Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“You put your left foot in. You put your left foot out. You marvel at the illusory nature of progress. 

“Welcome to Night Vale. 

“Citizens are reminded that the Night Vale Scouts are having their monthly combat training exercises this Saturday. This is an excellent way for young children to safely experience the horrors of war before the potentially traumatic and emotionally scarring rite of passage that is assigned reading in Freshman English. 

“We advise that non-scouts avoid the streets marked off with purple caution tape decorated with pictures of staring eyes and mutilated corpses in order to avoid being caught in the crossfire. Scouts should have their marksmanship, heavy artillery, and bullet immunity badges prior to attending. Parental permission slips, or convincing forgeries thereof, are required.

“It has come to our attention that there has been some confusion regarding what constitutes proper dining etiquette, particularly in high-end dining establishments, given the generational gap in the normal expression of good manners.

“To clarify this, we've put together some guidelines that should help people have a comfortable and classy fine dining experience in the modern age. For one: when challenging your wait staff to a private duel, it is considered polite to offer them first choice of the available weapons. Remember, you aren't the first person they've dueled today, and you probably won't be the last. Make sure all tips are witty and seasonally appropriate, and please refrain from overused clichés. Splitting the bill? Don't forget that calculators are illegal, and involving innocent restaurant employees in your felony activities is rude. If you've forgotten how to do advanced linear algebra, find a nearby middle school student to help you out. Do this, and it should ensure a positive experience for you and the kind people who stave off the darknesses and responsibilities of life long enough for you to enjoy your meal. 

“Night Vale's new local food stamp program has garnered mixed reviews from the town's citizens. Critics say that putting stamps on all of our food and mailing it to an undisclosed location, most likely to serve as some kind of arcane sacrifice to appease the faceless elder gods, is inefficient and wasteful, and that they are, quote: “still hungry by the end of the day”. 

“Supporters of the program ask: “What about the faceless elder gods? Aren't they entitled to the literal and figurative fruits of our labors?” I mean sure, they likely have no need for our mortal sustenance, but hey, it's the thought that counts. When asked to comment, town mayor Pamela Winchell said “Corporate sponsorship. Coooooorporate sponsorshiiiip. Corporate. Sponsorship.” then waved a striped umbrella and disappeared in a shower of stamps and empty candy bar wrappers. 

“Speaking of, a message from our sponsors:

“There will be wailing. There will be crying out. There will be some indignant whining. There will be gnashing of teeth. They aren't your teeth. You aren't alone. You thought you were alone, but you are never alone. There will be Mott's Applesauce.

“This has been a message from our sponsors.

“Complaints have been coming in from concerned parents about the ghosts haunting the classrooms in the east wing of the Night Vale Elementary School. This is a friendly reminder that ghosts are harmless. Ghosts cannot harm you. Ghosts are almost certainly more afraid of you than you are of them. After all, they merely represent the inevitably of eventual death and obscurity, while to them, we must represent the endless multitudes of missed opportunities from a life already spent, stretching on endlessly into a future they are no longer able to interact with. I know which of those I find more terrifying. 

“Enterprising teachers have taken to using the ghosts as an educational tool. As it turns out, ghosts perfectly illustrate scientific principles such as reverse gravity, fluid ectostatics, and triple relativity. Who knew? Teachers, and probably also scientists. 

“Today, on the Children's Fun Fact Science Corner: it's a little-known fact that rain is actually the tears of angels who are disappointed in your life choices. Thunder is the anger of a handsome space god. Snow is rain, only frozen. Sunshine is hope made solid. 

“This has been the Children's Fun Fact Science Corner. 

“Listeners, I must issue a correction. Earlier in the show, I said that the food we have all been covering in government-distributed stamps and shoving into our mailbox with howls of hunger and sacrifice was most likely going to serve as an offering to the faceless elder gods. Instead, it seems that all of that food has been being delivered to the house of John Peters, you know, the farmer. John Peters says he thinks it should be fine if we all join him for a mandatory potluck at his newly-constructed and magnificent food archway, so long as we think of the faceless elder gods while we do it. City Council says, by way of a note tied to a brick which was tied to a pigeon trained to fly in through the studio chimney, to go and check it out. That's an order. 

“The Night Vale Ecological Society wants to remind you to stop releasing balloons at events such as weddings and children's birthday parties. These balloons are more than likely raised in captivity, and as such they lack the necessary skills to survive in the wild. Instead, consider taking them to a local balloon shelter. And when you're in need of balloons, adopt, don't buy. 

“And now: traffic. 

“Speed is relative. Speed is your relative. Speed is related to you, probably on your mother's side. Speed is down on their luck. Speed wants to know if they can crash on your couch, just for a while. After all, isn't that what family is for? Be a good relative. It'll probably only be for a few days. A week, at most. Just until they're back on their feet. It's hard to find a job in this economy. Having a support system is important. 

“This has been: traffic. 

“The mandatory potluck is underway, and seems to be going well. Citizens are reportedly enjoying a time of community bonding over prodigious amounts of gluten-free snacks and meat. A small scuffle broke out near a statue carved out of high-fiber granola bars, but was broken up by John Peters himself, and it looks like from here on out things will be smooth sailing. 

“On a more solemn note, Luke, the ancient and mythical being of chaos who lives in our town and occasionally saves the world, is currently missing. He left on a mission from the Vague Yet Menacing Government Agency eight days ago, and he has not returned. We don't know what happened, and we've received no word, either by text or messenger vulture or cryptic ghostly messages drawn in the fog on our mirrors while we shower, as to where he might be. Night Vale, I am worried about what this might mean. We don't know if he's okay. We don't even know if we'll ever know. We have no way to tell whether or not he's coming back, and no one to ask. 

“It's ironic, don't you think? That the universe knows what happens to all of us, but doesn't care, and the people who do care what happens, often don't know? 

“Anyway. To the family of Luke, the ancient and mythical being of chaos: we know how you feel. Your town grieves with you. We remember with you. We reminisce and regret and recover with you. We feel your pain as though it were our own, and in a way, it is. We are your family, now. And we'll do our best to be a good one.

“That is, unless he's actually just fine, and will turn up any day now. In that case, you can disregard what I've said before and move on with your life, with nothing but the vague terror that comes of realizing those we love are more fragile and less permanent than we would hope.

“We are pleased to announce the opening of Night Vale's first frozen yogurt shop! Among the available no-calorie offerings are imaginary vanilla, berry invisible, and non-existent chocolate, all of which can be purchased at the shop's non-location in the empty lot behind the Ralph's. To help you imagine the flavor of this healthy alternative to other, more substantial frozen treats, they offer this descriptive slogan: It's like if ice cream left behind a ghost of its true self. A hollow, empty shell, devoid of soul or feeling, dedicated only to upholding the idea of the thing in question and without any care for its deeper attributes. 

“Frozen Yogurt. Like ice cream, but not. 

“Things have taken a dark turn down at the mandatory community picnic. Right as the festivities hit their stride, several of the faceless elder gods manifested in the center of the screaming crowds, rising up out of the depths of forgotten history to demand what they are due. Intern Sarah reportedly pushed forward to try and ask one of the faceless elder gods for a quote for our show, and a stray tentacle knocked her into one of the steaming cracks that spread across the earth. To the family of Intern Sarah: she will forever be remembered as a courageous and dedicated member of the investigative journalism community. Even though our time with her was short, we will treasure those memories forever, or until the next government-mandated brain wipe. We don't know where that crack leads, but we can only hope that she is in a better place. 

“The faceless elder gods continue on their voracious and rage-filled rampage. The food arch is fallen, burying over an acre of invisible corn in a landslide of cucumbers and lunchmeat. They devour. They devour. They devour. 

“And now: the Weather.”

“We're back, listeners.

“After lashing out with their horns, hooves, tentacles and unkind words, the faceless elder gods appear to have faded back into the earth, leaving nothing behind but the bodies of their victims and an empty hole where the food archway had once been. One of them reportedly said ‘sorry about that guys, you know how it gets when you go a few thousand years without eating--we were pretty “hangry”, and we apologize for any rude behavior’ before disappearing in trails of oily black smoke that left the survivors choking and wheezing. 

“Will they rise again? We don't know. We can't know. In the end, all things are temporary and unpredictable. Sometimes, things we once thought to be stable and unshakeable are lost. Sometimes, things that are lost return. We can build monuments out of stone or appropriated government food, but we cannot change how the sand and voracious appetites of faceless elder gods will wear them away. We can only remember them as they were, and hope against hope that we are not yet out of time. 

“Stay tuned for seven hours of ominous noises that you can only hear when you aren't really paying much attention, but that mysteriously stop every time you really try to listen. 

“Goodnight, Night Vale. Goodnight.”

The broadcast died with a crackle of static. Hela turned over in the dark of her borrowed bedroom, curling tighter around the now-silent radio. She didn't cry. The angels would know if she cried, and they would tell Aunt Josie, who didn't need the extra worry. 

So she rolled onto her back and stared up at the ceiling, holding the radio to her heart the way she'd clutched a stuffed dog back when she'd been small and afraid of the dark, and didn't cry into the long hours of the night. 

Chapter Text

“Heard about your dad.” A barely-recognizable pile of mud and camouflage paint slid down beside Hela, covered in twigs and ammo belts. 

“I'm worried,” she whispered, and she and Tamika sunk deeper into the foxhole as the other team laid down covering fire. Artillery shells thundered in the distance. Despite not officially being in scouts, the older girl always seemed to show up for combat training exercises, not that she needed them. “It's been more than a week and he hasn't called, or written, or astral projected a message or anything.”

“Huh,” Tamika said. Then “You sure he isn't just spending a few weeks or months learning to play bass guitar in the wilderness to clear his head?” 

Hela shook her head, then ducked as a spray of bullets popped one by one into the piled dirt above their heads. They were immune—everyone at training was immune, or should be—but that didn't mean she wanted to lay down and play dead until the next break, or until one of their team's necromancers wandered by. “People don't really do that where we're from,” she said, “and besides, he would tell us first. He knows we would worry.” 

Tamika didn't look at her, attention fixed on the scope of the high-powered rifle she'd assembled, but she grunted a sympathetic reply. 

Because that lay at the core of it. Her papa would tell her if he planned to be gone longer than normal. He should have reached out to her and her brothers even if the mission hadn't run long. 

So why couldn't she reach him now? 

Something hit her in the side, hard, and she rolled around to find Tamika half on top of her and a spray of fresh bullet holes where she'd been. “Careful, Cadet,” Tamika hissed in her ear as she leaned back, pulling the trigger and earning a huff of disappointment and an overdramatic flop as her victim ‘died’. “Focus. Now isn't the time for thoughts. Now is the time for actions.” 

She rolled off, and Hela did her best to brush the dust off her uniform. “Sorry,” she mumbled, and Tamika gave her an odd look. 

“Cecil said no one could find him,” she said at last. “Your dad, I mean.” 

Hela nodded. The water in her eyes was from the dust of the trench, and she scrubbed at her face before taking a deep breath and forcing herself to listen for approaching footsteps. 

“Anyone looking?” 

“Not yet,” she said. “I was thinking I—if he doesn't come back, I should go.” 

She hadn't quite admitted her half-formed plans to herself yet, partly because she wasn't sure what she would do if she tried and failed, and partly because she wasn't entirely sure whether Erika could read minds or not. Besides, before last night, planning to go meant admitting he was really missing. Cecil's show had used up the last of her denial, it seemed. 

Tamika pulled the pin out of a grenade, lobbed it over their heads and the strands of razor wire separating the two teams, and then turned the full force of her attention on Hela. The intensity of her scrutiny made her want to shiver. 

“Meet me on the elementary school swingset at midnight,” she said. 

“What?” 

But Tamika was already gone, rolling out of their fortified trench and taking out three more of the opposing scouts before disappearing into a nearby hedge. 

The rest of the day passed slowly and anxiously. Being distracted during combat training meant that one of the opposing scouts managed to clip her with a semi-automatic, and she had to lie slumped and still in the sweltering heat until training ended. Victory, she thought, was profoundly less satisfying when you were dead, and less important than the loved ones you worried about. It was hard to say, but she suspected that might be true about real wars as well. She could use it in her post-training “what I learned about war” report, anyways. 

Dinner was quiet, the sort of strained, awkward quiet of people pretending nothing was wrong when it really was. Even Fenrir, with his usually enormous appetite, barely picked at his food. Josie talked to them normally, but her eyes were sympathetic and that was almost worse. 

In bed, she pretended to sleep until her watch said half-an-hour before midnight, then rolled and dropped to the floor on cat-quiet feet. Josie would be asleep by now, and with any luck her brothers were too. Her breathing sounded loud in her own ears as she crept to the door. 

Out in the hall, she came face-to-faces with Erika and stopped.

Of course. She should have expected this, honestly, and probably would have if she'd given it more thought. It was nearly impossible to sneak past Erika, or really any being with so many eyes and a functional degree of omnipresence. 

Hela swallowed back her frustration. Why should Erika even want to keep her here? The angels had never seemed terribly interested in her comings and goings before now. 

She blinked. Why should Erika care whether she stayed or wandered? 

She stepped carefully around the angel and moved through the house, passing Erika in the hall and the living room before pushing open the front door. Sure enough, Erika stood on the porch, hovering beside Josie's rocking chair despite having been standing in the kitchen when she'd left. 

“Do you mind if I leave?” she asked bluntly. Erika only buzzed noncommittally. 

So Hela left the porch and kept walking. 

The town felt different in the dark. Cooler, yes, but also stranger and more comfortable. The day belonged to the stores and the schools and the workplaces, such as they were in Night Vale, but the night belonged to the stars and the strange lights and, maybe, to little girls who snuck out purposefully under its cover. 

The elementary school playground wasn't far, and the chips of bark crunched underfoot as she made her way past the student's official bloodstone circle. The night air was crisp enough to almost be cold, but it didn't bother her. It never did. 

She didn't see Tamika at first. In the shadows, the only visible part of her was her fingernails, painted bright white so that hand signals would be easier to read in the near-darkness, and the beads braided into her hair. Then her eyes, as she turned and looked at Hela. Then her teeth as she smiled. 

Silently, Tamika beckoned her forward, then used her foot to brush aside a pile of wood chips and reveal a metal hatch. She stepped back as Hela lifted the lid and then they descended into a tunnel, dimly lit with what looked like salvaged airline safety lighting. 

Tamika was wearing jeans and combat boots, with a bomber jacket and a shirt which read “In order to rise from its own ashes, a Phoenix first must burn”, which was normal. She was also carrying a duffel bag thrown over one shoulder and had several extra knives in her belt, which was less normal. 

“Sorry about the extra security,” she said. “They've doubled the number of Secret Police patrolling at night for the rest of the week.” 

“Because of the thing with the parakeets?” 

“Exactly.” 

Curiosity got the best of her. “What's in the bag?”

“Clothes. A toothbrush. Explosives. Y'know,” Tamika shrugged, “the usual traveling stuff.” 

“Oh.” She paused for a minute, awkward. “Where are you going?” 

“Don't be stupid,” Tamika said. She adjusted the bag, hitching it up higher onto one shoulder. “I'm going with you. To find your dad,” she elaborated when Hela only stared. “You're my friend. I'm not going to let you run off and face unknown shadowy threats and possible crushing disappointment on your own.”

“Oh,” Hela said, and something in her chest felt very tight. “Thank you.” 

“Don't mention it.” She hefted her bag. One of the lights near the ground flickered a few times with a buzz like a dying beetle. “So where are we headed?” 

“I'm not sure,” Hela said. “I was thinking if I—if we could find one of the Avengers, they might know what happened, or at least where to look.” 

Tamika hummed. “Okay then,” she said, “where are they?” 

“New York?” Hela suggested. “I think.” 

“Alrighty.” Tamika hefted her bag by the strap and set off down the tunnel. The possible airplane safety lights gave way to raw light bulbs hung from cords on the ceilings, to Christmas lights, to three lamps shaped like llamas and arranged in an ominous circle, all hooked together with extension cords and powered with a generator humming at varying loudnesses. 

She thought for a moment about going back and bringing her brothers, but immediately dismissed the idea. After all, she could pass for human, or near enough; they could not. She had been shunned from Asgard not because of how she looked but what she was: goddess of death was an intimidating title, but not one that could be easily matched to her by one who didn't already know. 

Even so, she still tended to attract stares, and people, especially other children, could be cruel. Her skin was much darker than her father's except where it wasn't, mottled pale patches that ran along one side of her face and down the right half of her body. The hair on that side, too, was light, so blond as to be almost white and a sharp contrast to the raven-black of the other side. She liked the contrast it made when she braided it together, often in fancy patterns she'd learned plaiting Sleipnir's mane.

While the odd looks had all but disappeared here in Night Vale, she had no doubt she'd be distinctive enough in the rest of Midgard to attract attention. It hardly mattered; she could handle the stares. The way people would react to Jormungand or Fenrir or even Sleipnir could not be so easily dismissed. 

Eventually, the tunnel sloped upwards and Tamika pushed her way out of another trapdoor, levering herself up and then holding a hand down to pull Hela out behind her. The clouds had mostly drifted on and the stars shone bright, no trace of the Void. 

“Which way to the nearest city?” she asked, and Tamika looked up at the stars for a few seconds before pointing. 

They settled into an easy stride, side-by-side, out into the night. 

Hela had planned for the two of them to make their way through the desert, and then to find some sort of alternative transportation once they reached another town. She hadn't planned on the desert stretching on for so long. It seemed endless, as though it continued off into eternity like the Void, and though they'd only been walking for a few hours when dawn started to streak up into the horizon, it already felt like a lifetime. 

She had started to consider turning back and possibly finding a helicopter to hijack (Tamika would probably know how to do that, if she asked,) when a windowless white van pulled up alongside them, trailing clouds of reddish dust. It seemed the perfect example of the sort of sketchy vans grownups told children to avoid, unmarked and dirty, and it had a crooked satellite dish and antenna perched atop it like a small bird on a crocodile. 

The person that emerged after the van pulled over next to them and ground to a halt, though, wasn't a suspicious stranger with offers of candy and puppies. Carlos the scientist regarded them with a neutral expression, but with an emphasis that came across as suspicion. “What are you two doing so far past city limits?”

“Just out for a stroll,” Hela said, and winced internally at how unconvincing and awkward she sounded. Tamika shot her an expression that was less than impressed. If it were true that her father were the god of lies, then the talent apparently wasn't hereditary. 

“I'm going to pretend you didn't just say that,” Carlos said. “Do you two need a ride back to town?”

“We aren't going back to town.” The conversation was making Hela anxious. What would Carlos do? Would he try to stop them? Could he? 

Carlos blinked. “Where are you going, then?”

Hela looked to Tamika, then down to her shoes. “New York?” she tried. 

“Okaaay,” Carlos said. “Why are you walking to New York?” Hela bit her lip and didn't say anything. “Is this about your dad? I don't think he'd want you wandering off.” 

“We just want to talk to the Avengers,” Hela said. “They probably know what happened.” 

“Yeah, and it's not like Hawkeye or Falcon or Mothman would hurt a couple of kids,” Tamika put in. “It should be safe. At least, safe like airplanes are safe: with the possibility of severe calamity, but at a low probability.” 

“Mothman?” 

She shrugged. “I don't know or care very much about the non-bird Avengers.” 

Carlos blinked at her. He seemed to be doing a lot of that, looking confused and a little like grownups tended to look when they'd discovered a problem and really wished they hadn't. “You realize they aren't actually—you know what? Never mind.” He looked between the two of them. “Do you have any idea how long it would take to walk to New York?” 

“About eight hundred hours,” Tamika said. “Give or take.” 

“That doesn't matter, though,” Hela added, “because we can find a car or helicopter or something once we reach another city.”

“Which is only about six more hours of walking,” Tamika added. 

“I know it's not a good plan,” Hela said at his continued skepticism. “but it's the one I've got and I can't just sit here and do nothing but pretend like everything is okay, day after day, when he's out there somewhere. Everything is not okay, it isn't or he'd be back right now, and I just...I just really hate not knowing.” 

Silence fell at the end of her outburst, long enough for her to feel awkward and childish about it, even though she meant every word. 

“Okay,” Carlos said, and for a second she thought he was going to just let them go. “Get in the van.”

“I won't,” Hela said. “I need to—” 

“You want to talk to the Avengers and ask them where your father is.” He nodded. “I'd honestly like to know that myself. We'll come up with a better plan, one that doesn't involve hundreds of hours of walking or stealing other people's cars, but first the two of you need to get out of the sun. There's water and snacks in the back.”

“Oh,” she said, then “thank you.”

“We weren't going to steal a car,” Tamika said. “Ubers exist.” 

“And how were you going to pay for the Uber ride?” He pulled open the back of the van, and they waited as he rearranged the equipment of ambiguous purpose to clear off several of the seats. 

“I have a lot of knives.” 

Carlos glanced at Tamika. “There are at least three ways that could answer the question,” he said. “Please don't tell me which.”

She nodded and sat on the edge of the seat beside Hela, leaning back. Carlos climbed in and pulled the door shut, then sat cross-legged on the floor. He distributed lukewarm bottles of water and asked about allergies before passing around packets of nuts, then unfolded a beat-up laptop plastered in stickers. The largest and most prominent displayed the Night Vale Community Radio official logo. 

“If I remember correctly,” Carlos said, “there's a conference in Phoenix tomorrow on interdisciplinary approaches to renewable energy. Let's see if I can find the email—hah.” He paused for a few seconds, scanning the screen. “And guess which billionaire with a vested interest in renewable energy is sponsoring it?” 

“Tony Stark will be there,” Hela said, and Carlos nodded. 

“Is he Batman?” 

Hela couldn't see Carlos' eyes, because his glasses reflected the computer screen as he scrolled, but he frowned. “You really don't know much about the Avengers, do you?” 

“I know that Sam Wilson served two combat tours with the 58th Rescue Squadron,” Tamika said. “I know he was a test pilot for the EXO-7 Falcon, and that he successfully captured Khalid Khandil in Bahkmala. I believe depth of knowledge is more valuable in the long term than general breadth,” she added when Carlos looked surprised. 

He shrugged. “I mean, that's pretty much the assumption behind PhDs.” 

“Will Thor be there?” Hela asked, trying not to sound like she cared as desperately as she did. 

He scrolled for a bit. “No, doesn't look like it. Which is a shame, because I imagine Asgard could probably share some really fascinating insights with the rest of us if they chose to.” 

“I don't really want Asgard anywhere near here,” she said, and she heard the darkness that crept into her tone. She smiled carefully, and hoped it was reassuring even if it was grim. 

“Oh. Right. Sorry,” he said. “Anyway, we need to find a way to get in. I wasn't planning on going, so I never RSVPed or bought tickets or anything.” 

Tamika turned to her. “Do you have your advanced hacking badge?” 

She shook her head. “No, but I just got my digital forgery badge.” 

“Alright. I'll add us to the lists, then, and you can make the tickets.” She took the laptop, and Carlos didn't protest. 

“I don't know that they let anyone your age in, though,” Carlos said. 

“We're your interns,” Tamika answered, typing so quickly Hela couldn't even hear the individual keys as they clicked. 

“I'm not even sure they allow interns,” Carlos said. “And if they do, they're probably grad students. Maybe undergrads, if they're advanced, but no one your age.” 

“I'm older than you,” Hela said. 

“You know what I mean.” 

“Knowledge and intellectual exploration are fields that do not know the bounds of age or race or class or gender,” Tamika said. “And besides, you cleared all of this with the conference administrators months ago. I have the email thread right here.” 

“Okay,” Carlos said, “that's impressive.” Tamika grinned. 

Hela leaned back against the wall of the van, already heating in the desert sun, and chewed carefully on an almond. “So it sounds like we have a plan,” she said. 

“Yep,” Tamika said. 

“Just let me call Cecil and let him know where I'm going so he doesn't worry,” Carlos said. “Then we can set out.” 

There were still so many unknowns, so many things that could go wrong, or could already have gone wrong and just be waiting for her to find out. She still worried, so much that it felt like it might consume her, enough at times that she had to focus on keeping it contained so she didn't dissolve the seat right out from under herself. 

But somehow, Hela had not ended up on this quest alone. She had friends, friends who would drop their lives and pack a bag and call their boyfriends so they could come and help and support her. 

And that, in of itself, gave her hope. 

Chapter Text

The trip was long and uncomfortable, not that Hela would complain. 

The van had air-conditioning, sort of. The fans would blow, and the air would move, and the little green screen insisted that the temperature was lower than the outside, and somehow none of those things felt true. The cracked vinyl of the seats heated to just a few degrees above what was comfortable on her skin, and she shifted and fidgeted in her discomfort. Tamika's jacket had been rolled into a compact bundle and tucked away in her bag almost as soon as the sun had risen, but the long pants and heavy boots she endured in silence. 

The music...wasn't bad, but it was cheerful in a way that grated on her nerves. The instruments were brassy and opinionated, and she thought she might enjoy it at a party, but now it just felt like a bit too much. 

Tamika, for her part, kept one earbud in and read a battered copy of The Art of War, carefully turning the pages and keeping her place with a folded grocery list. 

Hela...fidgeted. Her thoughts now were nothing comfortable when she had the time to sit and confront them. 

“So,” Carlos said, “Have you met Tony Stark before? Your father worked with him, right?”

Hela clambered up into the front seat, grateful for the distraction. “I haven't,” she said, “but I did commit credit card fraud with his information for my identity theft badge.” She dragged a thumbnail across her left palm, a nervous habit. “I probably won't tell him that, though.” 

“Probably wise.” Carlos nodded. “So what did you buy?” 

She shrugged. “I mostly made donations to good causes. Gave money to conservation efforts, paid off random people's student loans, contributed to fundraisers, that sort of stuff.” 

“Mostly?” 

“Well, I did get a couple of presents for my brothers,” she admitted. “And a soft-serve machine. I've always wanted a soft serve machine. We installed it in the kitchen.” 

“Uh huh,” Carlos said, tapping his fingers on the wheel and then signaling and merging onto the wider highway. “And what else?” 

The song that was playing ended, and the sudden silence hung heavy in the air. “I paid a lot of adoption fees,” she said quietly. The first few notes of the next song slowly built, quiet and in a minor key. “All kids should have a family to grow up with. Someone who loves them.” 

“Oh.” 

The singing started, slow, mournful. It was a sad song, and the words that filtered through were about heartbreak and lost love. “We will find him,” she said, a little bit too forcefully. To her mortification, her eyes burned, and she blinked to hold back the tears that threatened to gather. “My papa's okay, and he's somewhere, and we'll find him. I'd know if he wasn't.” She took a deep breath, and mostly managed to keep it steady. “I'm the goddess of death. I'd know if he wasn't okay. I'm sure I would.” 

“I'm sure you're right,” he said, but he didn't sound sure. He sounded worried and careful, like if he didn't reassure her well enough she might break. 

She was stronger than that, of course, but he didn't know that, so she pulled on her best approximation of a smile. She still wasn't a good liar, but this wasn't lying, exactly. It was being brave, and that came naturally at this point. “I am.”

They rode in silence except for the music for a while longer. 

“Can we get food?” Tamika asked after a bit. “My blood sugar gets low.” 

Carlos pulled off at the next exit, and they stopped at a fast-food restaurant. Tamika chose a table with a strategic view of the entire building, and Hela saved the spot while they ordered, drumming her fingers against the drab plastic tabletop. She didn't have much of an appetite. 

Next to where she was sitting, a group of children crawled through a play area that reminded her of a laughably easy version of an obstacle course they'd done in scouts a few weeks ago. There were no true obstacles here, only a series of tubes and steps and plastic slides, but still the way the children climbed and ran and laughed seemed similar if more carefree. Some of the children were not much younger than Hela's own classmates. 

“I brought you a hamburger,” Carlos said as he set a tray down on the table. Tamika slid into the booth next to her, grabbing several fries and swirling them in ketchup before popping them into her mouth. “I know you said you weren't hungry, but I thought your dad would probably be upset with me if I didn't at least try to feed you.” 

“Thank you,” Hela said politely, and took a bite. Some Midgardian food was better than it had the right to be, more exciting and varied than anything Asgard had to offer. Fast food, however, tended to be utilitarian and bland. She thought this one might taste like cardboard even if she felt like eating. 

“It's better if you mix everything together into one ubercondiment and dip the food in it,” Tamika said, swirling together a small pile of ketchup and mustard and BBQ sauce. 

“Really?” She watched skeptically as Tamika pushed the mixture around with a couple more fries. 

“It doesn't really taste better,” she said, “but it's more interesting, and sometimes that's the best you can hope for. Although,” she added after a moment, “I think this bun is made of wheat, and any chance of a meal turning spontaneously into venomous snakes makes it interesting by default.” 

“I told you that doesn't happen here,” Carlos said calmly, but Hela caught the slightly nervous glance he darted at his own food before he continued eating. 

Tamika shrugged. “I think that, in general, wheat is worth the chance of snakes,” she said, and then poked skeptically at the bun in question. “Probably not this wheat, though.”

“Next time we'll stop someplace with gluten free options,” he promised, and they all nodded in agreement before lapsing back into silence. 

It didn't take long for her skin to prickle with the phantom sensation of being watched. She looked up to find a little boy—if she judged correctly, a human of his size was probably four or five years old—watching her, his eyes wide and curious. 

She didn't have to wonder why, but something inside her curled uncomfortably at the reminder that her appearance was and always would be considered unusual. She wasn't angry--the curiosity of a small human boy, after all, was far from the worst she had endured—but it made her feel tired, and she was tired enough. 

Still, though, he crept closer, and lifted his face to address her. “Why is your face like that?” 

She sighed, and debated with herself how to answer. Before she could, though, Tamika smiled. 

“I got this,” she said, and stood confidently before dropping to one knee. It brought her down lower than the boy's eye level, but she had his full attention nonetheless. “Do you know how babies are made?”

The little boy shook his head; Carlos' eyes went a little wide and he also shook his head, but more frantically. Tamika didn't look at him, and didn't stop. 

“Babies, like all living things, are made from the fabric of the cosmos,” she said, “and they are assembled based on blueprints that have been regularly sliced to ribbons and then shuffled like a deck of particularly vital cards. We are made up of incredibly tiny pieces strung together in patterns that are impossibly complex and irrepeatable, and somehow simultaneously both random and precise. We are babbled into existence by a universe speaking a language that it doesn't understand. Our birth—like the rest of our existence—is unlikely and wonderful and terrible. And when you consider that,” she finished as he continued to listen, rapt and a little wild-eyed, “It's no wonder that each and every one of us comes out different and beautiful and strange.”

“That doesn't make any sense,” the child asserted, but he glanced nervously between Tamika and Hela. 

“It will when your older. Think about it, and don't forget.” Tamika clapped both hands on her knee and pushed back to her feet. “But for now, you should go play on the slide.” 

The child gave her one more searching look before he stomped off to do just that. 

“Thank you,” Hela said quietly. 

Tamika shrugged. “It's our duty to educate the next generation,” she said. “Wasting a teachable moment is how we kill time, and I don't want to live in a future where time is dead. Besides,” she continued, “I got to make Carlos make that face.” 

“I—thought you were going somewhere else with that,” he said, and the color that had risen up in his cheeks was still there. 

“Like, the technical details of where babies come from?” Tamika waved a hand. “Nah. The stork's assembly secrets are their own.” 

Carlos choked. “Sometimes I honestly can't tell if you're being serious.” 

“It's no joke,” Tamika said. “They're fiercely protective of their intellectual property. Especially compared to most other birds.” 

Carlos sighed, and together, Tamika's eccentric kindness and his exasperation pulled a smile to Hela' s face. Her worry still shadowed her thoughts, lurking in the back of her mind the way the Void lurked in the sky above their town, but she forced herself to take another bite of the tasteless food and listen as Tamika described to an ever more concerned Carlos the differences between various species of birds and their preferred ideological frameworks for dealing with intellectual property and trade secrets. 

Back in the van, Hela found herself staring out the window and making up games to entertain her restless mind. She imagined Sleipnir running alongside them, weaving through the gaps in the cars, or Fenrir hanging his head out the window, tongue lolling, and not for the first time she wondered if she shouldn't have at least told her brothers where she was going. No doubt they would worry, were probably already worrying, and in the vague way of a problem hiding itself behind other bigger and more immediate problems, she felt bad about that. 

But at the same time, if she had told them, they might have tried to stop her, or join her, and neither would end well for any of them. Maybe sometimes it could be necessary to do something a little bit cruel, like make people worry, to protect them from greater harm or heartbreak. 

If this was the case, Hela thought it was a terrible way for the world to work. 

She had moved from the front seat and back into the back, and Tamika, after spending some time in the front as well, had done the same. Now they sat side by side in the back, and she jerked out of her thoughts as Tamika nudged her in the ribs with a sharp elbow. 

She looked up to find Tamika holding out an earbud like an offering, and she took it hesitantly. “I'm going to listen to an audiobook,” Tamika said by way of explanation. “I know people say they're a crime against paper, and since paper is made of trees and trees are natural, that makes them a crime against nature, but I personally think there's nothing more natural than books adapting to new habitats, and a book is a book. Just ideas wrapped in a thin veneer of corporeal existence to make themselves discernable by way of our limited senses. Anyhow,” she finished, “I thought you might like to listen too. Let the thoughts of a stranger somewhere else in time and space drown out our own for the length of a single story.” 

She looked down at the earbud. Her papa hated audiobooks, and ebooks, and anything else that replaced the physical book itself with some form of mortal technology—soulless, he'd called them, and viscerally unsatisfying, like a phone call in place of a face-to-face meeting or a meal-replacement shake instead of a home-cooked breakfast. Mortals, he'd complained on more than one occasion, seemed obsessed with creating worse versions of things that already existed. 

She tucked the earbud into her ear and nodded gratefully. “I'd like that very much,” she said, and Tamika wordlessly started the book. 

The story took place on a realm she didn't recognize—she'd not heard of a Hobbit before, in any of the Nine—but in many ways it was familiar enough to be soothing and strange enough to provide a distraction. There were dwarves, which were very unlike the few she'd met but a familiar staple of stories all the same, and an epic quest of the sort that often featured in bedtime stories and was blissfully free of missing parents or bleak, realistic uncertainty. The wizard reminded her of no one she knew, and the tone of the story was light, in places comical. She wondered if Tamika had considered these things when she'd chosen it, and was grateful either way. 

They drifted through the first few chapters before the van noticeable slowed and then rolled to a stop. She blinked, and Tamika switched off the book before they both looked to Carlos. 

“We're just outside the city,” he said, “and it's getting late. The conference doesn't start until tomorrow, so it would probably be best if we settled in for the night.” 

The building she could see through the windshield was long and, despite its multiple stories, squat; the long rows of windows and doors made the building's purpose clear, but it straddled the linguistic gap between hotel and motel with knife-edged precision.  

Her feet ached with pins and needles as she stood up, and she stomped them several times to try and clear the static. Beside her, Tamika did the same. The sunlight hadn't quite started to fade when they stepped, blinking, out of the van, but it had gone a shade of evening gold that washed the concrete in orange light and carried with it the promise of impending sunset. Perfect photography lighting, Aunt Josie would say, and then probably herd whoever was nearby outside in order to snap a commemorative picture. It would invariably be ruined by the overexposed starburst-shaped hole that Erika left in whatever photos they should have appeared in, but that wouldn't stop the woman from hanging it on the fridge beside the others. 

The person behind the desk at the hotel barely looked at them as they checked in, taking the request for two rooms without so much as a raised eyebrow. There was a certain level of apathy that could only be attained through long and careful practice, Tamika whispered to her as Carlos checked them in, and, while some sects of monks and acolytes had been known to achieve it through meditation and chanting, it was most often seen as a defense mechanism in people who had worked for years in retail or customer service. The person behind the desk was a master. 

Carlos paid for the rooms with a card, and she couldn't help but notice the way his shoulders tensed and then eased in relief when the payment went through. She made a mental note to remind her papa to pay him back when she found him and they finally went back home. 

Their rooms were up two flights of stairs, side-by-side, one for Carlos and the other for her and Tamika to share. The beds were stiff but the bedding seemed clean, at least. Tamika threw her bag on the bed closer to her door, dug through it until she found her cell phone, and gave a short wave. “I'm going to call my dad,” she said. “He'll worry if I don't check in every now and again.” 

Hela nodded as Tamika slipped out into the hall, then flopped back onto her own stiff bed and concentrated. 

Tamika had her canvas duffel, and Carlos had a small overnight bag, perpetually crammed into the back of his van and half-squashed under his heavier equipment, but Hela hadn't had the time to pack. She had left carrying nothing but the clothes she wore. 

That didn't mean they were all she had. 

Hela couldn't carve out pockets of space-time like her papa could; her talent with seidr was relatively limited, and what energy she could control manifested itself in other ways. Because of that, he had taken it upon himself to prepare a bag for her in case of emergencies and hide it away, hovering someplace both near enough to reach and far enough that it could not be stolen or lost or forgotten. 

She concentrated, doing her best to block out the hum of the ice machine down the hall and the stiff, plastic texture of the hotel comforter and the smell of stale air and dusty carpet and fabric softener, and after a moment the bed beside her dipped with a sudden weight. She sat up and pulled the small black bag into her lap, undoing the clasps and rifling through the contents. 

On top she found clothes, a few loose and comfortable outfits, neatly folded, with a warm jacket rolled tight to take up as little room as possible. Below this was a full set of formal clothes in Asgardian style, unsubtly decorated with symbols she knew were associated with the royal family she technically belonged to, a clear and almost defiant declaration of rank. She set that one aside quickly; on Midgard it would only serve to draw unwanted attention, and she didn't like to dwell on the situations in which such a declaration would be helpful or necessary. 

Below the clothes she found a dagger, the blade nearly as long as her forearm and viciously sharp. The design was simple, but the weight of the blade and the feel of the metal confirmed it was Uru, and thus probably forged by the dwarves of Nidavellir. One of her father's, then. She carefully set it aside. 

The rest of the bag was filled with various other things that might be useful in different scenarios: emergency rations, a few bottles of water, a toothbrush, a signal flare, and a truly impressive amount of money in various currencies, from Asgardian gold to a roll of Midgardian paper money. A small, sturdy cell phone, somehow still charged after however long it had sat inactive. Forged passports with false names and her face, one each for the US and Norway and Switzerland. A handful of healing stones, carefully wrapped and tucked into the corner of the bag. All told, it was a bag packed for a fugitive as much as for a child, a concrete reminder of how volatile their lives were and could be again. It was packed, too, jammed full enough that it seemed unlikely that so much could have fit in such a small bag without magic. 

Tucked into the very bottom of the bag was a note. 

She pulled it out, holding it in one hand and staring. A single sheet of paper, carefully folded, but she could see the imprint of the pen on the other side, not enough to read the words but enough to recognize the tight, neat script. 

A lump rose up in her throat, and she swallowed it down before tucking the note, unread, back at the bottom of the bag. 

“Nice knife.” 

She jumped and spun to find Tamika carefully turning the knife over in her hands, testing the balance before setting it back on the bed. She didn't comment on the appearance of the bag, only glanced over the pile of stuff, assessing. 

“Thanks,” Hela said, and she quietly set aside an outfit of nondescript Midgardian clothing for tomorrow before packing the rest away again. She left the knife in easy reach on the bedside table, more because it seemed like she should feel paranoid than out of any real fear they'd be attacked. 

“Mind if I listen to the radio?” Tamika asked, and Hela shook her head. 

Cecil's program was already partway through, still coming in clear and loud despite the fact that by all logic it shouldn't reach them at all this far from Night Vale. Hela leaned back, allowing herself to drift as the words filled the air with the pleasant, reassuring cadence she had come to associate, in many ways, with the concept of home. 

“—and when the journey ahead seems insurmountable, remember: you have come so, so far already. You have already taken a finite yet uncountable number of steps, halting, maybe stumbling at first—maybe stumbling later, also—and then more confident, natural, as you learned step by painful step how to control this prison of bone and meat that contains your intangible essence. Your heart, that knot of muscle in your chest, has beat in a near-uninterrupted rhythm since your fragile lungs pulled in their first breath of air to scream in terror at what was then a new and terrifying world, and is now only a terrifying world. Your heart has broken. It has also mended. 

“Somehow, against all odds, you have survived to this point. Possibly, you will continue to survive. You will continue to take step after ever-more-steady step, battling setbacks and fatigue and heartbreak, and you will continue still, because it is in the nature of the human spirit to persevere. You will put one foot in front of the other, tireless as the ancestors who pursued their prey across the plains until it collapsed, exhausted, while they kept on going. You will remain, a constant and consistent force, the steady pressure of a river wearing down the Earth's stone foundations over countless eons, until finally, finally you reach a place where you can rest.

“I mean this, specifically, about the aforementioned unseasonably long lines outside the Pinkberry, of course, but now that I've said it, I'm sure there are other things it applies to. Probably. But boy, are those some loooong lines.”

It could have been her own exhaustion or the desperate desire innate to all sentient beings for the events that make up their life to hold some coherent meaning, but the words stuck with her, somehow, resonated as though they held a message specifically for her. They lodged somewhere in the anxious emotional void that gaped in the space around her lungs, glowing with comfort like the warmth of a candle in the darkness, and they stayed with her until she finally settled under the scratchy hotel covers and drifted off. Because she would face the next day, whatever it held. And with any luck, she would face it after a full night of dreamless sleep. 

Chapter Text

The lines outside the convention center moved slowly enough that they felt long, even if they weren't really. 

“I know I asked this back in the car,” Carlos said in a low voice, “but now that I think of it, I never got a straight answer, so: you guys do realize that there's a security checkpoint before we can get in, right?” 

“Yeah,” Hela said. 

“Of course.” 

He let out a breath, and his shoulders relaxed minutely. “So you left everything questionable or dangerous in the car, right?” 

“Define questionable,” Tamika said, and Carlos looked like he'd rather this conversation had gone a different direction. 

It was a moot point, though, because they reached the front of the line before Carlos could answer. Hela slipped quietly to the front, shook her head when they asked if she had a bag, and walked uneventfully through the metal detector. 

Carlos went to follow, but then, so smoothly it seemed like a perfectly natural slip, the man standing behind them tripped over Tamika's shin and they both went down. The man fell in a heap, awkwardly splayed across the concrete, while Tamika neatly broke her fall with a half-roll.

No one noticed the flailing movement of Tamika's leg amidst all the rest of the flailing as she kicked the bag under the table, much less spotted Hela when she grabbed it and calmly started walking towards the building. 

“Sorry,” Tamika said. She stood easily, brushing off her jeans and tactical vest as the man scrambled to his feet. 

“That was my bad,” the man said, and bobbed his head at the checkpoint people with their blocky security vests, whose expressions had gone gradually from concerned to annoyed with them for holding up the line. “You all right?” 

“I'm just fine,” she answered confidently, and stepped through the scanner. Carlos followed, and the look on his face made clear he had noticed their exchange and wasn't sure whether to be impressed or exasperated. 

They stepped aside to regroup a few steps further on, and Hela covertly slid her father's knife out of the bag and into her belt before handing it over. Carlos shook his head but didn't say anything. 

The crowd thinned significantly after the security checkpoint, and then bunched together again toward the doors, where staff were signing in conference-goers and issuing badges. They moved over into the group near one of the doors, and the woman standing there glanced up from a tablet and gave Carlos a look of bored indifference. “Name?” 

“Dr Carlos Ramirez,” he said, and she frowned as she tapped at her screen. “I have my confirmation email, if you'd like to see it.” 

“No, here you are.” She tapped something else and started to wave him forward, then stopped. “You can't bring your children with you,” she said. 

Carlos cleared his throat. “They're my interns.” 

She blinked down at Hela and Tamika suspiciously, looking fully engaged in the conversation for the first time.  “Aren't they a little young?” 

“Oh,” Carlos waved a hand, “they said it would be fine. The science curriculum at the local school is very progressive. You can ask either of them a question about quantum physics if you don't believe me.” 

The woman frowned harder, but it was difficult to tell if the expression was disbelief or distaste for the topic. “Fine,” she said, and typed furiously for a couple of seconds on her tablet. “Dr. Ramirez and two interns.” 

Their name tags hadn't been printed, possibly because they hadn't been in the system until the day before, so they each got a grudging apology and a temporary tag that was a square white sticker labeled in permanent marker. Hela's and Tamika's only said "Intern", while Carlos had to spell his name twice. He took the sticker and carefully pressed it to the pocket of his lab coat, then straightened it and nodded. Hela followed him into the building, looking around with wide eyes. 

“Why did you tell them our school is advanced?” she whispered. “They don't even teach us to believe in mountains.” 

“Could you have answered the questions?” he asked in a low voice. 

“Of course,” she said, at the same time Tamika said “obviously.” 

“Then it was true enough.”

Tamika peeled her name tag off the second they were through the door, wadding it up into a small ball and tossing it into the nearest trash can. “Name tags that say intern are bad luck,” she said when Hela gave her a questioning look. 

“I'm pretty sure that's only at the radio station.” 

Tamika shrugged. “Better safe than sorry.” Hela thought for a moment, then peeled off her own tag and covertly slipped it into the trash. 

The conference center was huge. Not as large as Asgard's palace, of course, but then Asgard had never been so crammed full of people and booths, noise and chatter and activity. 

A small stage with chairs had been set up at one end of the building, and a man paced back and forth with a microphone, saying something so laced with Midgardian technical terms that the Allspeak wouldn't properly translate it. Booths lined the walls and stood free in the center, stocked with brochures and handouts and manned overwhelmingly by tired-looking young people who were probably actually interns. Arrows pointed people towards doors and hallways in the back that, according to the signs, led to panels and smaller presentations. 

Hela read them to herself as they walked past. Up In The Air: The Calculus of Wind Turbine Optimization was being held in the room next to Solarpunk and Integrated Sustainability. A little ways down they passed WMD or Cheap Energy: The Politics of Nuclear Power in the Modern Age, then Rubiscorp: What Plants Can Teach Corporations About Atmospheric Carbon Scrubbing. 

Tamika leaned over and whispered “Who are we looking for, again?” 

She bit her lip and concentrated. Illusion magic didn't come easily to her, but she'd learned enough to conjure up a small illusion in the palm of her hand. She cupped her hand around it and tilted it to show Tamika. She'd seen enough pictures of Mr. Stark in her prior research that she thought the likeness was recognizable, at least. Tamika nodded and she closed her hands, banishing the image. They ducked through the crowd, weaving their way around groups and scanning faces as they walked. 

She finally spotted the man she was looking for standing alongside a solar-powered robotics display, poking at something while an uncomfortable-looking desk intern visibly wavered between asking him to stop and being intimidated by his celebrity status. She started forward, but stopped just as quickly when she recognized the man standing nearby and talking to him. 

“That man over there,” she whispered to Carlos when he bent down to hear, “I think he's the Hulk.” 

“Where?” she pointed, and he let out a low whistle. “Yep, that's Dr Bruce Banner.” 

“What are we going to do?” She watched Dr Banner, who was deceptively short and, well, normal-looking, until he glanced in her direction and she had to avert her eyes. “If he freaks out and turns into the Hulk, we can't handle that.”

“Hm. Maybe he won't?” Carlos sounded...not quite as unsure as she felt, but it came close. “I mean, you'd just be asking some questions. And it's not like he won't know your father works with the Avengers, even if they haven't worked together yet?” 

“They haven't,” she confirmed. “Papa won't, because Hulk is too unpredictable and doesn't like him. And I'm technically the goddess of death. That may not freak people out in Night Vale...” 

“But here it could be an issue.” He swore under his breath in Spanish. “Okay, okay. I'll distract Dr Banner. No big deal, not like I've looked up to the man since I was thirteen, no. Just two scientists talking about science and other science stuff.” He groaned. “Now I sound like Cecil. But with none of the eloquence, or charm...I'm going to embarrass myself in front of my childhood hero. This is happening.” 

For all of that, though, when he strode easily up to where the two Avengers were chatting, he spoke easily and fluidly, only a slight increase in the intensity of an accent that was usually all but imperceptible giving away his nervousness. “Dr Banner,” he said with just the right mixture of excitement and shyness, “I'm a huge fan of your work.” He ran his fingers nervously through his hair. 

Dr Banner raised his eyebrows and glanced down at Carlos' name tag. “Dr Ramirez? Are you the same Dr Ramirez that published a paper on localized gravitational fluctuations?” 

Carlos flushed and smiled, and his next words came out so fast they almost tripped over each other on the way out. “No, I mean yes, that's my paper, but you can call me Carlos.” 

“I'd love to discuss your findings, if you have the time,” Dr Banner said, sounding genuinely impressed before looking, abruptly, like he'd just remembered something he'd rather not have forgotten. “Tony?” 

Mr. Stark waved a hand. “Go. Be nerds. Get a room, if this turns out the way it's headed. I'll hang out here.”

Carlos blushed even deeper. “I'm in a committed relationship,” he said defensively, and Dr Banner shook his head. 

“Don't mind Tony, he's just like that,” he said. “So how did you come up with your method of measuring distortions in localized spacetime?” 

They wandered off, leaving Mr. Stark shaking his head and chuckling and, most importantly, alone. Hela moved in, standing tall and making her strides purposeful as she approached. She could feel rather than hear Tamika moving behind her, and the other girl's presence reassured her. 

She raised her voice. “Mr. Stark?” 

He turned and looked, then turned further, craning his neck before looking down and spotting her. “Oh, it's a munchkin. I didn't know they allowed kids at these things.” Despite the dismissiveness in his tone, she still had his attention, so she steeled herself and lifted her chin. “What did you want, little lady? I'm not giving autographs right now, but—” 

“My name is Hela Lokadottir,” she said firmly, “and I'm looking for my father.” 

“That's—” his face lost some of its color, and he opened and closed his mouth. “Hela? Like, the goddess of death Hela? I thought you'd be...well, less tiny for one thing.” He glanced around nervously at the people milling about, as though to make sure they were all still alive. 

“I'm the normal size for my age,” she said politely, “and I'm looking for my father. Do you know where he is?”

“What, who? Loki? Isn't he with you? I thought he'd be with you.” It would be amusing how nervous her presence made him, if it weren't a bit hurtful. And if she didn't need this information so badly. 

“If he was, I wouldn't be looking for him,” she said reasonably. “He's been gone for more than a week.” She tried, but the nervousness wormed its way into her voice anyways. 

“Really. Huh.” He scrubbed a hand over his mouth. “Well, I haven't seen him for, let me think, six days? He helped us take down that rogue whatever-it-was--honestly, I'm not even sure why they called him in, we were doing fine—and then he disappeared off back home like he always does. Or at least I assumed that's what happened until you showed up here.” 

Her heart sank. “So you don't have any idea where he could be?” 

“I'm sorry, kiddo.” The genuine sympathy in his words didn't quite make up for the disappointment that sunk her heart in her chest. If he didn't know anything, she had no idea what her next step would be. Her papa could be anywhere, and even though Midgard was small, considering, it still seemed far too large for her to scour alone. Something like panic scratched at the inside of her ribs, and she carefully tamped it down, keeping her chin high and her expression steady. 

“Thank you anyway,” she said, and by some miracle her voice didn't wobble. She turned to go, had half-taken a step towards the door because she couldn't stay here and still hold herself together, when Tamika caught her shoulder. 

She looked up, but the other girl was staring straight at Mr Stark, her expression so intense that he looked unnerved. “Why are you lying?” Tamika said, her voice level with just a hint of menace. 

“What? I'm not lying, and I don't know what you're talking about.” He took a half-step back, and glanced around nervously. 

“You're not telling the whole truth, then,” she said. “What aren't you telling us?” 

“I promise, I don't know anything, I—whoa.”  A really rather large knife, or perhaps a small sword, had appeared in Tamika's hand. She had it tucked against the inside of her forearm so that no one around them could see it, but she'd tilted it enough to catch the light, and Mr Stark had both hands raised in a placating gesture. 

“I know when I'm being lied to,” she said simply, “and I don't appreciate it.” 

“And I am not lying,” he said. “I swear, I didn't know until just now that he was even missing.”

“But?” Hela asked, and Tamika crossed her arms, the knife no longer visible but, knowing Tamika, almost certainly still within reach. 

“But now that I do know, I have an idea about what might have happened. I don't know anything, though. I was going to check it out as soon as you left, and that's the truth.” 

“What are you thinking?” 

He twitched, nervously, then glanced around before dropping down to one knee. In this position, she was just a bit taller than he was. “I shouldn't be telling you this,” he muttered, “but SHIELD built a new ‘storage’ facility a few months ago. It's supposed to be housing scraps of the Chitauri tech we salvaged from the invasion, but the orders they've put in don't match the reported specs, and there's a lot of power being routed over there for a glorified warehouse. It's suspicious, and I've been meaning to check it out. And, now that I think about it, the construction started right after the first time Lok—your dad helped us out, with that nutso Asgardian sorceress.” 

Hela felt sick. “You think SHIELD took him? After they asked for his help?” She couldn't fathom why they would do something to him, not when he'd been helping. 

Stark grimaced. “I don't know. Like I said before. It's just a guess, but...”

“Location,” Tamika demanded. 

“Look, I get it, this is an issue, but I'm not going to send a couple of kids into a secure SHIELD facility, we'll get in contact with—”

“Location,” Tamika said again, and Stark swallowed. 

“Let me write that down for you.” He grabbed a pamphlet from a nearby booth, something to do with a new solar panel design based on photosynthetic zooplankton, then flipped it over and scribbled an address. “I still don't think you should—”

“Thank you.” Tamika took it, handed it over her shoulder to Hela, and nodded crisply but politely. 

“Hey.” For all it was unassuming, the voice turned the blood to ice in Hela's veins. “Is something the matter?” 

“No, Bruce, nothing's wrong, everything is, just, totally fine.” Dr Banner raised one eyebrow—after all, Mr Stark might just be a worse liar than Hela herself—but he didn't look green, or angry, or particularly inclined to sudden violence. “I was just talking to—” 

“My interns,” Carlos finished smoothly. Apparently, his nervousness hadn't survived a couple of minutes of science talk, and Hela wasn't particularly surprised. “This is Tamika, and this is Hela.” 

“Yeah. Interns.” Mr. Stark still looked spooked, and he spread his hands before leaning, a little too abruptly to be casual, on the counter of the nearest booth. “Just, you know, telling the kiddos about our plans for assisting China with switching over to Stark-based renewable energy. Nothing else going on here.” 

“Hela?” Dr. Banner asked. “Like...” He dropped his voice, “Loki's Hela? That Hela?” 

This was...not good. But if anything good was to come of it... “Do you know where my father is?” 

“What?” He looked confused, and maybe a little alarmed, but still small and pale and not green. “Tony, what's she talking about? What's going on?”

He started to mumble something that sounded like “...tell you later,” but Carlos spoke over him, a little too loud. 

“Well, thank you Dr. Banner, Mr. Stark, but we won't take up any more of your time. Girls?” 

“If you're thinking about trying to stop us,” Tamika said in a low voice, fixing Stark with a dark look, “you should know that I was the leader of the Night Vale summer reading program.” She pulled open her oversized tactical vest, revealing something small and shrunken dangling from an inside pocket. Librarians looked different, Hela thought, when they were carefully desiccated. 

Stark looked nauseated. “Is that a severed head?” 

“Tamika,” Carlos sighed, “I told you to leave that in the car.”

“No really,” Dr. Banner said, and he sounded truly anxious, now. “What's happening?”

Several people in uniform started making their way towards their group, and while the uniforms were too bland and hatless to resemble those of the Sherriff's Secret Police, Hela felt comfortable assuming they were some sort of security or similar authority. Carlos took her hand and Tamika's and started walking them quickly towards the exit. Tamika twisted back for just long enough to point at her own eyes and then back at Stark, still glaring impressively. 

“Did he know anything?” Carlos asked in a low voice as they made it through the door and back out into the sunlight, which seemed brighter now than before. Hela didn't look back, but the sounds from the people behind them took on a more agitated quality. She walked faster. 

“We have an address,” Tamika said. 

“We threatened an Avenger,” Hela added. 

“I noticed.” 

“You don't sound surprised,” she hazarded. They reached the end of the parking lot and stopped at the edge of the street before, as one, they glanced both ways and sprinted across. That, at least, might slow down anyone still inclined to follow them. 

“I'm getting harder to surprise,” Carlos said, breathing a little heavily from the exertion. “Living in Night Vale is like a vaccine against the absurd. I can honestly say that you two picking a fight with a rich, famous public figure who is also a superhero isn't one of the weirdest things to happen this year.” 

“Mr Stark thinks...he said SHIELD might have my father,” she said. They reached the van, safe where they'd left in in the far lot, and clambered inside. 

“Who?” 

“The Vague Yet Menacing Government Agency,” Carlos told Tamika. 

“So what's our next move?” 

“If SHIELD does have him, we can't go to the police,” Carlos said quietly. “They answer only to World Government.” 

“Maybe the rest of the Avengers?” Hela saw the flaws in the suggestion as soon as she made it, and sure enough, Carlos shook his head. 

“We don't know where they are, or how to contact them. Besides,” he said, “we didn't make the best impression on the two we did manage to track down. Unless you have a way to get in touch with your uncle...” 

“I don't.”

“Then I don't see us being able to reach them, unless you two have any ideas.”

“I won't just give up and go back,” Hela said. The back of her throat burned, and she blinked several times to head off the hot, prickly feeling of gathering tears. 

“Then it's settled.” Tamika clapped her hands together, so startlingly loud in the midst of their hushed discussion that Hela momentarily forgot she had been on the edge of tears. “We go break him out.” 

“Whoa.” Carlos put up his hands. “We don't even know if he's actually there. This is just a guess.” 

Tamika shrugged. “If he's not there we don't break him out. It's not hard.” 

“We can't just break into a secure government facility. You're both children.” 

“So?” 

He sputtered. “It's dangerous!” 

Tamika turned, looked him dead in the eyes. “Do you think,” she said carefully, “we've never done anything dangerous?” He only looked uncomfortable, didn't answer, so she continued. “I led the summer reading program. I've survived thirteen years in Night Vale; thirteen Valentine's Days, an unknowable number of Street Cleaning Days, several parades and even a carnival. When I was seven. I was forged in blood and fire and healthy levels of civic resistance. Am I supposed to believe that, in this watered-down world outside of our home, breaking into a secure government facility is more dangerous than, say, a game of crossbow tag or cooking with mysterious mushrooms camp?”

“You shouldn't be doing those things either,” Carlos said. “Especially crossbow tag. The lab even put up posters to try and discourage people from doing that!” 

She hummed thoughtfully. “That was you? I always thought those were propaganda put up by rogue plastic bags.” 

“No! It's a terrible idea!” 

“My point still stands,” Tamika said obstinately. “I've faced far worse dangers than this.” 

“And I spent a significant amount of time trapped in a horrifying nether realm haunted by the shades of the dead,” Hela said. She didn't say ‘banished to’, although that would be half-true, or ‘ruling’, as that would probably be less true than the other. “Plus there's a significant chance that I can't die.” 

“Wait, really?” 

She shrugged. “I haven't tested it, for obvious reasons, but I am the goddess of death.” 

Carlos looked back and forth between them, and his shoulders dropped as he sighed. “I can't stop you, can I?” 

“Not really, no.” 

“Don't feel too bad about it,” Tamika added. “We're very hard to stop.”

“Alright,” Carlos huffed. “I guess we're breaking into a secret government facility.” 

“Thank you,” Hela said, quietly. 

Tamika grinned back at her. “What are friends for, if not helping you commit violent felonies for the people you love?” 

Chapter Text

The address Stark had given them, once it was punched into Tamika's phone, turned out to be only on the opposite edge of the city. Suspiciously close, then, both to their current location and to Night Vale itself. Not that strange coincidences were unusual, especially not in Night Vale, but they weren't in Night Vale and it was a bit too odd to just dismiss as a coincidence. In a way, it strengthened her suspicions that this mysterious SHIELD outpost had something to do with her father's disappearance, even if there wasn't a clear line of logic linking the two. 

Tamika took them on a long, winding route along the edges of the city, and while part of Hela wanted to protest the delay, the decision was tactically sound. Staying away from busy areas and thereby most traffic cameras and police was probably wise after their run-in with Stark. 

So they were all but alone on a winding back road, the landscape on either side a faded blend of the natural desert landscape and ever-present cityscaping, when Hela noticed a dark speck hovering above the horizon. It grew larger, then took on a roughly humanoid shape. By the time she made out why it looked so familiar, it had landed in the center of the lane directly in front of their van. 

Carlos swore and jerked the wheel to the side, and the van screeched on its locked-up brakes before lurching to a stop. 

There was silence for a second, an awkward staredown as Tamika turned the crank to roll down the window, and then she stuck her head outside and shouted “Get out of the road, creepy scowling automaton!” 

“No can do, little lady.”

“That's Iron Man,” Hela whispered. Emotion churned in her stomach, a confused mixture of dread and the childish excitement at seeing a superhero. She'd met him earlier, of course, but then he'd only looked like an ordinary businessman, short and a bit condescending. The suit, it seemed, inspired more of the awe of celebrity than the man inside it. 

“Really? Who's that?” Tamika whispered back. 

“Tony Stark. The guy you threatened earlier.” 

“Oh.” She blinked. “Carlos, floor it!” 

“I'm not going to floor it.”

Hela stuck her head out the window, next to Tamika. “What do you want, Stark?” 

“Why won't you floor it?” Tamika muttered over her shoulder. 

“The suit's a titanium alloy. The van would be crushed.” 

“Look,” Stark said, “I know we got off on the wrong foot, and I get it, I really do, but I can't let you guys go storm a SHIELD base.” 

“You can't stop us, either,” Tamika shouted back.

“I can, actually. That's why I'm here.” He raised his hands, glowing with superheated plasma, and Carlos swore again. 

“Wait, are you gonna attack a car full of kids?” Hela asked, raising her eyebrows. 

“That's reprehensible,” Tamika added. 

“What? No!” His hands dropped, and he looked vaguely uncomfortable standing stiff in the middle of the road. Hela got the impression that he'd like to put his hands in his pockets, only his mechanical suit didn't have them. He crossed his arms. “Plan A is talk you out of this, and Plan B, you go into time out until the grownups work things out.” 

“Both your plans are terrible.” Tamika looked back at Carlos. “Are you sure you can't run him over?” 

“Very sure.” 

“Look,” he said, “I'm reaching out to a couple of people right now, including the director of SHIELD. Let's discuss this, talk it out like adults.”

“I'm not an adult,” Tamika shot back, “and I'm not particularly impressed by their typical conflict resolution skills or political processes.” 

“...okay, that's fair,” he said. 

“Drive around him,” Tamika said suddenly. “Just go around. We don't have to listen to this.” 

Carlos looked from Iron Man, still standing in the road, back to them, then gunned the engine, jerked the steering wheel, and whipped around where he was standing. Tamika whooped as they floored it and sped down the road, wind whipping in through the open window as they accelerated. The sensation was oddly freeing, and Hela couldn't help a giddy laugh as they rushed forward. 

“Rude.” The voice snapped her out of her thoughts, and she jerked her head to the side. Outside the window, Stark was keeping pace with them easily, floating beside the van at eye level and leaving trails of bright light behind him. The mask tilted until the glowing eyes were staring straight at her, and even though she knew the expression couldn't change, they seemed drawn together in an angry scowl. 

Carlos cleared his throat. “Okay, did we have a plan past ‘drive really fast for as long as we can’, or—” 

“Keep going!” Tamika leaned forward as if it would make the car go faster, grinning wildly. They sped up, and the scenery flew by so quickly and smoothly their tires may as well not be touching the ground. 

Check that. Their tires weren't touching the ground. 

Metal hands had wrapped around the roof of the van, gripping it at the tops of the open windows, and the rest of the suit must have attached itself magnetically to the vehicle because they were staying mostly level as they rose slowly off the ground, first by  a few inches, then nearly a foot. 

“Let go!” she demanded. 

“Put us down!” 

“No can do.” Their momentum slowed until finally  they reversed, now headed back the way they had come. “Like I said, can and will stop you running off.” 

His voice echoed, metallic and oddly vacant, like it had nothing much to echo against. 

She stood up, peering up and over the edge of the van roof at the metal suit splayed over it. Now that she was paying attention, there was something...off about Stark himself, too, something out of place. His limbs, stretched out for balance as they hauled the van, held on with a grip that was oddly precise. And despite being clearly solid, he felt hollow to her somehow, wrong, as if some key part of him were just missing. 

...as if he weren't really there. 

“You're not in the suit, are you?” she asked suddenly. “It's empty.” 

The mechanical face tilted towards her, still scowling without any real expression. “Yeah, why?” 

“Because then I can do this.” She wrapped one hand around the metal gauntlet wrapped around the van, fingers small against the oversized metal ones, and closed her eyes. 

Hela didn't consider herself a seidkona or sorceress. She hadn't inherited her father's gift for magic, either in magnitude of power or the easy facility with which he learned and manipulated the theories behind it, no matter how much as she would have liked to. She had, in fact, very little true seidr of her own. Practice had taught her a few simple spells--astral projection for messaging purposes, short-term invisibility, summoning light and so forth--but they were nothing most Aesir children could not learn through long and careful practice. 

That did not mean, however, that she was powerless. 

Like her, her uncle Thor was not particularly gifted in magic. When he'd visited, she'd been surprised to learn he had even less affinity for it than she did. And yet he had carried within him another sort of energy, a control of lightning that was a sort of magic all his own. He'd been appropriately called the god of thunder as a way of describing that skill, that aptitude, that force of nature that resided within him. 

And Hela was, however much she preferred not to think of it, the goddess of death. Not glorious death on the battlefield, the way Asgard preferred; no, that belonged to Odin. She was the goddess of death the reality. Of the slow chipping away of centuries, of decay, of non-being and then being reclaimed back from the universe in other forms and for other uses. Of withered, dead grass, of carrion, of loss and tears of mourning and fear of the unknown. Of falling-apart and non-being. 

Her father had never told her outright to fear this part of her, of her power. He'd held her close more than once as she cried about it, rocking back and forth and telling her she was okay, not wrong, not broken. Taken her out into the fields to bless the mushrooms and watch them expand, glutted on dead leaves, gifted her trinkets of polished bone, pointed out the crows in the sky and counted them with her as they swooped down out of the trees to sail overhead as soldiers practiced in their yards. 

But still, he'd been uneasy with it, and children are not so imperceptive as to miss such a thing however well it is hidden. He'd warned her from an early age, with a grave seriousness he rarely used to address his children, not to draw on those abilities when playing with her brothers. Not to so much as practice near them, at least until her control was absolute. He'd comforted her when she killed her first pet, a small white rabbit she'd named Sven, but the worry etched into his face hadn't escaped her, so deep it might almost have been fear. 

It was the same fear, presumably, that led Odin to have her sent away. A fear she couldn't even begrudge either of them, because she'd felt it herself. Fear that the next thing she hurt, killed, wouldn't be a rabbit. That she'd do something unthinkable and irreversible by mistake, by virtue of only being who she was. 

She feared it less, now. Her control had grown with her, and now it took an effort to peel back the layers of protection that kept that part of her from seeping into her touch. She felt it take hold, latch onto the metal like a starving plague of locusts touching down on the earth. She felt as the fingers of the suit slowly, surely started to crumble. 

For nothing, no material nor metal nor being, was truly immune to the ravages of time and decay. Not the Aesir, nor the gold of their cities or the steel and uru of their weapons, and not the titanium alloy of the suit. Some of the races of the Nine lived a short enough time that they could forget that the world around them, the stone and stars and steel, was just as mortal as they were. Hela carried that awareness beneath her skin and tight in the space beneath her lungs. She could feel it, especially during times like this: the inherent fragility of the universe. 

The crumbling spread, and a crack shot from the metal collapsing beneath the pads of her fingers and up the armored forearm. The glowing eyes turned on her as the hand crumbled to dust, releasing only one side of the van. It gave an awkward lopsided bounce as it half-fell. The impact jarred her teeth, but she kept at it. 

The cracks lengthened, revealing the emptiness of the suit's interior though ever-widening fissures. A garbled mechanical whine that might have been Stark trying to say something died out half-finished as the speakers crumbled to powder. The remains of the suit didn't so much topple as pour from the top of the van, a rain of metallic dust already decomposing as it blew away. 

The van hit the ground entirely, and skidded, and stopped, leaving them alone on the road once more. 

“Whoa,” Carlos said, “what was that?” 

“Could you still have done that if he was actually on the inside?” Tamika looked...mostly curious about the answer, and if she was at all disturbed by what happened, it didn't show. Hela suspected she truly wasn't bothered. 

“Yeah,” she said, “but that would be wrong.”

Tamika shrugged her agreement. “I mean, sure.”

She couldn't pin down exactly how she felt. A little breathless, maybe, but not overextended or exhausted the way she usually did after practicing a more complex bit of magic. No, if anything, she felt flushed and exhilarated and alive, and not even the tiny guilty voice telling her she shouldn't feel that way, not when the magic she used was purely destructive in nature, could change that. 

“We should keep going,” she said at last. “He probably has more than one suit.”

Carlos quietly turned the van around, carefully avoiding the larger pieces of the crumbled armor that could puncture the tires, and soon they were rolling down the road once more in a quiet that felt more awkward than it had before. 

“Do you think Mr Stark gave us the right address?” Hela asked once they were a little ways down the road. “I mean, he doesn't want us to make it there. He tried to stop us. And it's pretty weird that the GPS would take us to a secret government base, right? That's weird?” 

Tamika shook her head. “He was telling the truth when he told us where to go.” Her eyes went distant, the expression of someone whose thoughts ran deeper than she wanted to share. “I can always tell when people are lying,” she said. “Lies are just stories told for the wrong reasons. And besides,” she added, “everyone knows that GPS is a scheme run by corporations and governments and foreign militaries to see where we go and how we get there. But secrets run both ways. If they can find us, we can find them.” 

“I don't think that's how any of that works,” Hela said. 

Tamika gave her a sharp look, but it was tempered by a faint if somewhat condescending air of amusement. “Of the two of us, who knows more about how things work on this planet?” 

She wasn't wrong. Hela glanced at Carlos. He didn't say anything, but looked a little like it hurt him not to. 

“Anyhow,” Tamika finished, “the only way we can tell if it's the right place is by going there. If it isn't, we'll have to start over. Find Stark, tell him if he doesn't give us the right one you'll turn his next suit to dust with him inside.” 

“I won't do that.” A small wave of panic rose up the back of her throat at the thought. The memory of Sven, her first and only pet, going limp and cold in her arms drifted into the front of her thoughts unbidden. 

“He doesn't need to know that,” she said. 

“We would lie?” 

She shook her head. “It would be for a good reason.” 

“Which would make it a story,” Hela said skeptically. She had to admit, though, it was an argument that could be made. They would be describing an alternate, fictional turn of events, one that occurred in an imagined universe where Hela was closer to the monster people feared she could become. 

Tamika grinned. “Now you're catching on.” 

Hela kept half an eye on the sky while they drove, but either Stark didn't have another suit handy or he'd decided against sending it after what had happened to the first one. 

The road and the rest of their surroundings grew less interesting as they neared their destination. The asphalt beneath them was worn but well-maintained. The scattered buildings they passed seemed always on the verge of giving way to the familiar desert landscape, but never did, and the resulting blending together of sand and dirt and concrete and soulless, box-shaped buildings created an almost calculated level of bland. 

They parked a little ways away from the red marker sitting on Tamika's map, stashing the van far enough from the road that it hopefully wouldn't be spotted by anyone who tried to follow them. 

Hela had learned the art of walking silently long ago. She would have earned a merit badge for it, if the ‘sneaking in ghostly silence’ badge hadn't been discontinued in order to make room for the newer ‘significant contribution to the blood space war’ badge. Hela had thought the change was silly—no one had been able to earn the new badge yet, in part because the blood space war had apparently been under a truce for a couple years shy of a decade now, or something—the explanations she'd been given hadn't made much sense—but the skill had come in handy often enough to make learning it worthwhile, merit badge or no. 

Tamika moved as silently as she did, and even Carlos, who was a scientist and therefore presumably didn't usually need to sneak around secret government bases very often, was still remarkably quiet as they approached their destination. 

When they got closer to the indicated building, a plain-looking warehouse sitting in front of a patch of unremarkable gravel, she stopped long enough to pull together a quick glamor designed to hide them from electrical surveillance. A simple spell, but even so she couldn't hold it for long. It was better, though, than being immediately spotted by whatever cameras might be in place. 

The spell wouldn't protect them from physical eyes, though, so she kept a wary eye out for guards as they crept closer. There were none, at least not that she could see. 

If she knew slightly less about defensive infrastructure, the exterior of the building would seem unremarkable. As it was, she could spot the state of the art fingerprint reader disguised as an old, worn intercom by the door, the perfectly fitted lines of a pressurized and reinforced doorframe, the way the roof was solid and not made of corrugated tin like the surrounding buildings. She knocked softly on the wood of the outer wall and was rewarded with a heavy thunk that sounded not at all hollow. 

“This is it,” Tamika said, echoing her thoughts. “This building has ‘Vague Yet Menacing Government Agency’ written all over it.” 

“Are we sure breaking in is a good idea?” Carlos asked. Every few seconds he glanced over his shoulder, clearly on edge, but he was still here despite his fear and Hela admired that. 

“No,” Hela said, “but I think we should do it anyway.”

“Okay.” Carlos took a deep breath, and it did seem to calm him, a little. “Any idea how we're going to get in here?” 

Her eyes flicked over the heavy security door, the fingerprint scanner, the reinforced walls and roof and foundation. Even if it didn't look it, the building was a fortress. No one from the government agency could be fooled into letting them in, even trying would be too risky, and forcing their way in would take more strength than any of them had. 

“Actually,” she said at last, “I think I have an idea.” 

Chapter Text

Hela reached into the small pouch-pocket at her waist, the one where she'd stored the most useful odds and ends from her emergency bag, feeling around for a small oblong object. She'd found it tucked away in a corner of the bag, probably as an afterthought, and despite everything it had made her smile. Now, though, she thought it just might prove useful. 

“Blowing open the door would definitely let them know we're here,” Tamika said. “And it would be really awkward if it turns out we're wrong. Do you know how to hack one of these things?” 

“No idea,” Hela said. 

“Carlos? You're a scientist, right?” 

“Scientist,” he said firmly. “I'm not a spy.” 

“I guess explosives it is.”

“Hang on,” Hela said. Her fingers closed around the object she was looking for, and she drew it out carefully before pressing the end of it to the scanner. She held her breath as it thought for a moment before finally it chirped a beep. The door came open with a mechanical click. 

The name ‘Steven Grant Rogers’ flashed briefly across the screen below the scanner and was gone. 

Tamika pushed forward and through the door, but Carlos stared at her, looking a little fascinated and a little sick. “Is that—do you have Captain America's finger?” 

“It's a model,” she said as she slipped it back into her pocket. “I got his fingerprint from the autograph my papa brought back, and the rubber conducts electricity same as a human finger. I made it in scouts during identity theft week. I can also forge his signature and,” she finished the sentence in her best impression, “I can fool most voiceprint analyses.”

“Huh,” Carlos said, “that's useful.”

“It works better than my Tony Stark one.” She nodded. “I only have a partial print for him, so most high-tech scanners won't take it.”

They slipped inside and closed the door quietly behind them. Hela didn't know how much time they had before someone noticed the unorthodox name in the system, or whether they would notice at all, but at least they hadn't set off any alarms. 

The hallways managed to be both too bright and dimly lit; the lights were sharp but they didn't carry, and the ambient gloom was low enough that her eyes couldn't fully adjust to either light or dark. The floors were unvarnished concrete and the walls were thick, and she couldn't help but find the entire place distastefully utilitarian. It had an unfinished air to it, too—there were pallets and crates stacked in corners, and more than once they passed a cascade of plastic sheeting covering the doorway of a half-finished room. She wrinkled her nose. The government in Night Vale might be a bit overbearing, but at least its agents and their facilities had standards.

For the first few moments the building was eerily, almost disturbingly quiet. Like they were the only ones here, or nearly so, or the rest of the people were dead or ghosts or busy doing something else far from them. It put her on edge, more than if they had been dodging government operatives at every step. 

A small, sharp sound echoed down the hall, then again and again, growing louder in a steady rhythm. By the time she recognized it as the sound of heavy bootsteps Tamika was pulling the both of them behind a stack of crates, and they crouched down as the bootsteps turned the corner. 

Her heart pounded faster as the steps moved closer; sharp, utilitarian, more military than was typical for civilian-esque government agents. Footsteps that sounded like that belonged to people loaded down with heavy weapons and equipment, and usually also the weight of responsibility, real or fanatically imagined. 

The soldier got close enough that she could see them, carefully peering around the edge of the box and barely breathing. The uniform they wore was black, but other than that it had nothing in common with one of the Sheriff's Secret Police; no balaclava, no miter, no mask with a vocoder or colorful flags declaring his rank in pictographic symbols. Agents of the Vague Yet Menacing Government Agency usually dressed like normal people, only more formally, at least when she'd seen them. She'd never seen World Government, but she doubted they dressed like this either. 

Right as the man reached their position, one of the doors that led off the hallway swung open. Another man, identically dressed, stepped out into the hall, and they snapped a salute to one another, sharp with military precision. 

Then snapped the salute up and out in front of them, a distinctive motion that left her uneasy. 

“Was that...?” Carlos whispered, looking at them through the gap between the pallet he was huddled next to and the boxes they were crouched behind. He looked vaguely nauseated, more disturbed than a single gesture could usually leave a person. 

“A Nazi salute,” Tamika confirmed, and Hela felt herself shiver. She didn't know much about the history of this realm, but no stories of Captain America's exploits could be told without the grim background of the war the humans had been fighting, nor the horrors perpetrated by that regime. 

“Maybe it's a mistake?” she whispered to Tamika. “Maybe they're not—”

“Hail Hydra,” one of the men intoned in a low voice. The other repeated it back before they nodded as one and marched in their separate ways, the first continuing down the hall while the other moved in the direction he had come from. 

Hela held her breath as the footsteps faded, and only let it out when they went completely silent. She stood, and pins and needles ran down her legs from the tense crouching. 

“You know that rule we established in the car?” Tamika whispered. 

“No ordering the guacamole at Chipotle's because it's really not that great, and also costs extra?”

“No, the other one,” she mouthed silently. “The ‘no permanently injuring government agents, they're only doing their job’ one. I move that we throw it out in light of this new information.” 

“Agreed,” Hela said. 

“No.” She and Tamika gave Carlos almost identical sharp looks, but he only shook his head, looking as serious and as grim as she'd ever seen him. “We should leave, now. We're in over our heads. I mean, we were when this was only a base for a shadowy world government organization, but Hydra? These are literal Nazis. We need to go get help.” 

“I'm not leaving without my papa,” she said firmly. The thought sent a spike of dread pulsing through her stomach. “Especially if these are worse people than we knew. We can't leave him here.” 

“Agreed.” Tamika's nod was short, businesslike. “We don't leave people behind. Not during the Summer Reading Program, not on street cleaning day, and not when raiding secret undercover Nazi prison bases.”

He studied them, still looking a little like a rabbit about to bolt and a lot like a terrified scientist about to argue, but at last his shoulders dropped a little as he sighed. “You aren't going to listen to me, are you?” 

“Nope.” 

“If we all get killed I'm never forgiving either of you,” he whispered at last. 

“Then we'll just have to not get killed.”

Carlos groaned, quietly but still loud enough in the silent hall to make her tense. “We're going to die,” he muttered. “It'll probably make the news. ‘Idiot Scientists Brings Children to Raid Secret Government Base’. Or maybe ‘Worst Adult Supervision in World Lets Little Girls Pick Fight With Nazis’.”

Tamika snorted. “Don't be ridiculous,” she said. “This is still a quasi-government organization. They know better than to let the news figure out who they've disappeared.” 

“Thanks,” he said, “That's comforting.” 

She gave him a thumbs up, grinning despite the sarcasm, or maybe because of it. “Any time.”

They had another close call creeping down the hall, and another when they nearly stumbled into a room filled with ominous cabinets and three more agents, presumably also Hydra, rummaging through them. Hela barely caught herself and kept from tripping right outside the door and giving their position away. 

It felt unnervingly like she imagined it would to be a ghost, drifting silently through a half-alive landscape. The sharp lights and equally crisp shadows combined to give the halls they moved through an odd, unreal quality, like a poorly-rendered digital image. 

Even more unnerving, none of them knew exactly where they were going, and the result was a fair amount of unnecessary stumbling around where every moment they spent in the building increased their chances of being caught. They followed one hall down to an unfinished set of rooms, hung with plastic and the air stuffy with the smell of plaster and insulation, before backtracking. Another deadended into a stairwell that led up, presumably to the roof. 

They were picking out their way back from those stairs, still a ways from the more heavily occupied parts of the building, when they turned a corner and nearly ran head-on into an armed guard. 

“Don't move!” The man stumbled back and raised his weapon, watching them with an expression of startled fear that slowly faded to disgusted anger as he apparently realized they were two children and an obviously harmless civilian. She could see the moment he mentally disregarded them as a threat. More fool him. 

“Hail Hydra,” Tamika said suddenly, and he stiffened. 

The other expressions gave way to discomfort and suspicion both, but the answer came back through gritted teeth. “Hail Hydra.” 

“You know the new salute, right?” Tamika said casually, and his eyes flickered back to her and away, uncomfortable. “Here, I'll show you.” 

She motioned for him to come in close, to watch carefully, and he leaned in a little bit despite himself. The uppercut rattled his teeth together and he dropped like a stone. 

“New salute?” Hela asked as the two of them quickly and methodically checked the downed man for weapons. She found a handgun and carefully unloaded it while Tamika disassembled the automatic rifle. 

“I'm hoping it catches on,” she said, and shook out her hand before slipping a knife from the man's belt and into her own. “If we can get them to punch each other, it'll be more efficient and save the rest of us some bruised knuckles.”

Ordinarily, she'd be concerned by how long the man remained unresponsive, but she decided she had enough things of her own to worry about just now to care about a Nazi guard's possible brain injuries. Tamika had a fair amount of rope in her bag, and together it took them no time at all to secure the man and, with a coordinated effort between the both of them, drag him into one of the abandoned side rooms. 

“Come on,” she said to Carlos, who had slumped against the wall and was staring off into space in much the same way new scouts did after their first round of combat training. Scared, shocked, grateful to be alive and not fully believing it was true. 

To his credit, though, he shook himself and stood, and barely wavered before he steadied himself and gave them a shaky smile. “I'm good,” he said, almost convincingly. “Let's go.”

They wound their way back out of the dead-end hall, and the sense of time running out grew as they moved. After all, if the guard they'd taken down survived they had only a limited amount of time before he woke up, and either way another Hydra operative could stumble on him at any time. Now, no matter how carefully they moved, their time undiscovered could end in a second. 

After only a few moments more a siren split the air, shrieking out all around them, and Carlos swore. They ducked into an empty room just in time for several men with heavy, booted footsteps to sprint past them. They were gone again more quickly than Hela would have expected; if they had been discovered, if the men were searching for them, they should have moved more slowly, looked more thoroughly. 

Hela wasn't about to look a gift void in the maw of its dark emptiness, though, so she waited until she was sure they had truly gone and then took a deep breath. 

“Do you think they found him?” she asked, louder than she would have dared if the sirens hadn't been conveniently drowning out all sound. That, at least, might help them; they could move more quickly if the didn't need to worry about how much noise they were making. 

“I dunno,” Tamika said back, “but it seems safe to assume they know we're here.”

Hela cut off an uneasy breath and nodded. Tamika was right; even if they seemed misdirected, the alarm meant something had alerted Hydra to their presence, and it was too much to hope that whatever distraction had sent them running would last. “So what do we do?” 

“The same thing we were planning before,” Tamika answered without hesitation. “Only more quickly, and probably with more difficulty than if they hadn't noticed us.”

They came to a bend in the hall and Tamika moved in front, carefully peering around before waving them back. They retreated a few steps, and Hela felt her heart jump when Tamika leaned over and whispered “It's that way. We're getting close.” 

“How can you tell?” Carlos asked, and it was all Hela could do not to charge around the corner and see for herself. As it was, she took a half-step forward before she stopped herself. 

“Is my papa here? Did you see him?” 

Tamika shook her head. “No. But there are two more guards around that corner, and even with the alarms they're looking at the door they're watching as often as they're looking around. Which suggests,” she continued, “that they're there at least as much to keep someone or something in as to keep people out, and that they're also at least as afraid of whatever that is as they are of intruders.” 

“My papa,” Hela breathed. If Tamika was right, they were close. There were still challenges between here and there, starting with the undoubtedly armed and trained Nazi guards, but they were almost there.

“Seems like it could be.”

Carlos hummed, nearly silent. “How are we going to get past?”

Hela moved stealthily towards the corner, crouching down and angling herself so she could just see around. The hall opened out onto a small room, well-lit, windowless, and empty except for two guards. Tamika was right; the men were very obviously stationed and standing in such a way that they would be prepared to take down a threat coming from the opposite direction, even if the siren did have them glancing around. 

“Maybe if we had a distraction...” she started, but trailed off in the middle of her sentence. It took everything inside her, every scrap of her sense and focus, to keep her from launching herself towards the door and just running. 

To her surprise, it was Carlos who spoke next. “Do you two both have your invisibility badges?”

Hela nodded, and beside her, Tamika shook her head.

“That's okay then, Hela, you can—”

Tamika clutched a knife in one hand, then stood and stepped out into the open, throwing them a smirk over her shoulder as the guards raised their weapons and shouted. “Invisibility is for those who have a reason to hide.”

Carlos gaped and Hela stood to help her friend, but by the time she reached her feet the guards were flat on their backs, one clutching his bleeding chest and whimpering while the other sprawled unconscious across the floor.

“Did you just kill those guys?” Carlos had gone pale, and looked like he was half-ready to throw up.

Tamika shrugged, and wiped her switchblade clean on the leg of her jeans, the movement careful and precise. “They'll live.”

“Are you sure? Because from where I'm standing that does not at all seem sure. Doctors worry about bleeding in the brain when you knock someone unconscious for a few seconds, never mind how long that guy's staying out. And bleeding like that,” he gestured to the other man, who directed a fuzzy glare at them both and seemed seconds from joining his partner in unconsciousness, “is always bad.”

“It's a rare martial art. You'll see it a lot in the movies.” Tamika bent over to take one of the guns from the unconscious guard; she expertly disassembled it with swift fingers, then tossed aside the gun and dropped the bullets into her pocket. “Hardly ever kills anyone. They use it to save money, because reusing actors is cheaper than growing new ones from scratch.” 

Almost before she finished talking the door the two unfortunate men had been guarding flew open, revealing a wide staircase leading down and two more men in the now-familiar SHIELD-slash-Hydra uniform. Hela flinched back instinctively, and while Tamika threw herself out of the way and pitched the gun she was still holding at one man's temple with perfectly precise aim, Carlos leaned back and planted a strong kick in the other's stomach. The gun bounced off Tamika's opponent's skull as he crumpled, and the man Carlos kicked flailed for a second before toppling back down the stairs in a series of loud, graphic thumps followed by silence. 

“Nice one,” Tamika said, holding her hand up for a high-five. Carlos gave her the high-five on dazed reflex before staring in befuddled horror at the stairs. 

Hela didn't wait to see how he would react; she all but flew down the stairs, taking them two at a time. Carlos' panicked breathing and the sound of Tamika's boots a second later told her that her friends were right behind her. 

The stairs took them down until at the bottom was another hall with a series of heavy doors, solid except for a tiny reinforced window well above her head. She let a tiny bit of her magic slip, just enough to let her sense the life of those around her, and other than Carlos and Tamika beside her there was only one living thing on this level, behind the second door. 

“I think he's in here,” she said, and pointed. 

The door buzzed at a low frequency she suspected was outside the range of human hearing, crackling and alive with a dangerous amount of energy dedicated to keeping it sealed. She couldn't tell if it was some sort of force shield reinforcing the door or an electromagnetic bolt or something she'd never heard of and wouldn't recognize, but it didn't matter because the lock on the door was another of the fingerprint scanners. She dug through her pouch again for the imitation Captain America finger and succeeded in fishing it out only to drop it on the floor and bob back down to retrieve it. Her hands shook a little as she pressed it to the scanner, but it only let out a heartening click as the door unlatched. She pushed it open slowly, carefully, and looked inside. 

The cell didn't have any furniture. It didn't have any features at all, not really, except for the figure slumped and unconscious in the center of the room, looking too small and helpless to be her father. Heavy, thick chains wrapped around his feet and hands and arms and legs, pulling them together in an almost comically elaborate series of restraints. They looped over and back to the wall, attached with heavy bolts to the solid concrete. 

She could guess why. One of the side walls that the cell shared with its neighbor had a roughly human-shaped dent, stained with a few spots of vague rust that was probably dried blood. The floors were scuffed, the walls chipped, mute evidence that keeping the god of chaos subdued within even these heavily reinforced walls had been no easy task. 

She took all of this in during the half-second it took for her to rush inside, trusting Carlos and Tamika to watch for approaching trouble as she dropped to her knees. As she got closer it became clear that he wasn't fully unconscious; his breathing was too controlled, his shoulders too stiff for that. 

“Papa?” she said uncertainly, and her voice wobbled just a little. 

His eyes opened, and the muted fire she saw there faded almost instantly to cold fear as he looked at her. “Hela?” Her name came out a little bit panicked, a little bit slurred. “No. You shouldn't be here.” He tried to reach for her, unsteadily, but the chains pulled his wrist up short. She reached across the gap to take his hand and squeezed. 

“It's okay,” she said, even though it wasn't. The chains looked near-unbreakable, especially for their group with limited time and very few tools, and this uncharacteristic sluggishness scared her. 

Carlos dropped down next to her, and her papa hardly seemed to notice as the scientist felt for the pulse at his wrist and peered into his eyes. His attention stayed on Hela, and the unsettling mixture of fear and disorientation didn't dissipate. “My guess is he's been drugged,” Carlos said clinically. “Probably to keep him from doing that,” he nodded to the vaguely human-shaped imprint on the wall, “again.”

“I'm sorry,” her papa said. “I'm sorry, I'm sorry. You shouldn't be here. They shouldn't have been able to find you.” 

“Shh,” she said. “It's okay. We're here to get you out.” 

“It's my fault.” He sounded so defeated, so scared, and it made her heart clench. “I'm sorry,” he said, “I was stupid. I thought…” He trailed off, but she thought she could guess what he meant anyway. 

She rested a hand on his cheek, and his eyes drifted closed. “It's okay,” she said again, “if you do something stupid for a good reason, that makes it brave.” She leaned in and kissed his forehead, and politely ignored the tears that had started to gather in the corner of his eyes. 

She closed her own eyes a second later, wrapped one hand around the heavy chain, and did her best to put everything else out of her mind. 

Any emotion could influence magic, set it off-course and turn even a simple spell deadly, but anger and fear were perhaps the most dangerous. She did her best to clear them from her mind, to lock them away deep down someplace where they couldn't reach her, before she reached, once again, for her magic. 

The chain started to crumble in her hand almost the second she thought about it, turning to a thin metallic dust that sifted through her fingers. She had only meant to break through that one spot, to create a gap and then repeat the process, but as soon as it started the destruction spread like fire burning along a fuse. Perhaps she had not locked away her anger so well after all, or perhaps some part of her couldn't be satisfied until the entire metal abomination was swallowed up in death and decay. The rot spread, up and over the chains linking his hands and down around those attached to his ankles, until finally it ran back along the length of chain that anchored to the wall. Her magic even took a chunk out of the concrete before it fizzled out. 

She grabbed his wrist, turning it over in her hand, but the skin was smooth, unbroken and untouched by her spell. She squeezed, pushing down the emotions that threatened to rise up in her throat once again. The relief, the fear at the could-have-beens, and the wild, destructive euphoria that rose up whenever she tapped into that part of herself. 

“Neat,” Tamika said. 

Carlos turned back to her father, shaking his shoulder and earning only a semilucid grunt and eyes that opened into thin slivers in response. “Are you going to be able to walk?” he asked. 

Hela wanted to glare—wanted to snap look at him, does it look like he can walk?—but she knew he was only being practical. She couldn't carry him, she was way too small, and Carlos could probably lift less than she could, because Midgardians weren't terribly strong, either, and he was a scientist and not a warrior. Tamika was also human, and young even if she was strong, and besides, she would probably need her hands free to cover their escape. 

Frustration built and tangled inside her. They had found him, they were here. This was supposed to be the hard part. It wasn't fair for them to get this far and get stuck, and she couldn't leave him behind again. She wouldn't. 

The sound of approaching footsteps made her freeze, and Tamika tensed beside her, ready to spring. She held herself still, listening, and when she picked up a familiar crackle of energy in the air she relaxed. Tamika shot her a questioning look, and she shot a hand out to keep the other girl from striking. “Don't,” was all she managed before the footsteps stopped and the mostly-closed door flew open. 

Her uncle Thor was everything she remembered; tall with lots of blond hair and an aura made of pure static. He was also very angry, a crackling, intimidating anger that surged when he spotted her father sprawled across the floor with Carlos standing over him. He raised his hammer and—

“Uncle, no!” she shouted, and Mjolnir swerved and just missed a now openly-terrified Carlos. 

Thor spun, and the raw rage in his expression faded to confusion and small bursts of lightning still dancing behind his eyes as he caught sight of her. “Hela? What are you doing here?” 

“They took my papa,” she said. “I had to go find him. These are my friends. They're helping me.” 

“Oh.” He turned and dropped a hand on Carlos' shoulder. Carlos, for his part, was still shaking, and he nearly fell over. “In that case you have my apologies. Are you all right?” 

Carlos raised one trembling thumb, and his voice, when he spoke, squeaked a little bit. “Peachy.” 

Thor had already left him, though, and dropped to his knees beside her papa, whose eyes were open now but glazed. “Loki?” he asked. “Are you well?” 

Her papa didn't answer, but Tamika stiffened and signaled that someone was coming. Someone else, and it was incredibly unlikely for the new footsteps to be friendly once more. “We don't have time,” she said, and Uncle Thor jumped guiltily. “We have to get him out of here, but none of us can pick him up. Could you...?” 

“Of course,” Thor said, and scooped him up as though he were as light as a pile of blankets. 

Thor followed Hela followed Tamika down the hall and back up the stairs, with Carlos hovering such that either she or Tamika were between him and Thor at all times, and darting occasional nervous glances over to where her papa hung semiconscious in her uncle's arms. Thor still generated his own personal static field, strong enough now in his agitation that it would sometimes snap sparks against her skin if she brushed too close. 

Even walking quickly, though, they had barely made it a few dozen steps before a shout rose up behind them. Whoever was coming must have found the empty cell, then. The footsteps picked up speed in their direction, the heavy impact of boots on concrete, and Hela was so focused on listening as they drew closer that her heart almost stopped when they rounded a corner to find themselves looking down the barrels of three especially large and evil-looking guns. The men holding them shouted several things at once, and Hela could pick out “Get down” and “On your knees!” from the cacophony. 

Carlos shrunk back, looking almost physically smaller, and Uncle Thor drew himself up and half-turned, caught between lunging forward and sheltering her papa. “Stand aside,” he said, and his voice crackled with energy and threat. He stood half a head taller than any of the mortals, and even the long hair hanging disheveled in his face didn't hide the clear anger written across his expression, his posture. Hela wouldn't have been surprised if the operatives had turned and ran, but while they shifted uneasily, they stood their ground, still brandishing the guns. 

Their first mistake was focusing too much on Thor to bother looking down. Their last mistake was focusing too much on Thor to bother looking down. Hela took one while Tamika lunged at the other two, and in short order all three were on the ground. 

The men behind them caught up as the last one fell, and the sharp spit of gunfire seemed magnified impossibly loud in the narrow hallway. Bullets bounced off the walls, Carlos yelped and flinched and she flinched with him. After all, bullet immunity was not something anyone wanted to put to the test in a high-stakes scenario. 

The loud noises and quick movements were disorienting, and Hela maintained that was the reason she didn't see the grenade until it was arcing toward them. She grabbed onto Tamika and tried, frantically, to call on what little control she had over her seidr and construct a shield around them both. She couldn't. The magic slipped away, and she braced herself as best she could, still clinging to the other girl's arm. 

The grenade bounced off of nothing and hurtled back towards the group who threw it. Or perhaps not nothing; she could see, if she squinted, a thin, translucent wall of greenish force. She twisted to find her father, half-conscious and draped now over one of her uncle's shoulders, still, somehow, muttering a spell with whatever energy he had left. Glassy eyes met hers as he mumbled and then he slumped, slipping back into unconsciousness once again. 

The grenade flew back into the group of their pursuers and they scuttled back, but not quickly enough. A flash of light illuminated the hallway, and a sound like a mountain splitting in half followed, and even though she could feel the magic barrier absorbing some of the concussion, she could tell it would have been blinding and deafening for anyone on the other side. 

A flashbang, then. Hopefully enough to slow down their pursuers, but she wouldn't count on it. After all, the biggest reason to use those instead of regular grenades, if they were already using real bullets, would be if they had some way to insulate themselves from the effects. 

She still had Tamika's arm between her hands, so she tugged at it as she started back down the hall, pulling her along as she started to run. Tamika launched into motion just as quickly, and she could hear Carlos on their heels with Uncle Thor right behind him. They ran, more mad scramble than orderly retreat, and it was hard to hear over the pounding of her heart whether anyone else followed them. 

She made her way back towards the door, remembering in a flash of panic that it would probably be closed and locked down once again, but as they got closer she could see daylight. A few more steps and the reason became clear--the edges of the doorway were warped, bent as though they'd been pulled apart, and the door itself, made as it was of heavy reinforced steel, lay twisted on the ground a few feet away. This must be where her uncle had made his entrance. She made for the hole, breaking through into the sunlight and barely slowing as her feet hit the sand and she ran for the van. 

They scrambled more than ran down the hill as the vague sounds of pursuit echoed from within the building, and Carlos sprinted past her in time to dive into the driver's seat and start the engine. They piled in behind him, and the doors of the van barely had time to close before Carlos was pulling away, tires squealing. Hela's heart pounded in her ears.

She glanced back into the back. Her papa was sprawled against her uncle and either unconscious or close to it, and Thor was attempting to maneuver them both into a less awkward position. Tamika crouched against the back door of the van, occasionally straightening enough to peer through the darkened window. 

“They're going to follow us,” Carlos said, remarkably calmly given the situation. “The van won't be able to stay ahead of them for long.” 

Thor growled. “Let them come.” 

“I'm not sure they will.” Tamika hefted her duffel bag, which looked...considerably lighter than it had the last time Hela had bothered to notice it. 

A deep shudder went through the entire car, and a half second later Hela heard it, the loud, dramatic, and unmistakable sound of a large-scale explosion. Carlos swerved then corrected, twisting around to try and look behind them. 

Tamika smiled, a small, satisfied smile. “C4 is the most efficient and cost-effective form of anarchy.” 

“You blew up the building?” Carlos asked, finally turning to focus on the road once more. Hela thought she could hear sirens in the distance, but it could have been her imagination. 

“Yep.” Tamika stood, now, and studied the view out the back window. 

Carlos nodded. “Good.”

They hit a curb going around a corner, and her uncle held her papa tighter as the van bounced. The next turn had them pulling out into traffic, and yes, she was sure now that she heard sirens. 

“I've gotten us far enough to buy some time,” Carlos said, “but there's a good chance that even if SHIELD doesn't follow us, the police will track us down. I'm not willing to bet we don't show up on traffic cameras fleeing the scene of a very large, very illegal explosion. I need to know where we're headed next.” 

“Stark and Banner have rooms at a hotel not far from here,” Thor said. He had settled her papa on the floor of the van with his head on his lap, and was running his fingers through dark hair with a gentleness that belied the anger still burning in his eyes. Her papa didn't stir, but he did take deep, steady breaths, so the unresponsive state was probably him burning off the rest of the drug in his system. “Take us there.” 

“Are you sure?” 

“They will not turn us away,” he said, somewhat forcefully. His hand squeezed into a tight fist before relaxing and going back to running through her papa's hair. 

“That's great,” Carlos said, “but what about anybody following us? If they recognized you, won't that be the first place they look?” 

“If any of those fiends dare show their face I will drag them to the gates of Hel myself, and enjoy it,” Thor said, his voice every bit as menacing as the words. Her papa twitched in his drug-induced sleep. 

Carlos stared at the road a second longer before answering. “Okay, that works for me.”

Chapter Text

The adrenaline and fear from their frantic escape slowly faded as they drove, leaving Hela feeling restless with anticipation. Her papa didn't wake, only slept as her uncle brooded over him. 

She edged closer, scooting past Tamika who had propped herself up in one corner and was reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance with the single-minded focus of someone trying not to think about other things, and cleared her throat. “How did you know?” she asked, half to break the awkward silence and half because she truly wanted to know. “Where to find us, I mean?”

“Stark,” Uncle Thor answered, staring off into the middle distance as he held one of her papa's hands and rubbed small nervous circles into the back of it with his thumb. “He spoke to me of his suspicion that Loki may be held here, and I left to find him immediately.”

“And he didn't tell you we would be there too?” 

Her uncle managed to look faintly embarrassed at that. “He may have tried. I did not listen past the initial news that my brother may be in danger.”

“I understand,” she said. “we did kind of the same thing.”

He smiled a little at that. “It seems like you've inherited the family recklessness,” he said. “I doubt your father will be pleased about that.” 

“So long as he's home to be displeased, I think I can live with that,” she said, and her uncle laughed. It was short, and strained, but it sounded genuine nonetheless. 

She kept checking out the window during their drive, watching for suspicious cars or other signs of pursuit, but if they were there she couldn't see them through the more normal traffic. They pulled up to the hotel just over twenty minutes after the beginning of their getaway. 

“Uh-oh,” Carlos said, “the lot is full. There's nowhere to park.” 

Tamika shrugged “Pull up behind someone over there. Or park on the curb.”

“That's a no parking zone.” 

“Really? We just blew up a government building, but parking illegally is where you draw the line?”

“I don't want them to tow my van,” he said. “My equipment is still in the back. I made half of it myself.” 

“We broke into and out of a secure facility belonging to a government agency that most people don't even know exists,” Tamika pointed out. “I think we could break the van out of impound.” 

“It's like Cecil says,” Hela added, “in for the picture, in for the frame.” 

“That never made much sense to me when he said it, either,” Carlos said, but he pulled forward and settled the car at the end of the aisle, at least halfway against the red curb. 

“I always took it to mean that if you set big, significant goals for yourself, you have to also commit to completing the smaller supporting tasks that make it possible,” Tamika said. “Like how you can't hang a picture, however beautiful, without a frame.” 

“Yeah,” Hela said. “Sometimes to get away with a felony, you have to be willing to commit a few misdemeanors.”

“I feel like a better adult would argue with you,” Carlos said. The van gave a small shudder as he parked and set the brake. 

Her uncle had been ominously quiet, but now, as soon as the van came to a complete stop, he stood and wrenched the back door open with enough force to make Carlos flinch. That done, he scooped up her papa and leapt down, hitting the ground lightly and taking off with long, steady strides. 

The three of them that remained stared after him for a second before jumping out themselves, and Hela had to run as she hurried to catch up. He didn't slow as she reached him, only carried on with the same heavy, purposeful strides, and before she could say anything they had turned a corner and he was pushing through a wide glass door. The startled attendants started to move towards him before catching sight of his face and quickly shrinking back. 

The hotel lobby was grand, all marble and carpet and crystal in whites and reds and golds. It very nearly had her stopped and staring, but her uncle seemed hardly to notice it. He marched straight to the front desk, caught the attention of a woman in a pristine dress suit with graying hair whose smile fell away the instant she saw him, and said “Tell me which room my friend Bruce Banner is staying in.”

“We don't have—there isn't anyone by that name staying here,” she said. Thor glowered, and Hela thought the woman looked half ready to make a run for it. “Do you need me to call an ambulance for—for your friend?” 

“Give us the number for Dr Banner's room,” Thor said, “or I shall kick down doors one by one until I find him.” 

“Oh,” she said, sounding small. “My mistake. It looks like he checked in under the name Mr. Green.” If things hadn't been so tense, she might have laughed at that. She thought it was probably Mr Stark's doing. “Room number 1278.”

“Thank you,” Thor said, his teeth gritted in unconvincing false politeness, and he moved towards the elevator, not quite stomping but making very clear from the way he was moving that he'd like to. Hela had to hurry again to catch up to him, darting in front of him to push the elevator button before he could smash it. 

“Uncle,” she said as he waited for the elevator to arrive, shifting his weight impatiently. “Are you sure this is wise? You don't want to make Dr Banner angry.”

“It is also unwise to make me angry.” A bright, cheerful ding rang out in the otherwise hushed lobby, and Thor shouldered his way into the elevator almost before the doors were fully open. The people in there already, a man and a woman in crisp business clothes, hurried out, and she squeezed in the spot where they had stood. Tamika and Carlos caught up and joined them just before the doors closed. “That does not seem to have stopped anyone.”

“I don't think Dr Banner was part of this,” she said, and he tensed. “And you're being a little...grrr.”

He took a deep breath and finally looked at her, then his shoulders dropped a bit as he sighed. “I apologize,” he said. “It was not my intention to—and I also believe Dr Banner had no part in my brother's capture, else I would not suggest we seek him out now. But your father needs a place to rest, and I need answers, and I can think of no better place to find either.”

“Just...please try not to electrocute anybody, okay?” A spark snapped in the air and he flinched, then gave her a small, wry smile.

“I shall be careful not to,” he promised as the elevator slowed to a stop and the doors slid open. 

The hall was brightly lit and wide enough that her uncle could carry her papa in his arms without worrying about bumping against either of the walls. They moved quickly and quietly, counting down the room numbers until they stood in an awkward huddle in front of Dr Banner's door. Uncle Thor's arms were still full, and the rest of them hung back for a moment until Tamika stepped forward, knocked, and stepped back. 

The silence that followed lingered just long enough for Hela to wonder if they had been heard, and then the door slowly and carefully swung open. “Thor?” Dr Banner said, and then “Is that...?” 

“My brother,” her uncle said, shifting him in his arms. Her papa remained unnervingly limp, and his head lolled against her uncle's chest. “May we come in?” 

Dr Banner looked around as if noticing the rest of them for the first time, then bobbed a hasty nod. “Yeah, alright, come in,” he said, and pulled the door wide open. 

The inside of the room was every bit as opulent as the rest of the hotel. The space was open and bright, lit by sunlight that streamed in through large glass doors that led to a balcony at the end of the room. The walls each had at least one piece of tastefully inoffensive art hung in a heavy frame, and the furniture was solid and made of rich, honey-colored wood. 

Her Uncle Thor went straight to the closest piece of furniture, an overstuffed leather couch, and very carefully set her papa down. He stirred and mumbled something incoherent before going still once more. 

“What happened?” Dr Banner was asking, and though he sounded alarmed enough to make Hela nervous, he didn't seem to be growing or changing color. “Is he okay?” 

“Define ‘okay’,” Thor said, and his tone was enough to make Dr. Banner take a step back. “If you mean to ask whether he was held unjustly in a prison of SHIELD's design for more than a week and has not been conscious since I found him there, then yes, he is ‘okay’.” 

“So far as I can tell he's been drugged, but I don't think he's otherwise hurt,” Carlos said quietly. “I don't know much about medical physiology, though, and less about his, with him being an alien and all. No offense,” he put in quickly, looking between her and Thor. 

Dr Banner moved closer again, slowly and with his hands up. One hand carefully reached out to take a pulse at her father's throat, but his eyes stayed on Thor until it became clear he wasn't going to react. “Why would SHIELD lock him up?” He shook her papa's shoulder, frowning when that got him no response. “I thought he was working with us now.”

“He is,” Thor said. 

Dr Banner shook his shoulder again, more forcefully but still gentle. “Loki?” He raised his voice slightly. “Can you hear me?” 

“The men guarding the SHIELD compound were Hydra,” Carlos said, and Dr Banner froze. 

“Hydra? Like, Nazi Hydra? Captain America wiped them out during World War Two Hydra?” He started moving again, taking a pulse before carefully exploring her papa's skull with his fingers. The movements were quick, sure, even if his voice was coiled and nervous as he spoke. 

“Apparently not,” Thor said. 

“Are you sure?”

“It was pretty obvious. One even said ‘Hail Hydra’,” Hela confirmed. “And then Tamika knocked him out.” Tamika nodded, and a satisfied smirk flickered across her face. 

“Yeah, I guess that's pretty clear,” he said. His examination continued, another minute of careful, clinical prodding. “Could you help me roll him on his side? I need to check his spine.” 

Thor moved to help, and Carlos asked “Why would Hydra have access to SHIELD resources?” 

“That's a good question. One we should probably ask SHIELD.” He took a step back. “Well, I can't find anything obviously wrong either. If you don't want to go find an actual doctor, I guess we'll just have to wait until he wakes up?”

“Is there anything else you can do?” Thor sounded almost hopeful, and more than a little nervous. 

Dr Banner shook his head. “Nothing he wouldn't kill me for once he's awake.” 

A knock on the door interrupted them, and they all fell silent as Dr Banner moved to check. 

He peered through the peephole, whispered “It's Tony,” then opened the door a crack. 

“Hey Bruce. It's good to see you looking like yourself,” Mr Stark said, “Claire from downstairs said there was a big angry bodybuilder-type guy after you and—oh hi, Thor,” he continued seamlessly. “I take it that was you terrorizing the staff?”

“That is likely,” Uncle Thor said, but he had the decency to look a bit ashamed. 

“Did you find—?” He pushed through the door, ignoring Dr Banner's irritated but half-hearted attempt at blocking him, and his eyes swept the room until they settled on the couch with her papa on it. “Oh good,” he said. “And the little girls are present and accounted for, and also this guy,” he nodded to Carlos, “who I'm still not really sure who is, sorry.” 

“I'm Carlos,” Carlos said. 

“Nice to meet you. So I guess,” he continued, “everything sort of worked out?” 

“My brother was abducted and held prisoner for more than a week, and still has not regained consciousness,” her Uncle Thor said, and though he sounded mostly worried it came out, as his worry often seemed to, sounding a bit cross. 

“I blew up a government building,” Tamika said, sounding, for the most part, very proud of herself. 

“SHIELD is full of Hydra operatives,” Hela added, because it seemed important. 

Mr Stark blinked, looking very much like he would have preferred not to hear all of this at once, or better yet, not to hear it at all. 

“So, sort of,” he said. “In a very loose sense.” Tamika had apparently dedicated herself to making Mr Stark as uncomfortable as she could using only dirty looks, and he glanced at her, unnerved, before continuing. “I did know about the Hydra thing, actually,” he added. “Not when I talked to you, but I did some poking around in the files I got from SHIELD during New York, and there was some uncomfortable info buried deep in there. I reached out to Fury because I'm pretty sure he isn't involved, and he seemed pretty genuinely shocked.” He put his hands up in a precautionary defensive position. “Anyhow, part of the reason I'm here is because I'm supposed to let you all know that he wants to meet with you. He's waiting now, actually.” 

“We aren't leaving until my brother is recovered,” Thor said stubbornly before Hela could. Tamika gave him a stronger dirty look. 

“Look, Tony,” Dr Banner started to say, but he cut himself off when Mr Stark grinned, the expression too full of trouble to be fully unfamiliar. 

“I said he's waiting,” he said again. “I never said he couldn't stand to stew a bit. From what I've seen, SHIELD deserves it.” 

Dr Banner only sighed at that. “Tony...” He said, then trailed off in an exasperated groan. 

“What?” he said, “I'm right. He would agree with me.” He nodded to her papa, still lying unmoving on the couch. 

“He probably would,” Hela confirmed. 

“See? Even the kiddo will back me up.” 

The adults kept talking, but it became apparent pretty quickly that they weren't leaving anytime soon, to meet the Director of SHIELD or otherwise, so she edged her way out of the conversation and walked quietly over to sit next to her papa. He looked better already than he had under the sharp compound light: tired, a little bit pale, but overall not so different than the times when he fell asleep on their downstairs couch after a long day hosting her scout troop or arguing with the Glow Cloud (All Hail) over allocation of school funds or rescuing the pizza boy when he inevitably got himself almost-eaten by ominous shadow beings. 

Except that the longer she sat next to him, the more she was convinced he wasn't actually asleep. He lay completely still, muscles relaxed, but something about his breathing seemed a bit too carefully even, and something in her instinct made her suspect he was listening to the conversation, gathering information while pretending to sleep. 

She thought she might understand, if that was the case. When he woke up people would fuss, especially her uncle, and that always annoyed him. They'd have to officially discuss their next step, and probably go meet the Director of SHIELD, and life would start moving and progressing in a forward direction again. She was certainly tired enough to want to put those things off for a little while, and she couldn't begrudge him the same. 

Still, she reached over quietly and took his hand in hers. It was warm, and real, very clearly alive, and still much bigger than her own, and together all these things gave her a sense of comfort. 

She gave his hand a small squeeze, and a relieved and grateful smile spread over her face when he squeezed back.

Chapter Text

It took a couple more hours for her papa to fully wake up, and Hela thought she might have dozed off somewhere in the meantime, but she was awake when he finally stirred. His eyes opened slowly, sluggishly, but before she could react he was sitting up and pulling her into a comfortingly tight hug. She hugged him back, grabbing fistfuls of his shirt and burying her face in his shoulder. 

“My little girl,” he mumbled after a long minute, ignoring her Uncle Thor who was saying something excitedly next to them. “Are you well?” 

“Yeah,” she said, “are you?” 

“Of course.” He rocked slowly, still holding her close. “But it isn't your job to worry about me, little one.” 

“But I was worried, though,” she said. She didn't bother trying to hold back the few tears that welled up in her eyes; he wouldn't mind, and she didn't particularly care if anyone else did. 

“Shh,” he said, “I know.” His hand came up to cup the back of her head, fingers softly running over her hair. “You shouldn't have come,” he said. “When I saw you, I thought—” 

He cut himself off, but she could finish the thought anyway. That she had been captured, too, a tool to use against him. That she was in danger and him powerless to help. 

It was a fear she could easily understand. 

“That's not what happened,” she said, pulling back just a little. “I came to find you.”

It took her a second to recognize the half-choked sound he made as a laugh. “What am I going to do with you,” he mumbled. “My brave and clever and foolishly reckless little girl.” 

“Sounds familiar,” she said back. “Wonder where I could have got it from.” 

Someone cleared their throat, and she looked up to find Stark looking uncomfortable and waving to catch their attention. She might have glared at him if Tamika wasn't doing such a good job at doing that already. 

“Don't get me wrong,” he said, “this is sweet and all, but we've probably left the Director of SHIELD waiting as long as we possibly can.” 

“No,” her papa said, pulling her back into his arms, “I believe he can wait a short while longer.”

They left a few minutes later. Her papa was still a bit unsteady on his feet, but his eyes were no longer unfocused and glassy, and her Uncle Thor was more than happy to let him lean on his shoulder as they walked. 

An ominous-looking black van was waiting for them outside the hotel, but Stark slid in without reservation, addressing the agents inside with an enthused “Wow, this is really cliche, I hope you aren't doing this to impress us because yeah, you'd have to try harder than this.” They ignored him, and the rest of them clambered in uneasily after him. 

She took comfort from the fact that her Uncle Thor alone could easily take down both agents sent to escort them if he so chose. So could her papa, if he was truly doing as well as he seemed, and Tamika, and probably Hela herself as well. Besides, unless they were incredibly stupid no one would try anything suspicious with Dr Banner in the car. She'd rather not be trapped in a small enclosed space with the Hulk, and she was fairly sure every reasonable person felt the same. 

The car took them a short ways through the city before pulling into an underground garage, and the agents rode silently alongside them in an elevator up to a large yet windowless office. The room held a single man, dressed like the other SHIELD agents but still short and unassuming, and their silent escorts trailed out almost as soon as they arrived, leaving them alone with the agent. 

“Coulson,” Stark greeted, nodding. “Where's the Director?” He looked around in an exaggerated fashion as though Director Fury might appear out of the walls or a trapdoor in the floor or drop down from the ceiling at any second.

Agent Coulson kept his face perfectly blank and polite. “He unfortunately couldn't wait here long enough to meet with you,” he said calmly. “Recent events have unearthed new information that demands his immediate attention. I'm sure you understand.” 

“You mean all the Nazis hiding in plain sight in your organization?” Stark asked with a deliberately annoying amount of cheer. 

“Yes,” Coulson grimaced, “that.”

“So how does it feel,” Stark pressed, still in the same deliberately cheerful tone, “knowing that you helped run an organization that was secretly full of Nazis hiding in plain sight all this time?”

“Tony,” Dr Banner hissed, but Stark pressed on, ignoring him. 

“Because I gotta imagine you must be pretty embarrassed right now,” he said. “Aren't you guys supposed to be, like, the experts at figuring this sort of stuff out? Super spies and all that?” 

“Yes,” Coulson said, without a touch of emotion. “And to answer your question, it feels a little like being stabbed in the back by a close friend, and then questioning and doubting everything about your life and perspective as a result. Thanks for asking.” Stark had the decency to fall silent, and Coulson continued. “But that's being handled,” he said, “and it's not the reason I asked you here.”

“Is this about the building we blew up?” Hela couldn't keep herself from asking nervously. Tamika glanced up from where she had been quietly standing off to the side, paging through a worn copy of The Checklist Manifesto. 

“I should hope not,” her father said. “And it should go without saying,” he continued, fixing the government agent with a sharp look, “that my daughter is under my protection.”

“Besides,” Tamika added, casually turning the page, “technically I blew up the building.” 

“Miss Flynn is also under my protection,” her papa added firmly. 

“Seems to me like you've got that one the wrong way round,” Stark said, grinning smugly. Her papa glared back. 

“The fact that she is considerably more capable of looking after herself than some members of a certain team of so-called heroes does not change that anyone who wishes her harm will answer to me,” he said, and if Tamika didn't look exactly like she appreciated the sentiment, she didn't complain. 

“So are we just ignoring the fact that you needed to be rescued by a couple of little girls, or—” 

“Are you suggesting I need to prove myself?” he asked with a dangerous smile. “Volunteering to be an example?” 

“Brother,” Thor said quietly. 

“No one doubts your abilities,” Coulson said. “Ignore Stark. That's what the rest of us usually do. In any case,” he continued, ignoring the dirty look the billionaire gave him, “no one's planning to try and arrest Miss Flynn. Although it would be appreciated if she refrained from blowing up government buildings in the future—” 

“Can only promise that if they aren't full of Nazis,” Tamika said. 

“—we have determined that in this case, the action was warranted, and to be honest it'll likely help us in the long run. A good number of the agents that our intel flagged as possible Hydra operatives were caught in the explosion, and the rest have been thrown on the defensive instead of building the strength for a retaliatory counterstrike. We should probably thank you.” 

“You're welcome,” Tamika said, and nodded. 

That settled, the agent turned back to her father, taking a deep breath before speaking. “What happened to you was inexcusable. The actions were those of a rogue element and are not condoned by SHIELD, but we missed the threat they posed and failed to prevent their taking action. You have every right to be upset with us,” he said carefully. 

“At least we are in agreement on that point,” he said back, tone carefully flat. 

Coulson didn't flinch, but he did look a bit nervous. “I'd like to apologize,” he said, “on behalf of SHIELD. I promise you that if we had realized what was going on we never would have allowed it.”

“Don't be sorry,” he said, his tone suddenly just short of vicious. “Sorry is a meaningless word used to placate those you've wronged. Being sorry doesn't undo harm or absolve wrongdoing. No,” he said, “don't be sorry. Be better the next time.”

“Will there be a next time? I thought you would have trouble trusting us,” Coulson said, “after...” 

The humorless laugh that followed seemed to catch Coulson by surprise. “Of course I don't trust you. I never trusted you,” he said matter-of-factly, “just as I suspect you never trusted me. No, this was never about trust, though I do admit I let myself become uncautious. A mistake I won't repeat.”

Coulson looked surprised, and that in of itself meant they truly had caught him off guard. “If you didn't trust us, then why...” 

“Why aid you? The same reason you tolerated my involvement, I expect, in spite of your own mistrust for me. Because the things that needed to be done were important, and they still are. What was I to do? Would my suspicion have absolved me of action, simply because I didn't want to play nice with someone who doesn't have my best interest at heart? Should I have sat back and waited to be approached by an organization that was a paragon of honesty and goodwill, fully deserving of my support? I suspect I'd still be waiting, and the world would have suffered from it in the meanwhile.”

He looked up, and though his voice remained calm, his eyes were burning. “I never thought this, our arrangement, was safe,” he said. “I judged it to be worth the risk of harm. That has not changed.”

“So you'd still be willing to work with us,” Coulson said slowly. “When necessary.”

“If I am satisfied that the rogue element you describe has been dealt with,” her papa said deliberately, “then perhaps. Although it may need to wait until I can find an alternative childcare option,” he said wryly. “Apparently angels will allow your children to run off in the middle of the night and devote themselves to foolhardy and dangerous schemes.” He gave Hela a meaningful look. 

“Hey,” she said, “I think they knew I had a good reason. You needed my help.” 

“No reason is a good reason to endanger your life,” he muttered darkly. 

“What about everything you just said?” She put her hand on her hips. “It may not have been safe, but it's worth the risk to protect the people we love. I didn't do anything that you didn't do first.” Coulson looked faintly amused at her proclamation, but he at least had the decency to try and hide it. Thor looked ready to laugh. Only her papa seemed unamused. 

“You are right,” he said, to her surprise, “but that doesn't mean I will not enforce my hypocritical double standard in ensuring you never, ever do this sort of thing again.” 

“That's unfair,” she said. 

“Yes it is, and I stand by it.” 

“Not that I think you're likely to take me up on this, understandably,” Coulson interjected, “but if there's anything we can do to help resolve the childcare issue, SHIELD would be willing to offer whatever resources get you back in the field when we need you.” 

Her father's eyebrows went up so far they almost met his hairline. “Whyever would I trust an organization which recently betrayed and harmed me with the well-being of my children?” 

“I thought you might say that.” Coulson shrugged, unconcerned. “Worth a try, though.” 

“Unless you watched them personally, I fail to see how even you could be certain they would not be harmed.”  

“There are a handful of people I would trust,” he said. “But if that's what it takes, I'd be willing to watch them myself.” 

Her papa froze, at that, and gave the agent a considering look. 

“You understand,” he said slowly, “that if anything were to happen in such a scenario, I would inflict grievous and personal violence on the person at fault.” 

Coulson nodded. “I'd expect nothing less.” 

“Then I shall consider your offer.”

Coulson actually looked surprised, at that, even if it was subtle enough she almost missed it. “Thank you.” 

Her papa waved dismissively, and when Hela looked up at him, she could see the lines etched on his face by exhaustion, very visible in the bright artificial light. Her Uncle Thor must have noticed the same because he stepped forward and quietly rested a hand on her papa's shoulder. “If there is nothing more you need from us,” he said, “I believe it is time for us to go.” 

Coulson looked, for a second, like he might try to argue, but at last he only brought his hand up to pinch the bridge of his nose as though fighting a headache. “No, everything else can wait until we've dealt with the immediate repercussions of today.” He smiled a wry little half-smile, and his eyes were sincere when he said “I hope you have a better night than I will helping Fury sort this out.” 

“Bruce and I will be on standby,” Stark said, “by which I mean we'll be back at the hotel playing cards, but you can call if you find any more Nazis that need to be punched.” He turned to the rest of them, spread his arms in a wide, gregarious gesture, and said “there's always room at the table for a couple more, if you want to put the kiddos to bed and join us.” 

“Thank you for the kind offer,” Thor said before her papa could answer less tactfully. “Perhaps another time.”

Hela nodded, because she knew exactly what he was thinking and she agreed. 

Now that they were all together, it was time for them to go home. 

The argument about how they should get home was short, in large part because her papa, arguing in favor of teleportation, was too tired to keep up the debate for long. Carlos refused to leave the van behind, and Uncle Thor made unsubtle worried comments about him overextending his magic until he grudgingly backed down. 

Uncle Thor, in turn, wanted to fly back, and there was some discussion between him and Tamika about how a harness could be fashioned to carry the van with him as he flew before Carlos put his foot down and forbid any plan that had them dangling unsupported in the air in a metal box that wasn't an approved passenger aircraft. 

In the end, they all tiredly agreed to the plan that had them driving home the normal human way, crammed in the back of a car that was considerably more crowded than it had been on the trip over. Not that Hela would complain—the success of their mission was well worth the cramped quarters. 

She drifted during the second half of the trip, lost in an exhausted haze that left black spots dancing across her vision. Without the adrenaline and anxiety of the past couple of days, it felt like she could sleep for weeks if she let herself. 

It didn't hurt that she'd taken the opportunity to curl up next to her papa, tucked under one arm and cuddled against his side. He had only smiled tiredly at her uncharacteristic clingyness, and now his fingers drew soothing circles on her arm as she drifted with her head against his chest. At this angle she could hear his heartbeat, slow and steady and reassuring. A reminder that, while she knew better than anyone how fragile life could be, that was not today's story. A reminder to be grateful. 

The van made it just inside city limits before breaking down. “I'm sorry guys,” Carlos said after poking at the engine by the light of three flashlights, “looks like we're going to have to walk. I'll call a tow truck tomorrow, but this isn't going anywhere tonight.” 

“That's all right,” her papa said. “We're nearly home.” The way he said the word left no doubt in her mind that he felt the same way she did, a deep longing and relief at returning to a life that could so easily have been lost. “Walking is a small price to pay.”

It was late, by now, and the sky overhead glittered with so many stars it looked almost overfull. That didn't stop Cecil from meeting them at the door, throwing it open in a rush of manic excitement and wrapping himself around Carlos in an ebullient hug. “Carlos, you're back!” he said, nearly shouting, and Hela could hear more than see his smile in the semidarkness. 

“And I'm very glad to be back,” Carlos said, chuckling as he leaned into the hug. “Did you miss me?” 

“Of course I did,” he said, and there was a quick kiss before he pulled back. “My life is infinitely richer and more beautiful with you in it.” 

“I missed you too,” Carlos said. 

And then Cecil was moving again, and without hesitating he pulled her papa into a tight hug as though it were the natural next action for him to take. Her father went stiff and ramrod straight, freezing so comically that Hela almost laughed before his arms came up, tentatively, to hug Cecil back. 

“It's good to have you back and not dead,” Cecil said, stepping back and leaving her papa looking a little bit dazed. He hugged her and Tamika together and even shook Thor's hand before the two of them said their goodnights and retreated back into the house. 

They dropped off Tamika next. Her house looked much like theirs; the main difference was that in this case, the low porch and the tan walls and the shallow sloped roof actually existed. Her father and uncle waited by the gate as the two of them made their way up to the door and rung the bell. 

The door swung open near-instantly, and then Tamika's father was there, beaming down at the both of them. “I was starting to think I'd have to come get you,” he said, something teasing in his grin. He was tall enough that he had to reach down to pull Tamika into a hug. They stayed there for a couple of seconds before he pulled back and ran a hand over her hair. “I missed you, baby girl.” 

Tamika smiled, then looked back over her shoulder. “Tell your dad to stay out of trouble,” she said, and Hela nodded. 

“Thank you again. For everything.”

When Tamika nodded, she turned to go. “Hey!” 

She turned back. Tamika was standing pressed up against her father's side, a half-hug with one of his arms wrapped comfortably around her shoulder. 

“What Cecil said,” Tamika said, “about the town being your family now. I know we found your dad, and I'm glad, but...it still counts. For me, at least.” 

Hela smiled back, a wide, delighted grin she couldn't have held back if she wanted to. “For me, too. At least for you.” 

When the door shut behind the two of them, she made her way back to find her father and uncle talking in a low voice. “You may want the extra sleep,” Thor was saying, “and I have it on good authority that even angels like my pancakes.” 

Her papa rolled his eyes. “They aren't exactly picky,” he said, “but yes, Thor, I assumed you'd stay the night. The town does not have an inn, and I can hardly send you off this late to find your way back. To the best of my knowledge, our couch folds out into a bed.” 

“That sounds marvelous,” he said. 

“It truly isn't, but you invited yourself along and now you're stuck with it.” 

They fell into step as soon as Hela reached them, and soon they were standing outside Aunt Josie's house in the flickering porchlight. 

Hela heard the bounding footsteps before they reached them, and she barely pulled the door open in time to keep it from being knocked off its hinges by several hundred pounds of enormous wolf. Fenrir barely kept himself from slamming into her hard enough to send the both of them sprawling, but even so, she stumbled back a couple of steps as she threw her arms around his neck. 

Jormungand spilled out of the house a second behind their brother, and Sleipnir trotted out after, and something in her heart she hadn't recognized as out of alignment fell back into place. Their family was together once more, as it should be, and their reunion brought both bubbling joy and a steady, easy peace that settled somewhere deep beneath all the worries and other tumultuous emotions of the past few days. 

They hugged until being together started to feel real, and after her papa left a message with Erika to give to Josie so she wouldn't worry about where they had gone, they all walked home together. The tiredness that settled over her felt like a hazy warmth, and her feet felt like they were floating just over the sand. 

The house, when they reached it, had all the strange emptiness that home took on after a long trip, and the combination of familiarity and perspective that felt almost like nostalgia. Uncle Thor took it on himself to argue her papa into bed, and since he still looked exhausted enough that the battle likely wouldn't last long, she only gave him one last hug before retreating back into her own room. She kicked off her shoes and climbed under her quilt, brushing her fingers across the mismatched material fondly before settling in and reaching for the bedside table. 

It didn't make sense for Cecil's show to be on now—she'd just seen him, and he hadn't been at the station—but time worked strangely here, and that included the radio broadcasting. In any case, when she switched the radio on it was near the end of the program, and Cecil's voice drifted through the room, deep and soothing. 

“Our community is complete once more,” he was saying. “The dark yellow vans marked only with geometric orange shapes and strange, abstract pictures of birds have returned our kidnapped neighbors and loved ones, and they are, if not unharmed, then ready to begin the process of re-integration into our lives. Others, too, have returned, from quests and missions and vacations to other parts of the world. It is good to have them back, Night Vale. It is good to have you all back. 

“I did some thinking, though, Night Vale, while we were waiting and wondering if those who were gone would ever return to us. I was thinking about families. What makes a family, and what can tear one apart. 

“Ah, families.

“I used to think that a family was like a machine, full of pieces that were different but still fit, somehow, working together to create something greater than the sum of its parts. But that isn't quite right. Families don't have a blueprint. Unlike machines, they can grow and expand without taking on ominous, twisted purposes and holding the entire elementary school hostage—twice in one month—and they very rarely come with limited warranties and strict licensing agreements.

“Then I thought that maybe families were like jigsaw puzzles that take some working out—a bunch of seemingly separate pieces who find their own connections until we create a whole. But that implies a single path, a set of predestined connections without flexibility or free will, a route laid out for us that we must inevitably take. But Cecil, you say; do any of us really have free will with all the government programs and mysterious entities of unknown intentions meddling with our lives? And to that I say—maybe not. I don't know. But if free will exists, I have to believe that we can definitely use it to choose who we give our love. 

“Which brings us to what I know now about families. You see, I've come to realize that families are like us, Night Vale, like each and every one of us. Neither whole nor broken, complete in of ourselves but always with room to change and grow.

“Up next: a series of terrifying choices that will eventually add up to an entire lifetime.

“Goodnight, Night Vale. Goodnight.”

The radio faded to crackling static and Hela shut it off, smiling to herself. She kept smiling as she muttered the anti-possession charm they'd all learned after the last incident, and as she rolled over and slipped, peacefully and near-instantly, into a sleep as deep and dreamless as the Void overhead.