🖤BUD🖤

Chapter 1

I pulled the car up to the curb, engine humming low beneath the storm in my chest. The airport breeze whipped through the open window, but I barely felt it. Just another piece of the world I'd become numb to. I spotted her near the terminal doors, bright as ever in contrast to my gray haze. Aunt Amalia. Unbothered by the weight clinging to my shoulders. I stepped out, forcing my legs to move. 

She spotted me and immediately lit up, her grin a beam of sunlight I wasn't ready to stand in.

"Hey, gorgeous!" she called out, tossing her bag into the backseat with practiced ease before wrapping her arms around me in a tight, grounding hug. The king that said, I"m here and you're not alone-even if I still felt like I was drowning. "How have you been? Any boys since everything went back to normal?" she asked with that teasing look she always wore when trying to get under my armor. We slid into the car. I watched her from the corner of my eye, her expression slowly shifted as she studied me in the rearview's reflection. "What's been going on with you, Al? Why do you look so gray?"

A humorless smile tugged at my lips. "The saying is: why do you look so blue, Amalia." I sighed, eyes fixed on the road ahead, not seeing it. "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 warning on the news. I tried coming down, but Nate didn't want me to leave Miami. He said that you would need me when it was all over." My grip on the steering wheel tightened until my knuckles turned white. The leather creaked faintly under the pressure of my hands. Silence stretched between us, heavy and choking, until she reached over and rested a hand on my shoulder. "Honey, come on, you can tell me. Hey, I'm the cool one, remember? You can tell me anything." 

Her voice broke something loose inside me. I bit my cheek hard, trying to hold it all back, but the words came out anyway, cracked and raw.

"That guy, Loki... he can control minds and do all sorts of other 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 complied or was dead. I-I tried fighting it, I really did. I even begged for him not to make me do this." Tears burned down my cheeks as the memories surged forward like a crashing tide. The cold weight of my blows to Dad. The haunting glow of the Arc Reactor in my sights. Dad's voice, terrified and pained, echoing in my ears. "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." Her hand gripped my shoulder tighter as her own eyes welled with tears, her mouth slightly open in shock. "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 on, you would've seen how broken he was. I was almost gone when Loki stopped Dad from landing the last blow."

The car was silent except for my quiet, uneven breathing and the hum of the tires against the road. Amalia didn't say anything for a few seconds. I could feel her processing it all, her body tensed like mine.

"This Loki... he stopped Tony from killing you?"

I nodded slowly. "And the weirdest thing was, I could see this... like smoke behind Dad. And when 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."