Heyyyyy talk to us about your headcanon about Loki's scepter representing him! (I wanna know more about the tags you had on the post your just posted!)
It mostly started because I was thinking about how Thor calls it ‘Loki’s scepter’ in Age of Ultron, despite it not really belonging to him, having come out of the Void. Why did he call it that? Where did he think it came from? How did it come to be truly Loki’s, in Thor’s mind?
I feel like it would have gotten tied up with all the things Loki hadn’t told him, and he hadn’t asked. And now it was too late - Loki was dead, and would never be able to tell him where he got it, where he had gone in that year, what had happened. So through the quest, finding the scepter becomes tied to getting answers about all those missing year questions. Maybe if Thor can find the scepter, he can find the answers to what happened to Loki before he arrived on Earth. What turned him into the furious, bloodthirsty villain that attacked New York.
So he couldn’t ask Loki, and he also, equally, couldn’t give Loki a funeral. They’d left the body on Svaralfheim and Loki Odin refused to let him hold a funeral. So finding the scepter becomes about finding what happened to Loki, the solution to the mystery - and also becomes about finding Loki and being able to bury him. To lay him, and the whole affair, to rest and maybe find some closure.
The tag I used in the fic I wrote was ‘Thor is sad and Loki is the scepter that’s what this is’ XD
I combined this concept with another - wondering whether or not the Avengers knew Loki was dead during Age of Ultron. They don’t talk about it and I wondered how they would have found out, how that would have made things a bit awkward for Thor. Because like, they’re all on the same hunt but also Thor has this side motivation going, to find his brother and give him a funeral and mourn him while also hiding his death from the rest of the Avengers.
I should have reread the fic before writing this answer, because I wrote it much more coherently back then:
Thor doesn’t know when he really starts thinking of the scepter as Loki’s. It’s a gradual process, starting with a few slips here and there. At first, he continues to make halfhearted denials that the scepter belonged to Loki - an attempt to redirect the focus to the mysterious forces who had given it to him. But the others have spent too long calling it ‘Loki’s scepter’ to call it anything else, and over time Thor finds himself thinking of it like that. Loki’s scepter.
So looking for the scepter, turns into looking for Loki’s scepter. Then turns into looking for Loki.
He finally admits to himself that he’s looking for his brother a few weeks into the quest. Somehow being useful to the Avengers had morphed into a private, personal quest to find Loki. Not find him alive - no, the near constant nightmares and agonizing grief and guilt mingled together have strangled that last hope. But he can perhaps find some trace of Loki in this scepter, find a way to understand what happened to him.
Even that has another layer, one that he doesn’t want to acknowledge. He’s looking for a way to give him a funeral, the one he hadn’t had the time or capacity for on Svartalfheim. He’s looking to bury his brother and eventually that desire becomes inextricably linked to finding the scepter.
If you want to read it, here it is! Thor is sad and Loki is the scepter. That’s it. Have another related excerpt:
“They want to go after it,” He finishes. Jane leans against the counter, frowning. “Loki’s scepter. They’ve asked me to join, to officially reform the Avengers.”
“I thought you said it wasn’t his. Loki’s.”
Thor blinks. He hadn’t realized he’d called it that. “It wasn’t. That’s just what they have been calling it, it’s…it's caught on.”
