Manipulation of Memories and Minds // (Loki x Reader)

Chapter XXIII: Adapting To Abnormous Changes

Life could change drastically in just one year.

One entire year, in which you were constantly trying to finally adapt to the new schedule the head of the allegedly very secret organization itself, Director Fury, had burdened you with the moment you had arrived back on Earth. A schedule he had forced into your prior routine, in which your main focus had merely consisted of surviving school—now you supposedly also had to survive agents and spies. In conclusion; you were stressed to an extent to which you questioned whether you would ever be able to graduate at all.

Yet despite all these new adjustments on Fury's behalf, the worst of your apparent anxiety actually had nothing to do with him. Not so far, at least.

The fact that you had been appointed as an Avenger had been kept a secret for now and was only open information for S.H.I.E.L.D and the Avengers themselves. Still, they deemed it necessary for you to receive proper training, and you really didn't have it in you to object—after all it was mostly training in self-defense, therefore something that could very much be of use at any given time. The person appointed to teaching you the mythical ways of how to defend yourself—how to disarm someone with guns pointed to your head, how to free yourself from a chokehold, how to take someone out in just a few steps as well as many more techniques—was none other than Agent Richards, who had also offered you to call him Evan almost immediately on meeting him for the second time.
He was surprisingly strong—nothing you could have possibly gathered from his rather lanky statue and constant wearing of rather cliche, black suits—as well as truly determined and thorough in his training, for your muscles hadn't stopped aching once since you had begun this entire ordeal.

You couldn't even quite say that you were getting this entire education for free, seeing as how you repaid this debt by being some sort of Agent after all. Oftentimes Fury's people would ask you more about your abilities, and once you had even been brought in to extract information from an enemy agent.
That was an experience you would not even in your dreams declare anywhere near pleasant, not endurable or anything of the sort—not even if you had been clubbed in the head and been cursed to only talk utter rubbish—for the horrors you had endured purely through seeing what some people were capable of merely imagining could not be eradicated by any force in the world.

It was simply horrendous, you admitted to yourself, horrendous how deep down into the rabbit hole some people could throw themselves; their morals shredded to bits by the world's best shredder, pieces afterwards having been blasted with some of the most impressive new technological invention crafted by Tony Stark himself, to not let a single fragment of common sense remain intact.
Maybe you should have hoped they'd kill themselves with their little implanted bombs they liked to hide in their teeth before you even had the chance to look into their minds, no matter how evil this might have sounded to anyone but you.

Yes, all of this was indeed reason to panic enough, sending every normal person spiraling straight down into hell, yet it wasn't what truly made your daily life feel like a living hell. No, to blame was the constant talk about what had happened back in New York. Back during the 'Tragedy of New York' as people liked to call it.
They knew you had been there and they were aware you had been injured in the process—now they wanted every single little itty bitty detail of what had happened and where and how, and who you met and if you met anyone at all and more questions, at which point you blatantly decided to tune out every single time, because you literally just couldn't take it any longer.
So much talking about a time you wanted to forget, desperately tried to forget in your grief and mourning of the friends you had lost, but you just couldn't bring yourself to let go of the memories. Couldn't also, because people apparently were incapable to last a day without bringing it right back up to the surface. And with each time and each talk of the past, the same hollow feeling threatened to engulf you once more, the pure longing for something supposed to make you whole, and with each time you couldn't help but wonder how he was faring, throwing your entire process of coping with the situation directly overboard.