."

She looks at me for a moment before looking at her phone. "Look, it doesn't hurt to try, Alex." she says. "We have a month before your birthday and, if I know my brother, there's going to be a huge party. Which means a lot of people and amongst those people, the press and where there's press, there's cameras."

"Which means good impressions so they don't gossip."

"Exactly. We can start tomorrow, okay? Gives me time to catch up with your dad and for me to settle in. Is he still with Pepper?" I nod. "Good. I like her, she knows how to keep my brother in check."

***

... "Don't kill me, please." It is the faintest whisper, he probably didn't hear it. The blackness has taken most of my vision, this is it... this is the end!