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From Odin’s throne Loki can scan the nine realms with ease. Thor rather stands stands out—golden warrior that he is.
Loki doesn’t seek him out.
Really.
Not often, anyway.
(Liar).
He watches (not at all gleefully) when Jane chases him out of her lab so she can concentrate.
He watches (definitely gleefully) Thor’s momentary dismay as the captain pretends he cannot lift Mjolnir.
He watches when Stark’s creation (quite literally) crashes the party.
He seethes when the witch invades Thor’s mind (no one gets to torment him but Loki, doesn’t she know that?).
He holds his breath when Thor submits himself to the Norns’ well (What do they tell him?).
He is so focused on his not-brother that he misses entirely what Stark has concocted in his lab until Thor confronts him suffusing the casket in an explosion of lightning, and bringing Stark’s creation to life. The color blanches from Loki’s face as he watches, paralyzed, sweating, his stomach filled with lead that threatens to heave itself over the throne room floor. The mind stone rests in its forehead, in plain view, marking it, marking Midgard, marking Thor as targets for Thanos’s rapacity more clearly than any comm beacon they might have sent out into the empty universe.
However short his relative freedom (“freedom”—ha! trapped here under the lumbering illusion of Odin’s girth), it is now drastically truncated. And in his frustration he turns to the only confidant he has, shouting at Odin as he lies silently in his enormous bed.
“Do you see the stupidity of your golden son? One vision quest and he believes he understands the forces that pull apart the mutltiverse. He couldn’t even sit still for the gilded over history lessons out tutors fed to us as children, doesn’t understand the most basic principles of magical theory!” Loki grabs onto the mantlepiece as though to hold himself up.
“An infinity stone!” It would be hard for Loki to be more incredulous. “Thor doesn’t even know what it is—he can’t possibly. You know—even though you never spoke of such things—Norns forbid you give your heir forewarning of the threats posed by those treasures stowed away in your vaults. Surely you can feel them even in your sleep!”
Loki resumes his pacing. “Even stowed away and unused, their power sings out to all who know their song. And now they’ve placed it in the forehead of that construct,” Loki practically spits out the word, “the mind stone thrums with new energy— Yggdrasil fairly hums with it.”
He pauses here, his hand rubbing at the healing scar on his chest, his voice quieter. “Did you not see what it was when I arrived on that backwater planet? Where was your vaunted wisdom then, you old con man—too preoccupied with bringing your wayward pet back home? Too worried about hiding away your mistake to investigate? Too repulsed to ask questions of your little monster?”
Loki is shaking now, and he scratches at the inside of his forearms trying to ground himself with the pain.
“I doubled the shielding on the vaults, but what good will that do when Thor has just sent out this broadcast to the stars?”
Finally he sits, rakes his fingers through his hair.
“I wish I could trust you.”