Drift (Loki x Reader)

I. Migraines

The universe was around you.

It was the feeling of feeling and not feeling, told and not told, that scared you the most. The way that your mind seemed in two places at once, inside your skull and viewing reality through your eyes, but also everywhere at once, in the plants in Africa, a chattering street in some remote corner of Asia, or perhaps it was a planet in a distant galaxy. It was often hard to tell, you had come to realise. Most civilisations on other worlds resembled that of what you had known for an eternity on Earth, bustling figures that walked on two legs, arguing about the weather, politics, religion and whatever else intelligent life could come up with.

You could feel a migraine ripping apart the back of your skull, the kind of migraine that came whenever you thought of these things, the energy, the blast, the beam of light that had threatened to rip apart the world and instead ripped apart your mind, scattering you into a thousand places at once. You didn't like these migraines, that's what you called them anyway. There was no prescription medication that could fix these sort of soul-splitting pains. There wasn't even a proper word in all of human or alien language that could accurately reflect and describe the sort of pain that you felt whenever your mind decided to wander, whenever you tapped into the split minds that composed your consciousness. Migraine was the best way you could normalize the pain, to deal with it in any sort of sane manner.

In a way, it was a sort of migraine. Every time you had an 'episode' as Banner liked to put it, you called him Banner anyway even though he insisted that 'father' would have been a more appropriate title, the pain resembled that of a migraine, though only a thousand times worse. You didn't like the term 'episode' as a means of referring to your migraines. An episode was like something you watched on television, an instrument of fiction that many watched for entertainment. The migraines were certainly anything from entertaining.

It wasn't like a television show, Banner assured you every time you expressed your disdain for the term. An episode was a word that could have many meanings and the definition that he was using related to the medical terminology in which a medical condition often presented its symptoms for a brief period of time and then went away.

No, you were firm that your migraines were not episodes. Banner had his episodes, whenever he would get a fit of anger and rip apart half of New York City. He didn't like it when you mentioned that particular detail, couldn't we put that behind us, he often asked? He was much better at controlling himself.

Control.

Banner could control his episodes, or at least by control, he knew when they were coming whenever his blood pressure spiked dramatically (in latent terms, whenever he got angry). But your episodes, your migraines, were different. No, they weren't the episodes that Banner got, you had not inherited any form of Banner's condition in your genome. His 'incident' happened several years following your birth. You had been born an ordinary human being on the planet Earth that was a part of a club that composed of over seven billion members (though it will probably exceed that number soon) and you were perhaps the least important figure in all of human history.

You couldn't control your migraines. You wished you could because then you wouldn't have them at all. Sometimes you would be sitting down and the pain would come, the feeling of your mind ripping apart, existing in not one or two, but a million different places at once. If this is what it felt like to be the universe, to exist in every permeable space of matter, to feel every heartbeat and every breath of the living and deceased from billions of years ago, to see empires that had lived, would live and currently do live all at once in the same time, then that was how your migraines felt.

You were vaguely aware of other voices around you. They may have been Banner's, or they could have been voices from some conversation halfway across the Milky Way Galaxy. There were some many voices, so many thoughts, so many souls and wants and desires all at the same time. If any of them, Stark, Odinson, Barton, Romanoff, or Banner were attempting to somehow reach you, it was futile. Part of your mind remained tethered to your vessel on the blue-green planet, to keep the heart and lungs functioning, but your consciousness, what made you, you, had expanded and faded into a larger background and was currently having a joy ride at the speed of light.