And the humans, what can they do but burn?

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Burning wreckage lay strewn in the streets. The twisted metal of far-flung cars. The shelled remains of buildings brought to their knees, just as He had wished to see their human inhabitants - on their knees and bowed in submission.

In the end, you will always kneel...

Here and there, a broken body; some of Chitauri, most of human. Here and there, the shrill screams of the injured, the pleading sobs of the dying. Pleading for life. Pleading for an end to come faster than the slow death of the trapped and the slowly suffocating. Asphyxiating in the dust of shattered buildings, in the ash of those obliterated.

Loki gazed over his near-won city as he whipped through broken streets upon the Chitauri chariot. The stench of burning flesh reached his nostrils with its taint. Though he barely noticed. He looked to the carnage around him, but did not see. He heard the screams of the injured, but did not listen. Instead, he cast his eyes over the destruction his army was leaving in its wake, and smiled wide. His lips pulled back and eyes bright with a righteous gleam.

You lie and kill in the service of liars and killers.

Thor had thought to sway him, by turning his face to the cityscape and forcing him to witness the chaos as it rained from the sky and plunged the streets into ruin. As his wild eyes searched his once-brother's face, Loki had felt a flicker of doubt. A shadow of regret. The echo of who he had once been rallied in despair against who he had become and he had gaped wordless and stuttering at the horror of his own doing.

It wasn't enough. Wasn't enough to turn back that which had already become an unstoppable force. A dark and unshakable purpose. It was bigger than him now. Bigger than all of them.

"It's too late.." The words rose like bile in his mouth. He cast his eyes to Thor's imploring face, and wondered for one small sane moment, how they'd ever come to this. How? When all he had once wanted, was recognition?

You lack conviction.

The memory of those mortal-spoken words propelled him forward.

Conviction. It was all he had left. All he could cling to as he drove the small throwing knife into his once-brother's side.

The God of Thunder had failed for his own eyes, to truly see what lay before him. This world had changed in a millennia. These mewling miserable humans had risen, had placed themselves in glittering towers as if they too were Gods. As if they had the right. They covered the earth like blistering sores. Festering the land with their slow-creeping rot. And they would seek now to press out into the universe. To cleave a path through the cosmos in search of more planets to consume.

Could his once-brother not see these people needed to be bought under control? The world should thank him for taking them under his wing.

The Chitauri were mindless beasts, bent only on death and destruction. But for the present they were his tools, his means to an end. And that end was peace, was it not? Or perhaps domination would be the more apt term. Yes, vengeance lay at the heart of his plotting, but Thanos had shown him a greater purpose. A plan bigger than his own. When the war was done here, he would rule these foolish humans that festered the land like crawling roaches; scrambling for purchase over this dung heap they called Earth. He would bring order to them.

Show them what civility truly meant.

You pretend to be separate, to have your own code, something that makes up for the horrors. But they are a part of you, and they will never go away.

Bringing his mind back into the present, Loki noticed the Chitauri had swung his vehicle into a road that was empty of threat. A street shattered in the first wave of attack, and now silenced as the war rolled on and left ruin in its stead.

The dust of pulverized buildings smothered the air and Loki squinted through the haze as the Chitauri slowed the vehicle to gauge his bearings. Impatient to re-join the fray, Loki raised his hand to motion the warrior upwards, above the choking cloud. As the chariot rose and began to bank towards the urban battleground, a stumbling movement caught the demi-God's eye, rousing his curiosity and causing him to give the Chitauri new direction. Ignoring the creature's chatter of frustration, Loki peered through the dust cloud until the source of movement weaved its way closer.

Humans. A tight knit group of humans made their way through the ruined street, an injured one supported between them.

Eyeing them with wavering detachment, Loki wondered what drove them to try and save each other. Why, when their city fell around them and they were so barely capable of saving themselves? At what point had their humanity evolved so?

And now, through the shock of the chaos, they stopped, trembling before him. Stretching out their hands as if they could be saved. So happy to kill each other in any other circumstance. What right had they to plead for his aid? Did they not know who he was?

You're a monster!

Loki flinched as the words rose to his mind without invite. Who was he to care? He was what he was. The prophesy had been set with each terrifying bedtime tale uttered from his mother's lips. A creature of childhood nightmares as he had been told with such cold finality by his once-father.

And with the Allfather's admission of his true parentage, he had found an explanation at last for the blackness in his heart. A dark smudge he'd tried for a thousand years to repel, never realizing until then that the seething blue-black smear was but his true form, locked away inside himself. A part of him that had always kept him on the outside. Never allowing him to come close, to fit in, to walk at the side of his brother and feel himself an equal. A part of him that would never, ever go away, but only gain strength. And hate. Until that other part of him - the part which had once cared - could no longer find a place in his damned and blackened soul to remain.

And now he would fuel his own damnation by extracting vengeance upon this planet his once-brother loved so much. He would watch these humans grovel for clemency. Rolling in the muck of their own undoing. And when he was done with their brilliant display of grovelling servitude; when he had laid bare their souls and satisfied himself with the knowledge that they were all as rotten to the core as their Master... Then he would rebuild them. This sniveling race. Reshape them into a mold more suiting. He would make this world his home, whether its inhabitants willed it or not. He would make this world his home, because he had nowhere else to go.

You will all fall before me.

And then came a sound. Rising above the screams of sirens and death. A sound that carried weakness and strength in a single breath. A sound both of hope and of damnation. Loki swung his head around, wild eyes searching; seeking to find the sound and stamp out its source. Pinpointing its location amid twisted steel and wreckage, he motioned the Chitauri warrior to swing around once more. Leaping clear to the ground, he strode over broken concrete and shattered lives to reach the object that had lit his interest.

The Chitauri muttered sounds of impatience, desperate now to be back amid his fighting brethren and uneasy with the vulnerability of being isolated and in the open. Loki silenced him with a withering glare and continued to pick his way through rubble. And there it was. Movement amid the strange stillness and settling dust.

The miserable cries of a human child. Naked as birth and caked in grime and blood. It's small limbs flailing in a feeble grasp for life. Loki froze, unable to pull his eyes away as he realized the baby was near-smothered by the body of a woman. Her back burnt black by a blast she had taken to save her child, and atop of it all, the dust.

Loki snorted in derision and shook his head to remove the pity from his mind. The infuriating echo of his old self who clung on to the fringes of his conscience and refused even now to be shed. Pathetic. What did he care for the lives of these people when so many more would die before his ruling upon this earth was secure?

Movement in his peripheral caused him to turn sharply, snapping back into awareness of his surroundings. The Chitauri had stepped forward and raised his weapon to fire. Frowning, Loki stilled him with a flick of his wrist, knowing it was that wretched echo of his once-self who motioned the movement but unwilling, for once, to stifle it.

Looking beyond the Chitauri to the group of humans who continued their scramble for life, he beckoned to one who looked most capable of keeping his balance. As the man in a tattered police uniform made his way warily towards the imposing God-King, Loki let slip a soft sigh of frustration at the human's shell-shocked eyes. This will not do. Waving an incantation before him, Loki nodded in satisfaction as the trauma cleared from the man's gaze, to be replaced by an all-too-keen awareness of what surrounded him, and who stood before him.

"Stop!" He roared, as the human turned to run. "Look, you quivering fool!"

Slowly, the man turned back to face the God-King. More by magic than by will to obey, and the fact of this filled Loki with yet more frustration which he closed his eyes against and forced back down. For now.

"You, who wear the garb of a protector of this pathetic realm." He hissed. "You would run from me and leave a babe to my wrath?"

The man faltered, his eyes flicking from alien God to mound of rubble behind him, and finally his weak mortal ears heard a thin warbling cry. His mouth flapped useless, like a fish drowning in oxygen.

"Well?" Loki arched an eyebrow, dulled by this pointless dalliance. Bored of torturing his once-self with just enough small mercy to give the wretched shadow hope. "Oh don't trouble yourself. It's no skin off my nose if you leave the mewling cur to die. By all means, please do. Watching your kind's feeble quest to survive has amused me thus far, but perhaps seeing you abandon your young in the midst of battle will..."

Loki's voice faltered for a moment as he realised where all of this was coming from. Why he was so compelled to commit this strange mercy. "Perhaps it will cement my conviction that you're all as damned as me." He finished softly.

The human continued to gape, unable to fathom what was being said by this other-worldly Being before him. But the snuffling cries of the baby stirred him at last to move forward and gently scoop the child from his dead mother's embrace, even as he was unsure if this was the action the cryptic God-King was asking him to take.

As the man stepped back, child in arms, and turned with fraying nerves towards the group of survivors, Loki reached out a long thin hand and watched the human flinch as it hovered at his shoulder, not quite touching the fabric of his vest. He kicked a leather-clad toe towards the dead woman, drawing attention to the ID card that had half-slipped from her jean pocket.

In a voice laced with threat and almost wistful, he commanded. "Make sure he knows who his parents were."

Scooping up the ID and shoving it into his own pocket, the man bolted, fleeing with child to his comrades, least the alien conqueror should change his mind.

Swinging his leg back over the Chitauri carrier, Loki shook his head at himself and squared his jaw. Swallowing the bitter lump that had lodged in his throat. Forcing his once-self back - back into the deep dark recesses of his flawed and miserable past.

Sentiment.

Notes

The inspiration for this came in part from the scene between Loki and Natasha. Did anyone else get the feeling he was almost talking about himself when asking if she could ever wipe so much red from her ledger? The second inspiration came from Loki's loss of the scepter, and possibility that without it in his hand, it's hold on his rage may have chance to weaken. If just for a moment.