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Chapter Text

Leonard watched as Loki fumbled around with the coffee dispenser in the “snack bar” area of his office. He still wasn’t completely on board with having a snack bar in his office. At one point, he’d had a partition put up sectioning the area off from the rest, but almost immediately, he’d figured out why that wasn’t a good idea. The barrier had been pushed off to the side and had stayed that way ever since.

When Loki started reading the nutritional label on his sugar packet, Leonard started to get a little impatient. “Loki, why don’t you come sit down now? I don’t have anyone else coming in for the rest of the afternoon, so stalling won’t make your session shorter.”

Loki stirred his chai tea a few more times, added another packet of sugar to it, and then stirred it some more. At last, he picked it up. Balancing the oversized mug in both hands, he picked his way across the oversized room. 

Once he had settled onto the couch across from him, Leonard gave him a tight-lipped smile, even though Loki was too busy staring into his tea to see it. “It’s been about eight months since you’ve been on Earth. How would you say everything’s been going?”

“I am happier than I have ever been, Doctor,” Loki said, still staring into his tea as if it held the key to the secrets of the universe.

“You don’t sound happy.”

Loki looked up at him with furrowed eyebrows. “Because this sort of thing doesn’t last for me. Mark my words, something is about to happen. Impending doom is looming on the horizon.”

“‘Doom’ sounds a little dramatic, don’t you think? But I do understand, Loki.” Things had been great for him too for the past several months. He found his work as staff psychiatrist for the Avengers more challenging and fulfilling than any position he’d held previously. He lived in luxurious accommodations in the middle of one of the most vibrant and interesting cities in the world, and he didn’t even have to pay rent. He’d been able to start saving for retirement, and at this rate, it was going to be a great retirement; maybe he’d buy a private island somewhere. 

He was even in a committed adult relationship again. There was a limit to how much physical intimacy they could have because of Bruce’s Hulk-related issues, but that didn’t matter, because what they had was better than nothing, and nothing had been what he had had for two years prior. He’d almost given up on being with anyone ever again.

“Doctor Samson?”

Leonard looked at Loki before glancing back down at his notes and realizing that he had written Bruce’s name in the margins. Mortified, he scratched it out with his pen. (At least he hadn’t drawn a heart with both their initials it, though he had to wonder what would have happened if Bruce’s name contained an “i.”) “The thing is, you’re probably right,” he said, still a little distracted.

“I am?”

“There’s a good chance that eventually, something bad will happen. You or someone close to you could be injured or become sick. Or your girlfriend could disappear from the face of the Earth, the economy could crash and take your IRA down with it—”

“I’ve never had a girlfriend who lived on this planet in the first place, nor have I had an IRA. Which one of us are we talking about here?”

“Sorry—anyway, my point was that no one can be happy all the time.” Thank God, or he’d be out of a job. “It’s probably best to appreciate what you have while you have it and try not to dwell on what might happen in the future.”

Leonard watched Loki’s hands as he tensed and tightened his grip on his mug. “So, what you’re saying is that I should be resigned to the fact that my current contentment is not to last, because in the end, happiness is but a fleeting emotion. That I should resign myself to my destiny, which is to suffer and one day die alone and unloved.”

“Holy shit, Loki, that’s not what I said at all—” Loki’s talent for catastrophizing shouldn’t have caught him off guard anymore, but sometimes it still did. 

“You have to put a dollar in the jar.” Loki’s grip on his mug loosened, and the corner of his lips hinted at a smile.

“Sorry, that was unprofessional of me,” said Leonard, but he couldn’t help being secretly happy he’d provided Loki with at least a momentary distraction from his negative thoughts. The Avengers’ “swear jar” had been introduced by Pepper a couple weeks before. He wasn’t sure why Pepper had suddenly become concerned enough with the language of the tower’s residents to take such a measure, but the far more intriguing psychological puzzle had been Loki’s reaction to it. In less than a day after it’s introduction, he had become the jar’s enforcer, and seemed to derive a great amount of satisfaction from policing the others’ language. To Leonard, the psychological basis for this remained unclear—somehow, he refused to believe it was simple schadenfreude, because with Loki, things were hardly ever simple.

( ﾟДﾟ) - #$%!

Tony sat down across from where the kid sprawled on one of the couches in the common room, by all appearances attempting to stare a hole into the ceiling. He knew better, though; if Loki’s mind were a hamster, it would be running itself ragged on its wheel. When he broke the silence between them, he tried to make his tone conversational. “Doc told me you’ve been worrying about the future.” 

Loki turned onto his side so that he could stare a hole through Tony instead. “Doctor Samson isn’t very good at the whole ‘doctor-patient confidentiality’ thing, is he?”

“Hey, he didn’t give me any specifics. I can only speculate on what you’re worried about. But you get that it’s okay for Doc to tell me if there’s something he thinks I need to know, right? I'm actually your legal guardian now. I mean, it might not hold up in court, but I'm still the closest thing you have to one; my name is on your fake birth certificate and everything. You know, if the press ever gets a hold of that, they’re going to have a field day—”

“That’s why it probably wasn’t necessary or advisable for you to do such a thing, but on the other hand, I don’t see how anyone would get a hold of it. What’s the point in even having a fake birth certificate when you won’t even let me use it to get my learner’s permit?” 

As far as Tony was concerned, there wasn’t a reason for Loki to learn how to drive when he wasn’t allowed to go anywhere on his own that wasn’t within walking distance. There was also no way he’d let a kid drive any of his sports cars; if he ever did let Loki get a license, he’d have to find him something that couldn’t go over sixty-five miles per hour. “Look, I told you I’d think about it, if you’re a good boy—er, girl—what are you today, by the way? Usually, you give off more cues than I’m picking up on at the moment.” 

Loki shrugged. “Do I always have to be specifically one or the other?”

“I guess not, even though you generally have been up until now.” 

“Is there a burning reason you need to know what genitalia I currently possess?”

“Oh, hell no—I mean, you know that wasn’t what I was asking. Biological sex and gender aren’t even the same thing.”

“Swear jar.” Loki pointed to the former mayonnaise jar that happened to be sitting on the table in front of them, to which Pepper had taped a note written in her own scrawling handwriting: Avengers’ Swear Jar, Proceeds go to the Maria Stark Foundation.

“Give me a break. ‘Hell’ isn’t that bad—”

“We’re still counting it. Whenever you’re in doubt, just ask yourself if Captain Rogers would give you a dirty look for using it.”

Tony took a hundred-dollar bill out of his wallet and stuffed it through the slot that had been carved into the top of the jar. “There. Now I’ve prepaid through the next ninety-nine times I say something Cap would consider naughty, which I’m guessing would include ‘gosh-darn it,’ ‘dagnabbit,’ and ‘leapin’ lizards.’”

“If so, you’re already down to ninety-six,” Loki pointed out. “No wait, ninety-five—you actually said the ‘h’ word twice.”

“You know, I kind of think you should have to put a dollar in for saying ‘genitalia,’ not because it’s actually a bad word, but because Cap would definitely blush if you said it in front of him. But instead, let’s just go back and pretend I never asked you what gender you were, since that seems to be an offensive question today.”

“It isn’t offensive, I just don’t see why it’s relevant.”

“It’s not,” Tony assured the kid. “Anyway, I came in here to try to cheer you up, or at least distract you a little.”

“And how are you to do that, Tony? No, let me guess—you have a gift for me.”

“Am I that predictable?”

“Well, yes—you think you can solve any problem by throwing money at it. The only way you know how to ‘cheer someone up’ is by giving them a gift. I’m guessing that’s what your parents did whenever they actually noticed you were unhappy.”

“Son of a monkey. Have you been listening in on my therapy sessions again?”

“Not since Doctor Samson figured out that the partition you had installed in his office wasn’t soundproof. It was just something that was easy to put together.”

“Alright, fine. In that case, I’m not going to give you this, even though I’d been planning on giving it to you anyway.” Tony pulled the prepaid debit card he’d been planning on giving Loki out of his pocket and waved it in Loki’s direction. 

Loki reached for the card. “I never said that my problems couldn’t be solved with money, or that my love wasn’t for sale. They definitely can be, and it definitely is.”

Tony held the card out of Loki’s reach. “Okay, now I’m having serious reservations about this. I want to make it clear, I really was planning on giving this to you before Doc told me that you were in a funk. I also don’t expect anything in return, be it love, affection, or unyielding loyalty. I just thought you might want to get some stuff. You’ve been here for over half a year, and your room still looks like a guest room. I mean, you’ve got a few books and some souvenirs you’ve picked up here and there, but that’s it.”

“I’m to use the money to redecorate, then?”

“You can use it for whatever you want. Just do me a favor and don’t go using the money on that card to buy a plane ticket and fly half way across the world. I feel like I shouldn’t have to say that, but I didn’t think I had to tell Frigga not to use my credit card to go globetrotting either. She still hasn’t given it back—do we even know where she is right now?”

“I’m not sure I care.”

“Come on, Loki. She is your mother, and I know you actually—”

Loki leaned forward and grabbed the card from him before Tony could hold it any farther away. “How much is on this?”

“Five grand. Just try not to spend it all at once, because I’m not giving you any more allowance until Christmas. Also, don’t tell your mom. He’ll think I’m out of my mind for giving you that much at once.”

“I take it you’re talking about Bruce this time.”

“Who else? Frigga might be your mother, but that doesn’t mean Bruce isn’t your mom.”

“I’m not sure that Bruce appreciates that characterization.”

“Well, he can’t be your dad, because obviously, you can only have one of those. Seriously, do you have any idea how many kids would love to have Tony Stark as a dad? Don’t get greedy, Bambi.”

Loki’s lips pursed together, and Tony could tell he was about to get chewed out—probably for “spouting nonsense again,” if he had to guess. Or maybe it was the nickname he was going to get in trouble for. But before Loki could make their feelings known, JARVIS interrupted. “Sir, I just picked something up on the police scanner. There is currently an ongoing incident at the New York Aquarium. The extremist group NAMOR—which stands for National Association for Marine Organisms’ Rights—have taken as hostages a full aquatheater of aquarium goers who had been there to see the sea lion show. They demand that all of the animals in the aquarium’s exhibits be set free immediately, or they will start forcing the hostages to perform tricks for the sea lions.”

“Foolish of them,” said Loki. “Don’t they understand that the aquarium plays an important role in educating the public and makes significant contributions to wildlife conservation efforts? Besides, I know for a fact that the sea lions love to perform for the public. Mister Flap-Finny is a bit of a ham, to be honest—”

“And that’s why you’re not allowed to go to the aquarium or the zoo anymore, since you can’t be trusted not to climb into the exhibits when we’re not looking.” Tony shook his head. “Do you even get how lucky we were that somehow, no one noticed the extra sea lion?”

“But you were the one that told me I needed to be more social—”

“When did I say that?”

“Sir,” JARVIS interrupted again. “Shall I ask the Avengers to assemble in the war room?” 

“Or you could just ask them to meet up in conference room A. You don’t have to get cute about it.” Tony got up, ruffling Loki’s hair as he walked by on his way to the elevator. He hated having to leave the kid so abruptly, but he knew that Loki understood that when the Avengers had a mission, he had to go. He was pretty sure that long goodbyes just made the kid’s anxieties worse anyway.

[  $  ] [  $  ] [  $  ]

Loki sat cross-legged in the middle of his bed, trying to visualize what he wanted to do with his room. It was an exciting prospect; he’d never had the opportunity to furnish his own living space before. In the palace, most of the furniture had been around since Bor’s time. The tapestries and linens in his quarters had been done up in his colors but hadn’t been changed since he had moved into them from the nursery. At that time, Frigga and her handmaidens had decorated and chosen furniture for him from the things already available in the palace. 

He wondered if Tony would let him have the walls repainted. If so, he thought he might have them a sage green. He would purchase darker green curtains to mask the blinds, and bed linens in the same color. Perhaps he could also paint the floor of his bedroom with chalkboard paint, so that he could draw magical circles and symbols on it as much as he liked without Tony getting angry at him for ruining them.

He’d have at least one floor to ceiling bookshelf put in, and a comfortable chair to read in. Maybe he’d even take advantage of the room’s natural light by getting a few plants. In Asgard, his rooms had been located on the palace’s interior. He hadn’t minded the lack of natural light so much; dim lighting was good for certain types of magic. But keeping most plants had been impossible. He could use magic to keep them alive, but that was usually more trouble than it was worth.

Loki browsed online a while for accessories and ended up placing a rainbow-colored lava lamp and a giant bean bag chair in green in his cart. There was something so quintessentially “Midgardian” about such things that he couldn’t resist. Just as he had finished entering the information for the card Tony had given him and hit the “place order” button, a rip in the fabric of the universe opened above him and a green envelope fell in front of him and landed on the duvet.

He had become accustomed to such things happening. He hadn’t seen Frigga in weeks, but she’d been opening miniature portals and throwing letters through them. Most of them, he’d ignored, deciding that if she really wanted to talk to him, she could step through the portal herself and talk to him face to face. But he suspected this letter, in its dark green envelope with silver scrollwork, was not a normal letter. He had a feeling that it needed to be opened, so before he could change his mind, he tore it open and pulled out a crisp piece of forest green cardstock with silver lettering.

YOUR PRESENCE IS REQUESTED
FOR THE MARRIAGE OF
Frigga of Vanaheim
—&—
Victor Von Doom
THURSDAY, THE 31st of OCTOBER
TWO THOUSAND AND THIRTEEN
—————————————————————-
AT FIVE O’CLOCK IN THE AFTERNOON
DOOM CASTLE, LATVERIA
—————————————————————
RECEPTION TO FOLLOW
In lieu of gifts, please donate to the 
Doom for Humanity Foundation

Before he even had the opportunity to process what he had read, Loki’s bedroom door swung open, and Thor came in, flopping onto the bed beside him in a way that reminded him of their younger days in Asgard. Loki scowled at him. “What are you still doing here? Didn’t you go with the others on their mission?”

“I have been banned from the aquarium ever since the unfortunate incident with the electric eel tank,” Thor reminded him. “Brother, did you receive a wedding invitation?”

“I did,” said Loki, still staring at his own invitation.

“Sif cannot possibly wish to marry Odin. He is over five thousand years old!”

Loki’s head snapped towards his brother. “Sorry, what are you on about?”

Thor and Loki stared at one another suspiciously. Then they exchanged invitations.

“Norns, not Mother as well!” exclaimed Thor, after he’d read Loki’s invitation. “This Doom fellow is a villain, is he not? Mother cannot be serious about marrying such a man.”

The invitation Thor had handed to Loki was written in runes, but translated roughly as:

YOUR PRESENCE IS COMMANDED
FOR THE MARRIAGE OF
All-Father Odin
—&—
The Lady Sif
ON THE FIRST DAY OF YULETIDE
—————————————————————-
AS HATI CHASES SOL BELOW THE HORIZON
THE PALACE, ASGARD
—————————————————————
FEASTING TO FOLLOW
Those who do not bring a gift may 
face fines or imprisonment

“So the All-Father intends to marry Sif. Feeling jealous, are we?”

Thor scoffed. “Why should I be jealous?”

“Perhaps because your father is planning on marrying your ex-girlfriend?”

“I am with Jane now, Loki. I have not been with Sif in centuries. Still, I cannot stand back and do nothing about it, because Sif is my friend, and surely, this cannot be what she wants.”

“It is what she deserves.”

“Loki, you cannot mean that. Sif was your friend too.”

“She has not been my friend in a long time, Thor. According to Odin, she volunteered to chop my head off, remember that? Clearly, this is her reward for being such a loyal subject.” 

Thor gave him that look he had always been so good at—the one Midgardians might refer to as a ‘sad puppy’ look—and Loki cursed himself, because he knew he would end up doing whatever his brother wanted him to. 

“Lets say you’re right, and this isn’t what Sif wants? What are you even proposing—that we sneak into the palace and help her escape?”

Thor nodded.

It would tick off Odin if he helped Sif escape him, so there was that. “Fine, but we need to do something about Mother first.”

“We cannot allow Mother to wed a villain,” Thor agreed. “But what are we to do?”

“I suppose the first thing is to get to Latveria.” 

“I could fly us both there.”

“Absolutely not, Thor. I do not enjoy flying that way. Tony gave me a card with five thousand dollars on it, and I’ve hardly used it—”

“Sir specifically asked that you not use it to buy plane tickets,” said JARVIS, making it obvious that he had been listening in on both this conversation and the one he’d been having with Tony earlier.

“Yes, but he didn’t tell me not to let Thor use it for that, so it should be fine if—”

“I have already apprised Sir of the situation, and he says you are not allowed to leave the tower until he returns. He has just asked me to put a hold on your debit card as well.”

“He can’t forbid me from leaving the tower with Thor,” Loki objected.

“Sir seems to be under the impression that he can, Master Loki. Mister Odinson, Sir told me to inform you that if you attempt to take your younger sibling out of the tower, he will have an Amber Alert put out saying that you are his kidnapper.”

“What is an ‘Amber Alert?’” asked Thor, just as Loki’s phone began making a noise like a siren. He pulled it out of his pocket and stared at a notification on the phone’s lock screen:

AMBER ALERT, New York, NY. Victim Loki Stark-Banner, age 1050. Suspect Thor Odinson, age unknown. Vehicle is Magic Hammer. Last known location Midtown Manhattan. If observed call 1-555-STARK.

Loki blinked at it. “This isn’t real, is it?” 

“It is only an example,” JARVIS told him. “And because you are still considered a war criminal by the United States government and police involvement would not be desirable, it would not be feasible to utilize the actual Amber Alert system. However, if you leave the tower with your brother, Sir has ordered me to send out such an alert to all Stark phones, which account for approximately half of the smart phones sold in the United States and forty percent of the international market.”

“He still can’t do that. No one is supposed to know I’m here at all.”

“Sir may not be thinking in a way that is entirely rational at the moment. I believe he is about to call you, by the way.”

As if on cue, Loki’s phone rang. 

“You had better answer it,” said Thor, collapsing back onto Loki’s bed.

“Hello, Tony,” Loki answered, wincing in anticipation of the scolding he was about to receive.

“Loki Stark-Potts-Banner-Samson-Romanoff-Barton-Rogers-Thorsbrother-Friggasson, if you run off to Latveria on your own, you are so grounded.”

Loki sighed into the phone. “I wasn’t going to go on my own, I was going to go with Thor. And it isn’t fair for you to use JARVIS to spy on me.”

“It might not be fair, but it’s obviously necessary. Hold on, give me a second—” Loki heard an explosion in the background of the call, which had more of a staticky quality to it than usual.

“Tony, are you calling me from inside your suit?” 

Tony came back on the line, breathing heavily. “I mean it, kid. You just wait for the rest of us to get back before you do anything. There’s no reason for you and Point Break to try to handle Doom on your own.”

“You’re going to help?”

“Of course we’ll help. You think we’re going to let Victor force your mom to marry him?”

“You believe she is being forced?” The idea that such a marriage might not be Frigga’s will made Loki feel a little better, but he still wasn’t certain that a mortal could force Frigga to marry him. Either this Doom was a formidable opponent, or— no, Loki didn’t want to think about the alternative. He would have to hope that Frigga’s hand was, in fact, being forced.

“The guy kidnaps Sue Storm and tries to make her marry him like once a year, so let’s say I wouldn’t be shocked. Just stay in the tower, got it? We should be back later tonight. Wedding isn’t before then, is it?”

Loki double checked the date on the invitation. “The wedding is to take place on October thirty-first.”

“We still have a few days, then. And if Victor’s planning on marrying her, I don’t think he’s going to hurt her before then.”

“I suppose that’s a reasonable assumption,” admitted Loki.

“Just try not to worry too much, okay? If you start feeling anxious, let Doc know.”

“Alright, Tony, you win. I promise not to run off to Latveria before your return.”

“Or anywhere else, got it? I promise we’ll get it all figured out when we get back—oh, shit.” After a good deal of static, the call dropped completely.

“JARVIS, what just happened to Tony?”

“Do not worry, Master Loki. Sir will be fine,” JARVIS told him, but he sounded a little uncertain.

!☆-（♯××)┘

“I’m sorry, Tony. This is my fault for distracting you.” Loki sat on the floor in front of the couch, making it easy for Tony to reach out and pet the top of his head using the arm that wasn’t currently in a sling.

“It’s okay, kid. It’s just a dislocated shoulder, and it’s my own fault for flying distracted.” 

“I can’t believe you flew into a police helicopter,” said Clint, as he flopped down on the other side of the couch with a bag of chips, jostling Tony’s shoulder and making him wince. 

“Clint, how would you like to be one of those pigeons you hang out with on the side of the building for a few days?” asked Loki.

Tony stopped petting him and lightly squeezed the back of his neck. “Uh-uh. We do not turn people into animals, even when they are being jerks.” He turned to Clint, narrowing his eyes. “The sea lions had been evacuated before it went down in their tank, and the pilot could swim. It wasn’t a big deal.”

“Yeah, I wonder if that’s how Pepper’s going to see it, since she’s probably the one that’s going to have to smooth things over with the police department.” Clint smirked as he held the open bag of chips out to him.

Tony just stared at it, and then arched an eyebrow at Clint. “We’ll buy them a new chopper and donate a bunch of other new equipment, maybe make a large contribution to their pension fund—problem solved.”

Loki tugged at Tony’s pant leg, hoping to gain his attention again. When Tony looked at him, he stuck out his bottom lip. “I am sorry you were hurt, but I still do not like that you have been spying on me.”

“I don’t spy on you. I just have JARVIS watch out for certain things now, like if you’re going to run off, or if you’re sick, or if you’re injured or about to be injured. Remember the first couple of weeks you were here? Forgive me for not wanting a repeat of that.”

“In other words, you have JARVIS spying on me because you don’t trust me.”

“I trust you, Loki. Hell, you’ve more or less behaved yourself for the past six months, other than a few hiccups here and there. I’m just not willing to take any risks.”

“You take all sorts of risks,” he said to the man who had flown into a helicopter.

“He’s got you there,” said Clint.

“I don’t take risks when it involves the safety and wellbeing of a kid I’m responsible for,” Tony insisted.

Loki didn’t try to argue that he wasn’t a child. Over the past six months he’d figured out that there were a lot of benefits to letting Tony and the others think of him that way.

Thor had been pacing back in forth in front of the window. “What are we going to do about Mother?” he brooded.

“If the Avengers cross the border into Latveria, Doom will consider it an act of war.” Natasha sat down in one of the armchairs across from them as she cracked open a can of tomato juice, which she didn’t then pour into a glass of vodka. It seemed like she hadn’t been drinking as much lately; then again, maybe she’d just stopped drinking in front of him, since she had gotten in trouble with Tony the last time she tried to “corrupt” him.

“We’ve been invited,” Loki pointed out. “Or at least I’ve been invited. I can only think that they’d have meant to invite Thor as well. Perhaps his invitation got lost on the way here.”

“As I am certain your invitation to Father’s wedding must have gotten lost,” said Thor.

Because Doctor Samson had explained it to him, Loki understood that Thor said things like this because he was still stuck in the “denial” stage of his grief over their broken family. He knew he ought to be patient with him—but after several months, it was starting to get old. “Odin would not have invited me to his wedding after he disowned me and I defected from Asgard, Thor. Considering you told him you were defecting as well, I’m surprised he’s even invited—” Something occurred to Loki that ought to have occurred to him before. “Now that I think of it, perhaps you shouldn’t go. Odin might intend to prevent you from returning to Midgard once you’re there.”

“At the very least, I must speak to Sif,” Thor insisted.

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” said Steve. “Frigga’s wedding is first, right?”

“Assuming Loki and Thor are both invited, it’s usually a given that you can bring a plus one to a wedding,” said Tony. “So that means two more of us can get in.”

“Obviously, you’re not going,” Steve informed him, his tone making it clear he meant this as an order.

If there was one thing that could be said about Tony, it was that he didn’t take well to orders. “It’s just a dislocated shoulder. I should be good to go in a couple days.”

“Absolutely not,” said Bruce. “Tony, you need to rest, maybe for as long as a few weeks to make sure that heals right. You’re lucky you don’t need surgery. Besides, there’s no reason for you to go if we can only get two more people in with Loki and Thor anyway.”

Tony seemed to deflate, and Loki realized he’d been wrong. Tony wouldn’t take orders from Steve, but he would take them from Bruce. Clint and Natasha smiled at each other, and Clint made a gesture that Loki at first assumed to be part the sign language that they sometimes communicated in. It was the one language on Midgard that eluded AllSpeak, and that Loki hadn’t learned yet. 

However, this time, Tony seemed to understand what had been said, even though Loki was certain he didn’t speak sign language. “I am not whipped, Clinton. That’s just rude.”

“Obviously, I’ll be going as Thor’s date,” said Natasha, before Clint could challenge him.

“Why obviously?” asked Tony. “These days being straight is practically unfashionable. Steve could go as Thor’s date.”

Steve blushed. “Tony, I don’t think I’d be comfortable going as anyone’s date.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Natasha told them. “I know it’s hard to imagine in this day and age, but there are still a few countries that criminalize same sex relationships. I’m pretty sure Latveria is one of them.”

“I knew Doom was a prick,” said Tony, “but I didn’t realize he was that big a prick. Don’t scowl at me Cap, I paid for those in advance.”

“I wasn’t scowling.” 

“You are now.”  

Natasha cleared her throat. “Anyway, it’s not worth stirring things up at the moment. We need to get in and get Frigga out, not start the Latverian sexual revolution. Besides, you want me in on this, because unlike some people here, I’m good at stealth missions.”

“I agree with Natasha,” Loki chimed in. “It makes the most sense for her to go as Thor’s date. And I should take Bruce as mine.”

Bruce made a choking sound and spit his coffee back into his mug. Doctor Samson, who’d been sitting next to him and listening quietly the whole time, took his mug away from him and started patting him on the back. 

“Steve just said he wouldn’t be comfortable going as anyone’s date, and I don’t think Barton and I would hit it off,” said Loki. “Besides, I daresay your alter ego might prove invaluable if things go south.”

“But Natasha just said—”

“I will of course be attending as Lady Loki.”

“I’m still much too old for—”

“Technically, you’re a thousand years younger than I am. Besides, I daresay the Latverians will bat an eye, if their country is as backwards as I am starting to imagine.”

“Loki’s right,” said Natasha. “In Latverian society it would be normal for a young girl to be seen with an older man. It’s common for Latverian girls to get married when they’re as young as fourteen, often to men several times their age. I also think he’s right that you should be the one to come along with us, in case it all goes to hell.”

“I know you do not like to feel like a ‘creepy old lech,’ Doctor Banner. I could make myself look older, if it would help.”

“It really wouldn’t. But if you guys think you might need the Other Guy, I guess I don’t have a choice.”

Samson looked like he wanted to say something too, but instead he got up and wandered into the kitchen to pour Bruce’s spit-take coffee down the sink.

Chapter Text

FOUR WEDDINGS AND AN ASGARDIAN FUNERAL: OMAKE THEATER

Tony: So, JARVIS said you wanted to see me, Doc? 

Leonard: Please take a seat, Tony.

Tony: And it looks like the gang's all here. Why does this feel suspiciously like an intervention? Just let me get some coffee first—

Leonard: Let’s just pretend the coffee machine isn’t there.

Pepper: Sit down, Tony.

Tony: Uh-oh, what did I do now? You sound kind of angry—

Pepper: I’m not angry. We just need to talk about one of your recent expenditures.

Tony: And this conversation includes Doc, Point Break, and Brucie Bear?

Bruce: Tony, you can’t just give a kid five thousand dollars.

Tony: So that’s what this is about. Of course I can, Brucie. I’m Tony Stark. I made at least three times that much before you finished that sentence.

Bruce: You know what I mean, Tony.

Tony: I knew you were going to have a problem with this. Your problem is that you grew up without money, so you’re thinking about this the way that a poor person would—

Bruce: No Tony, your problem is that you’re thinking about this the way a jaded billionaire would.

Tony: I’m not jaded just because I grew up around money.

Leonard: Tony, we’ve had conversations in the past about how you have a tendency try to solve problems with money, because that was what you learned from your parents. Aren’t you concerned that you might be teaching Loki the same thing?

Tony: Some problems can be solved with money, Doc. The police department’s happy with the new equipment we sent them, right?

Leonard: Maybe some problems can be solved with money, but what I find concerning is that you seem to have given Loki this money right after I told you he’d been feeling anxious. Money can’t fix Loki’s anxiety.

Tony: Says the person I’m paying to treat the kid’s anxiety. You do remember who signs your paychecks, Doc?

Pepper: Actually, I sign his paychecks.

Leonard: You know what I mean, Tony. This is the same kind of thing your mother would have done.

Tony: No, it isn’t. I was planning on giving Loki that money anyway. Besides, Loki’s my kid, so if I want to give him a little pocket money—

Bruce: Five thousand dollars isn’t a little pocket money, and I thought we agreed we were more or less co-parenting Loki. That means you’re supposed to consult the rest of us before you make decisions like that. Giving Loki a large sum of money out of the blue just sends the wrong message.

Tony: And what message is that?

Bruce: That it isn’t necessary to earn money, because it's something that will just fall into your lap?

Tony: Loki is both my kid and actual royalty. He might have ninety-nine problems, but being broke ain’t one, Bruce. Money’s probably never going to be a problem for him, even if he never works a day in his life. Personally, I think I’m just teaching Loki how to have money. I did tell him that he wasn’t getting any more until Christmas.

Bruce: Thor, don't you have something to say about this? Loki is your brother.

Thor: Actually, I don’t see what the problem is. Loki has always been responsible with money. Whenever we journeyed with Sif and the Warriors Three, Loki was the one who held the purse strings—a bit too tightly, if anything. I remember once we were journeying in Vanaheim, and there was a perfectly good inn we could have stayed in. But Loki made us camp in the woods at the edge of town instead, because he thought the innkeeper was attempting to overcharge us. He attempted to persuade him to lower his rate first, but the innkeeper would not budge even when Loki said he would ‘burn the place to the ground.’ Personally, I would have just paid the extra gold. But the inn burnt down in the middle of the night, so it was probably a lucky thing we weren’t staying there—what? Why are you all staring at me?

Leonard: Thor, you don’t think that—

Thor: Oh—I mean, no! I know what you’re thinking now, but it could not have been Loki. He volunteered to keep watch over our camp all night long while the rest of us slept. Besides, he might threaten to ‘burn such and such thing to the ground,’ but the threat is nearly always figurative. Arson really isn’t his style. And the denizens of the village assured us that it was a dragon who burnt the inn down—why are you all still staring?

Bruce: Thor, can Loki shapeshift into a dragon, by chance?

Thor: I suppose he could if he wanted—wait, you cannot think—but I know he could not have been the dragon, because afterward we hunted the dragon down. Remember that I said Loki once kept a miniature dragon as a pet?

Tony: A miniature dragon burnt the inn down?

Thor: It only takes a tiny spark to ignite a roaring bonfire, my friend. Anyway, when we found the little dragon, Sif wanted to kill it and turn it’s hide into a new chest plate for her armor—dragon scales make very good armor—but Loki would not hear of it and insisted on taking it home with us as a pet.

Leonard: I feel like we’ve gotten way off track here. We were here to try to explain to Tony why it isn’t appropriate to—

Pepper: Actually, now I’m thinking that Tony might be right.

Tony: Pep, that is completely off base—wait, sorry—did you say I was right?

Pepper: I said you might be right. We probably should be teaching Loki to be a good steward of the wealth he’s likely to inherit. Maybe letting him have what’s still a relatively small amount of money wasn’t the worst idea—

Leonard: Small amount? I’ve made less than five thousand dollars in a year.

Tony: But that had to have been like, pre-nineties inflation, right?

Leonard: It was 2012.

Bruce: Leonard, that’s impossible. Weren’t you teaching?

Leonard: Adjunct professors make practically nothing, Bruce. Only around two thousand dollars per class, if the class is full. Considering how much work actually goes into preparing class materials and lectures, grading, and working one on one with students, I probably could have made more money per hour working a register at a fast-food restaurant.

Bruce: But your private practice—

Leonard: Barely paid for the rent on my office and my malpractice insurance.

Bruce: How did you pay the rent on your apartment?

Leonard: I put it on my credit card. You wouldn’t believe the amount of debt I racked up. But it’s alright now, because—

Tony: Because? We’re waiting, Doc.

Leonard: Because I made enough money in the first month working here to pay it all off. Okay, now that I think about it, there are a lot of problems that money can solve. This still has nothing to do with—

Tony: Doc, the fact that you paid your rent with a credit card for a year tells me that your problem is also that you think like a poor person when it comes to money. So tell me, which one of us do you think is the right person to teach Loki how to handle finances?

Leonard: You might have a point, actually.

Bruce: Tony, I still think that you shouldn’t have just given Loki that much money.

Pepper: I agree. Tony, you inherited most of what you have, but you do work. Even though you’ve stepped down from your position as CEO, you still lead research and development for SI.

Tony: Yeah, but I don’t actually have to, just like none of you actually have to work.

Bruce: What do you mean, we don’t have to work? Tony, all of us—

Tony: Could live with me for free? Seriously, haven’t you guys realized that I’d take care of you even if you didn’t work for me? Actually, Bruce, you don’t even really work for me. You’re basically a free loader already.

Bruce: Oh my God, you’re right—

Pepper: No, he’s not. You’ve actually made a lot of contributions to SI’s research and development, plus you’re part of the Avengers. Look Tony, what’s done is done, and I guess we’ll just have to wait and see whether or not Loki’s responsible with the money you gave him—

JARVIS: Sir, the life-sized leopard statue ordered by Master Loki has been delivered to the lobby of the building. Should I have it sent up?

Tony: Yeah, go ahead. Hey, why are you guys looking at me like that? I did tell the kid he could redecorate his room, and it’s not like he bought an actual leopard.

Chapter Text

Loki twirled in front of the three-way mirror in a forest green satin ball gown with lace sleeves and lace at the throat. “Do you think it’s appropriate for a Latverian wedding, though?” 

Pepper leaned forward to get a better look. “To be honest, I’m not sure what’s in fashion in Latveria. Nat?”

“As long as it’s got long sleeves and a high neckline, you should be good.” Natasha sat on the other end of the sofa on which Pepper was perched, but she hadn’t truly been watching the fashion show Loki had been putting on for them outside the dressing room of the high-end boutique the other woman had brought them to. Instead, she’d been looking at her phone the entire time, occasionally typing input into it with her thumbs.

“Shouldn’t you be shopping for a dress as well?” Loki asked her.

Without looking away from her phone, Natasha shrugged. “I’ve already got something I can wear. There’s no reason to buy something new every time I go on a mission.”

Pepper arched an eyebrow at her. “You’re sure you have something that isn’t damaged?” 

“You accidentally wear a ball gown with a few bullet holes to a charity gala once, and no one forgets it.”

“There were blood stains on it, too.”

“Which is why I’ve switched dry cleaners.”

Pepper turned her attention back to Loki. “Well, is that the dress?”

“I’m not sure.” Loki loved the color and the way the gown moved when she switched her hips back and forth, but she had been having too much fun trying things on to settle on something yet.

“You look a vision in that dress, Sister,” said Thor. “I think you should get it.” 

Loki didn’t understand why Thor had come if he was only going to complain the entire time. “You’re just tired of watching me try things on.” 

“No, I just think that is the dress. The color suits you.”

Tony leaned back against the cushions of the couch where the males of the group sat, and swirled the champagne around in his glass. “Might as well settle in and enjoy a complementary glass of bubbly, Point Break. There’s no way we’re getting out of here in the next hour. Also, I’ll give you a tip ahead of time. If the question ‘does this make me look fat’ ever comes up, there’s no right answer. You would think that a simple ‘no’ would be acceptable, but somehow it never is. The answer least likely to get you killed is, ‘I love you, you’re the most beautiful woman in the world, and you look fantastic in everything.’”

Like Natasha, Clint had been distracting himself with his phone the entire time, but he nodded in agreement. Natasha gave him a sidelong glance, then started typing something on her phone. Clint looked up from his own phone and shrugged.

“Loki is starting to look a little chubby, though,” said Thor.

Loki spun towards him, her hands clutching the fabric of her skirt as it spun with her. “I can hear you, Thor, and I am not chubby. The next time you use my name and ‘chubby,’ in the same sentence, I shall turn you into a kookaburra.”

“At least if I were an unusually large rodent, I wouldn’t have to watch you try on dresses all afternoon. It isn’t a bad thing, Loki. I would rather see you chubby than emaciated as you were before.”

“Kookaburra are birds, not rodents. I believe you are thinking of a capybara. Tony, may I? I did give him ample warning.”

“Just this once I’m tempted to say yes, but I’m going to have to say no, at least until we get home.”

“Perhaps I will get this one,” said Loki, suddenly having an incentive to get back to the tower. “Of course, I shall need shoes to go with it.”

Natasha peered at her over the top of her phone, scanning her eyes over the dress Loki had chosen and giving her a small nod of approval. “Make sure you can run in them. Remember, we’re going to get your mom out of this wedding. With any luck, we’re not staying for the reception, because there won’t be one.”

⋆ ˚｡⋆˚₍₍⁽⁽ ƪ(˘.˘*)ʃ ₎₎⁾⁾ ˚⋆｡˚ ⋆ ⁽⁰ ⁰⁾◞❢

Loki had found a pair of satin flats that could be dyed to match her dress, and Pepper had promised to lend her some jewelry—nothing precious of course, in case something happened to it. She probably shouldn’t have let Tony spend so much on the dress when it might suffer the same fate as most of Natasha’s formal wear. The woman had been right, they were going on a mission, not to a social event. Still, Loki would take any opportunity to get dressed up; she had been stuck inside the tower too long wearing sweatpants and T-shirts out of the Avengers’ unsold merchandise closet. Loki looked uncertainly from the puffy green dress laid out on her bed to her open suitcase. “JARVIS, how do you pack a ball gown into a suitcase?” 

“I don’t know, Miss Loki, how do you pack a ball gown into a suitcase?”

“It isn’t a joke. I need to know.” Loki had done plenty of traveling in her life, but she didn’t have much experience packing. Whenever she had gone on journeys before, she had kept most of her things in dimensional storage; even before she’d learned to use dimensional storage, there had always been servants to do her packing for her. 

The only “servants” Tony had were Dum-E and U, who she wouldn’t be allowing near any possessions she didn’t want ruined anytime soon, and JARVIS, who could do no more than advise her on how to pack on her own. “Miss Loki, surely you can tell that dress would not fit in—”

“Are you suggesting, JARVIS, that I have grown so large that one of my garments would not fit into this suitcase?”

“I am suggesting that ball gowns with tulle underskirts are not intended to be packed in suitcases. I would suggest packing it in a garment bag instead. I have already ordered an extra-wide garment bag for you, and it should be here by this evening.”

“Extra-wide? You think you’re funny, I suppose.”

“I think I can be hilarious when I wish to be, but I hardly see what that has to do with anything. I only ordered the correct size to accommodate for the extra material in your gown’s skirts. If you don’t mind my saying so, it seems to me that you have become fixated on a small or imagined flaw in your appearance—perhaps you ought to speak to Doctor Samson about that.”

Loki grit her teeth. Were it possible for her to turn him into something unpleasant or stabbed him, she might have. Then again, turning people into animals or stabbing them just for annoying her was not constructive behavior. When someone hurt her feelings she should use her words, shouldn’t she?  “I am not delusional, JARVIS, and if I ever need a machine to psychoanalyze me, I shall let you know.”

“I apologize if I have overstepped, Miss Loki.” Loki got the distinct impression that she’d offended JARVIS somehow, but she had little time to think about it. She stuck the tip of her tongue between her teeth to stop herself from grinding them and tried to focus on packing again. At least if the dress couldn’t fit in her suitcase, she would have space to pack a few more books. With any luck, she wouldn’t have much occasion to read them. 

Since her powers had started returning, she had been itching to test them against something, but she knew better than to ask to come along on any of the Avenger’s missions. Ever since she had been dead for two hours, Tony had been horribly overprotective. He hadn’t let her leave the tower at all until the Wrecking Crew had been caught, and the first time she had left the tower after that, he had attempted to make her wear a bullet proof vest under her clothes. Luckily, Pepper and Doctor Samson had teamed up to convince him it wasn’t necessary. Pepper had then taken Loki aside and told her that Tony kept trying to make her wear one too, and to just ignore it.

Bruce could be worse. She couldn’t sneeze or cough around him without being dragged off to have her temperature taken. He had also insisted on immunizing her for anything and everything he could think of to immunize her for. Though she supposed that was fair; according to Bruce, her immunity to Earth diseases might be weaker than a normal human’s. She wouldn’t have inherited any of the right antibodies from her biological mother, whoever that had been.

She wondered why neither of them had protested her going to Latveria yet. Maybe they were starting to accept that it was impossible to keep her preserved indefinitely in a safe little bubble.

Loki jumped when she suddenly felt another presence in the room with her. The doors in the tower didn’t creak like the doors in the palace did, so she never had any warning when people entered rooms without announcing themselves. She only just stopped herself from swearing; she didn’t mind having to contribute to the swear jar—it was for a good cause, after all—but she’d still been raised to believe that young ladies didn’t use foul language, and that kind of early programming was difficult to overcome. “You ought to knock, Stark. I might have been indecent, you know.”

“JARVIS said you were packing. If you’d been packing naked, he would have told me that.”

“Are you certain of that? If you haven’t noticed, your little AI has developed a rather mischievous personality of late.”

“Yeah, I wonder who’s influence that was. Anyway, I brought you a present.”

“You shouldn’t have—” Loki looked down, saw what he held, and had to sick her tongue between her teeth to keep herself from gnashing them again. “I mean it, you shouldn’t have.”

“This time I’m not being over protective,” Tony argued, holding out the familiar bullet proof vest with his good arm. “You’re going into enemy territory here. Just try it on. I’ve redesigned it so that it will go under your dress without looking bulky.”

Loki decided that if it would get Tony off her back, she would try it on. He couldn’t force her to wear it once she got to Latveria. She held the garment up to examine it and realized that he had redesigned it so that now it was not only a vest, but a garment that would cover her legs halfway to her knees—it looked a bit like the “shape wear” some human women wore under their clothes. The thin material shimmered under the light and reminded her of uru when it was pounded thin, but of course that couldn’t be what it was. “What material is this?” 

Tony’s proud grin gave Loki an uneasy feeling. “It’s made of nanobots.”

Loki made a face. “Tiny robots? Like a bunch of microscopic JARVIS’s?”

“I didn’t put JARVIS in them, although that would be awesome.”

Loki disagreed. She wouldn’t be putting anything against her skin that had the capability of making snotty comments about how difficult it was to wrap themselves around her trunk-like thighs. “So how do I put this on, anyway?” She couldn’t see any seams in the material, or any buttons or zippers, for that matter.

“It’s voice activated,” Stark explained. “Go-go Stark Industries nano-mailcoat!”

Loki knit her eyebrows at that odd turn of phrase, but before she could ask Stark if he had taken leave of his senses, the material in her hands seemed to dissolve into a swarm of gnats. She attempted to jump away from them, but they were fast, and began flying up the leg of her loose-fitting sweatpants and up the arm of her t-shirt. A moment later, she realized that they had all settled against her skin underneath her clothes. 

At first it felt as if a swarm of bugs were crawling over her, but a moment later, it felt only as if she were wearing a garment made from the mortals’ “spandex.” That didn’t mean she was comfortable, however—in fact, it was too tight, and seemed like it might be getting tighter, though it might have been her anxiety telling her that. “How do I get it off?” Loki asked, managing to stay relatively calm.

Stark shrugged. “You don’t get it off. It only responds to my voice.”

Visions of murder danced behind her eyes. “Stark."

“What? I’m not stupid, Loki. I know you won’t wear it if I don’t make you wear it.”

“If you don’t take this off right now, I’m going to dislocate your other shoulder.”

“Whoa, hey. Just calm down—”

“Don’t tell me to calm down. How am I even supposed to use the facilities in this?” 

“I did think of that, okay? You’re not allowed to take the suit all the way off, but if you say ‘go-go Stark Industries nano-mailcoat, activate potty break protocol’—”

“Those words are never, ever coming out of my mouth, Stark.”

“I bet they will if you get desperate enough.”

“Listen to my words right now, Stark: GET THIS OFF ME, OR I WILL END YOU.”

“You can threaten me all you want, Loki, but I’m not letting you anywhere near Doom without adequate protection. I would have made it a full body suit, but I didn’t have time to produce enough nanobots—”

Loki had gotten to the end of both her reason and her patience. She stood with her nose an inch away from Tony’s. “Are you saying I have grown so large that it would take a thousand years to produce enough nanobots to stretch around my calves?”

“Whoa, no, that is not what I’m saying at all. Loki, you are not at all fat. Thor has to be nuts. But even if you were a little chubby, we’d love you just the way—”

Loki grabbed his good arm and pulled.
  
( *｀^´)/ヾ(༎ຶ ෴ ༎ຶ)

After Loki lost had her temper with Tony, things got a little blurry. She was fairly certain it had been Natasha who had pulled her off of him, but then someone else had been talking to her, telling her she was safe, as if she’d been the one who’d been attacked and not the one who had done the attacking. An empty glass sat on her bedside table, reminding her that whoever it was who’d been talking to her had also coaxed her into drinking a glass of water—Bruce, possibly? It seemed like Bruce always wanted her to drink water for one reason or another. 

Loki lifted her head from her pillow and blinked at Doctor Samson, who was sitting in a chair by her bed. She wondered how long she’d been out, if he’d had the opportunity to move furniture from the kitchen into her room. “How are you feeling?”

“Tired,” Loki told him. “Have I been asleep?” 

“Only for a few minutes. Bruce gave you your medication. You know, the stuff I told you could take if you had another bad panic attack? Then you must have passed out from exhaustion, because the medicine itself shouldn’t be strong enough to knock you out like that. Do you remember what happened before that, and do you want to talk about it? We don’t have to talk about it now if you don’t feel up to it.”

Loki tried to remember. Had she been having a panic attack? “I tried to dislocate Tony’s good shoulder.”

Samson nodded. “You didn’t dislocate his shoulder, but you did knock your head into his and give him a bloody nose. It doesn’t seem to be broken, though. You also bit Natasha.”

“I didn’t mean to hurt Natasha. Is she going to need a rabies shot now?”

“We’re pretty sure you don’t have rabies, so no. Loki, can you tell me what was going on before all that happened?”

“Stark put me in an undergarment made of voice activated nanobots and refused to let me out of it. Then he called me fat.” Loki shoved her bed linens aside and lifted her shirt to check. She wasn’t wearing the suit anymore, which meant that someone must have taken it off her at some point. Either that, or it had never been there, and she had finally gone mad.

Samson’s eyebrows knit together. “Are you certain—”

“Doctor Samson,” interrupted JARVIS, “You should know that is what actually happened, though I do not believe Sir meant to call Miss Loki fat. He told her that she was not.”

Samson’s lips pursed together. “I see.”

“I’m sorry, Doctor Samson. I know I’m supposed to slow down and think things through when I become upset, and let people know—”

“No, it’s alright. Sometimes things happen. It sounds like Tony was being pretty obtuse, and that what he did triggered a panic attack.”

“Am I not in trouble for attacking him, then?”

“When you have a panic attack, your body goes into flight or fight mode. In this case, you fought. Anyway, Tony and Natasha are both okay, and I’m sure they’ve already forgiven you for accidentally hurting them. No one here is going to punish you for having a panic attack.”

Loki didn’t know that hurting Tony had been an accident. It hadn’t felt like an accident at the time; but then, she couldn’t even remember hurting Natasha. At that point, she must have been completely out of control, the way she’d been when she had been when she’d attempted to use the Bifrost to destroy Jotunheim. She felt her heart beat a fraction of a second faster. “You’re saying I shouldn’t feel bad because I wasn’t in control of myself. I don’t like feeling out of control—”

“We can work on finding better ways for you to cope with these attacks when you have them, but in the meantime, I don’t want you to beat yourself up about it. It won’t help.” The doctor smiled at her, a forced sort of smile that was probably meant to reassure her. “Do you know where your brother went, by the way? We’ve been looking for him.”

“Odin’s crappy beard—” Loki’s hand flew up to cover her mouth. She had nearly forgotten about Thor and wondered if she still wouldn’t be in trouble when she told him what she’d done.  She blurted it out before she could change her mind. “If you’re looking for Thor, I believe you’ll find him in the atrium, in one of the eucalyptus trees.”

“What is he doing in a tree?”

“Laughing, I suspect.” Turning her brother into a kookaburra hadn’t been an accident, but Tony had given her permission to do it—more or less, anyway.

♪  ♫ ♪ 
Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree,
Merry merry king of the bush is he.
Laugh, Kookaburra, laugh, Kookaburra,
Gay your life must be!

— “Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree,” Marion Sinclair (1932)
♪  ♫ ♪

Bruce had instructed Tony to lean forward, and now he pressed an icepack to the bridge of his nose for him. “Tony, what the hell were you thinking?” 

Tony’s nose had refused to stop bleeding for over fifteen minutes, so he’d packed it with gauze. This gave his voice a nasal quality, making it even more difficult for Bruce to take him seriously when he said, “I have a right as a father—” 

“To put Loki in some sort of chastity device? No, you don’t.” 

“It wasn’t meant as a chastity device.”

At a certain point, Bruce had resigned himself to the thought that he’d never have children. Now it was like he had two, if he counted the forty-three-year-old man-child in front of him. “And what was the thinking behind putting her in an impossible to remove nanobot suit that covered her to her knees?” 

When Bruce had entered Loki’s room, he’d found Loki hyperventilating on the floor. He’d first assumed it to be the result of her wrestling match with Natasha, but when he’d gotten a closer look at her, he’d been shocked to discover that her breathing had been constricted by some sort of restrictive undergarment. At first, he had thought it to be some kind of shapewear, but when he tried to cut her out of it with the scissors from the first aid kit he’d brought with him, the material had reformed itself around the blades. 

JARVIS had been able to explain to him about the nanobots; otherwise, he would have thought he was going out of his mind, or that he’d accidentally dropped acid. Only the years of work he’d put into his “anger issues” allowed him to stay calm as he pulled his friend, who had been walking around the hallway in a daze with blood dripping down his face, back into the room. He had calmly instructed him to remove his nanobots before Loki suffocated, then he’d been quick to get Loki a dose of her emergency anxiety meds, which he carried in his wallet just in case she needed it. Leonard had arrived soon after, freeing him up to take care of Tony.

Tony took the icepack from him and held it in place himself for about ten seconds, but then put it down and started to lean back. Bruce grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him forward again. “Don’t do that. If you lean back, it’s just going to make the blood run down your throat.” 

“Huh, I always thought you were supposed to lean back—how’d I ever survive before I had you around to make sure I didn’t choke on my own blood?” 

Bruce couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or not, but he didn’t particularly care. “I wonder about that myself sometimes, but I’m guessing Pepper had a lot to do with it.” He picked the icepack up again and shoved it back in Tony’s face. “You need to keep that on for a few more minutes.” Tony really could be worse than a kid; even Loki could follow simple directions. “And maybe stop talking.”

“Will that help?”

“I don’t know if it will help you, but I have a feeling it might help with the massive headache I feel coming on. You won’t like me when I have a headache, Tony.”

Tony took the icepack from him, and this time he held it there. He was quiet for about a minute, but Bruce should have known he wasn’t capable of staying that way longer. “We have to be nuts for letting Loki go to Latveria at all. You know you agree with me, so don’t tell me—”

“Tony, you can trust me to keep her safe. Hulk won’t let anything happen to her either. Not again.” And if Bruce just kept telling himself that, maybe he’d believe it too.

“You know I trust you. That isn’t the problem, and it wasn’t your fault Loki got killed that time. If anything, it was mine. I shouldn’t have let her order those mimosas.”

“That part was just as much my fault as yours. I was there too. But the decision to leave her in the restroom by herself? That was all on me.”

“You thought she’d be safe there. You didn’t know she’d wander out into the street.”

“I should have made sure she didn’t.”

“Does it help if I point out that if you hadn’t Hulked out, other people might have died that day? People who wouldn’t have come back because they don’t have a daughter who’s queen of the Norse underworld?”

“In other words, it’s the trolley problem. You know what? I hate the trolley problem. There’s no good answer to it when it’s just a thought exercise—”

“And when it’s not, it really sucks. Except in this case, the person you didn’t save happened to be a god that got resurrected two hours later.”

“I had no idea that was going to happen.”

“You also didn’t choose to sacrifice Loki so you could save those other people, which means it isn’t the trolley problem at all. You just trusted that she was going to be okay where she was, and it turned out to be a bad call. You’ve got to stop beating yourself up about it.”

“I know.” Leonard had told him the same thing, over and over. “But Tony, you need to stop beating yourself up about it too. Loki’s fine now. No more going overboard with the ‘safety measures.’ We have to remember that she isn’t defenseless. She’s been training with both Clint and Natasha, and she can do magic.”

“She’s still a kid, though.”

“She’s a kid who almost broke your nose.”

“She was trying to dislocate my arm.”

“She’s going to be fine, Tony. I won’t let anything happen to her, and neither will Natasha or Thor.”

( ;¬_¬)   ( ¯།,།¯ )

When Leonard returned to their suite, Bruce had changed into a gray suit, and had a lavender silk tie draped around his neck. “Planning to take me out?” he asked, even though he knew better.  

“I’m just checking to make sure this still fits, and that there aren’t any stains—luckily, I’m not as hard on my formal wear as Natasha.”

“That’s an understatement.” No one was as hard on their formal wear as Natasha, but Bruce hardly ever wore any of his. The only time he did was when Pepper insisted he attend one of her charity events with the other Avengers. 

“How’s Loki doing?” Bruce asked, as he fumbled with his tie.

Leonard took it from him and tied it into a Windsor knot with practiced ease. He wondered how Bruce had made it to his early forties without figuring out how to tie his own tie. “She’ll be fine. She turned Thor back—Kookaburras have a pretty distinctive call, so it wasn’t difficult to find the tree he was in. Pepper’s going to help her finish packing now. How’s your patient?”

“He’ll live.”

“You sound like you aren’t happy with that outcome.”

“I know he’s worried about Loki, but what the hell was he thinking?”  Bruce’s hand went to the knot that Leonard had just tied for him and loosened it, setting it askew in the process. 

Leonard battled the urge to fix Bruce’s tie for him again. “I don’t think he was.” After so many losses in his life, Tony had a strong fear, bordering on a phobia, of losing the people closest to him. He had already lost Loki once—all of them had, even if it had only been for a couple of hours. Letting Loki go to Latveria while he stayed behind couldn’t be easy. But given that Tony was his patient, he couldn’t talk about his issues with Bruce, nor did he want to. He leaned in close enough to smell Bruce’s aftershave, which had strong notes of sandalwood and cedar. His hands found their way back to Bruce’s tie. “You look good, by the way.”

Bruce leaned back and arched an eyebrow at him. “It’s just the same suit I wore to the last charity gala for the Maria Stark Foundation. You’ve seen it before.” 

Leonard remembered. He’d spent the entire night watching women—most of them beautiful young women—flirt with Bruce. He didn’t think he’d have minded so much if some of them would have flirted with him too, but apparently, being the Avengers' staff psychologist wasn’t nearly as sexy as being the Hulk. At least Bruce had been fairly oblivious to their attentions.

For a while, he’d thought Natasha was flirting with Bruce too. Again, Bruce had been oblivious. But then Leonard had realized that there was no way that Natasha, who knew everything that went on in the tower, didn’t know about their relationship. Now he was pretty sure she’d been teasing him, trying to make him jealous on purpose. Why she would do that he didn’t know, but Natasha never did anything without a reason. Maybe she’d been trying to force them out into the open, or maybe she had been trying to find out what he would do. Natasha had once put together psych profiles for SHIELD, and she probably hadn’t stopped obsessively analyzing everyone she knew just because SHIELD was defunct. That, of course, was a difficult habit to break.

“Leonard, are you okay?”

Leonard wondered if too much of what he’d just been thinking had shown in his expression. Jealousy wasn’t an attractive emotion, and it had likely been his jealous tendencies that had driven Betty away from him. “Sorry, I was just worrying about this whole Latveria thing. Promise me you’ll be safe.”

That earned him another arched eyebrow, and Leonard wondered if Bruce knew that had been a cover. “I’ll be fine. It’s just another mission. You know I can’t get hurt. I can’t even hurt myself, because the other guy won’t let me.”

“I hate that you know that.” Leonard said it without thinking, and when Bruce looked away from him, he felt something tighten in his stomach. The last thing he had wanted was to shame Bruce for something that was already painful to remember.

“Sorry,” said Bruce, making him feel even worse. “Anyway, I’m more afraid of something happening to Loki. Maybe it’s a bad idea to let her go.”

“If you tell her she can’t go, she’ll probably try to go on her own,” Leonard pointed out. “And there wouldn’t be much we could do to stop her, since she’s starting to get her magic back.”

“You might be right. I just hope that she’ll let the rest of us take the lead, and that she won’t do anything too dangerous.” 

Bruce Banner can be an optimist after all, thought Leonard. “I’m sure that if anything happens, you’ll be able to handle it. Out of anyone here, you’ve been the one Loki’s most likely to listen to.”

Chapter Text

“This is your captain speaking—” came a tinny disembodied voice from the speaker at the front of the cabin. “Please remember to buckle your seat belts before takeoff, and remember, if you look out on the wing and see something that looks like a gremlin, it probably is a gremlin. That’s just the kind of world we live in—”

 “Stop screwing around, Clint,” came Natasha’s voice, more muffled but also reduced to something thin and metallic. Despite the poor quality of the sound system, the inside of the SI corporate jet looked more like a luxurious sitting room than the inside of a commercial air liner. A sofa and coffee table were bolted to the floor across from a sixty-inch flat screen television, which if anything seemed a little big for the space. There was even a dry bar, although it wasn’t stocked with any alcohol at the moment.

Loki watched as Thor picked up the two ends of his seatbelt, looked at one and then the other as if they were the pieces of a puzzle, and then clicked them together. He hadn’t ridden in this type of aircraft before; he’d been on the Quinjet plenty of times, but when the rest of them had flown out to Malibu during the summer on a jet similar to this one, Thor had flown himself there using Mjolnir. This time, since the distance had been somewhat greater, he’d decided to take the jet with them.

Bruce had already strapped himself into the seat across from them. “Loki, are you not putting yours on?”

“I shall put it on when we take off,” Loki told him.

“We should be taking off in just a minute. Loki, are you okay? Does flying make you nervous? It’s okay, flying makes a lot of people nervous—”

Loki felt annoyed suddenly. She was tired of everyone being so overprotective. “Maybe I just don’t want to wear it.”

Thor had the nerve to roll his eyes at her. “Sister, this is not a good time to be obstinate.”

“Stay out of it, Thor.”

Bruce unfastened his own seatbelt, stood, and for a moment, Loki froze, because she didn’t know what he was about to do. But all he did was walk down the aisle, pop his head into the cockpit for a moment, and come back. “Loki, we’re not taking off until you put your seatbelt on. It isn’t an option.”

Loki wanted to scream, but instead, she grit her teeth and kicked the seat in front of her.

“Sister, must you throw a tantrum now?”

Loki thought she had done a pretty good job of minimizing her reaction. “Shut up, Thor, or I shall stab you.”

“You’ve nothing to stab me with.”

“You know I’m nothing if not resourceful.”

“True.”

“Thor, can you let me talk to Loki alone for a minute?” Thor nodded as he unfastened his seatbelt. The jet wasn’t that large, but he shuffled down the aisle to the back of the plane while Bruce sat down next to Loki. “If you don’t tell me what’s wrong, I won’t know how to help.” At first, she thought she might be in trouble for threatening Thor, but Bruce seemed prepared to overlook that, or else he was ill-prepared to deal with two of her behavioral issues at once. Actually, it didn’t sound like she was in trouble at all—Bruce was being understanding again, which only annoyed her more though she couldn’t explain why.

“You are being overprotective again.”

"I’m overprotective?”

“Yes. You have been ever since I died that time.”

“I know Tony’s gone a little too far a few times trying to make you wear his protective gear, but what have I done?”

“You vaccinated me for all those diseases.” Loki knew it was the wrong example as soon as she’d said it. She already understood why the vaccinations had been reasonable.

“Loki, that doesn’t make me overprotective. I know getting so many at once might have seemed excessive, but that’s because normally, you’re supposed to get most of those shots before you’re old enough to remember getting them, and then the rest are spread out throughout your childhood.”

“You also take my temperature a lot.”

“Taking your temperature doesn’t hurt you, and it only takes a couple of seconds with the aural thermometer. I’m sorry, but it does concern me that you weren’t born with any antibodies that would protect you against the diseases we have here. If you have symptoms that indicate that you might be sick, I’m going to take your temperature.”

“You’ve swabbed my throat as well,” said Loki, not ready to admit that, maybe, she was being a little ridiculous. “Which isn’t painful, I suppose, but it is uncomfortable.”

“I’ve only swabbed your throat a couple of times, and both times, it was because you complained about your throat feeling sore. One of those times was the time you had strep.” The other time, Loki had been faking because he wanted attention. Both of them knew that, but Bruce was kind enough not to bring it up.

Loki didn’t have any further arguments, but she still didn’t want to admit she had been wrong. “I’m not wearing my seatbelt. You can’t make me.”

“We’re not taking off then.”

“What would even happen if we took off and I wasn’t wearing it?”

"I don’t think anything would happen unless something went wrong during takeoff. But then you might be hurt. You might still be hurt if you were wearing it, but it would significantly reduce the chance.”

“If I die because I didn’t put my seatbelt on in an airplane, I am sure Hela will send me back.”

“I’d rather we didn’t test that theory. Besides, death might be the worst possible outcome, but it’s not the only bad outcome. I’m guessing Hela wouldn’t be able to help you if you ended up with brain damage or a spinal cord injury. She isn’t the goddess of being paralyzed from the waist down.”

“Isn’t air travel supposed to be the safest form of travel? Aren’t you more likely to get struck by lightning seven times than die in an airplane crash? Obviously, I’ve been struck by lightning quite a few hundred times more than that, but that’s beside the point; it’s an extremely safe mode of travel. Don’t push your anxieties onto me, Bruce, I don’t need anyone else’s.”

“I’m glad you aren’t nervous about flying, but that isn’t a reason for you not to wear your seatbelt. You just have to wear it during takeoff. The bigger thing is, if you can’t cooperate when it comes to something like this, I’m not sure you should be going to Latveria at all. We aren’t just going to your mother’s wedding. We need to treat this like a mission, because we’re going into dangerous enemy territory. I already had some reservations about letting you do this, but if you’re going to have this much trouble every time someone tells you what to do—”

“What you’re saying is that unless I can follow orders without questioning them, you don’t think I should go.” Loki hated the idea of following orders; it reminded her of all the times Odin had given them orders and expected them to follow those orders blindly.

“I understand that’s difficult for you,” said Bruce, “but I need to know that you’ll do what we tell you to do so that we can keep you safe.”

“I am capable of keeping myself safe,” Loki argued.

“I know you aren’t helpless,” Bruce told her. “I’m pretty far from being helpless too, and neither is your brother, or Natasha, or Clint, or Tony. But when you’re on a mission, everyone can’t just go do their own thing. That’s why on every mission, there’s someone who takes the lead; usually that’s Steve, but since he isn’t here, Natasha is in charge.”

“But you want me to take orders from all of you, not just Natasha.”

“It’s called a chain of command for a reason. If nothing else, it prevents us from having to stop and have a debate about what to do if we disagree.”

“If that is the case, who is higher in the chain of command on this mission? You or Thor?”

Bruce winced apologetically. “Okay, so actually, I go on most missions as the Hulk, and I’m not sure he has the best understanding of the whole chain of command thing. But still, he usually does defer to the Captain or Tony, I think—”

“Even though Tony is clearly under you in the chain of command.”

Bruce’s eyebrows knit together as if he didn’t know what Loki meant.

“Oh, come on Bruce. You know Clint was right.” When Bruce continued to stare at him like he had no clue, Loki smiled back at him and made the gesture Clint had used the other night.

Bruce snorted. “First of all, the words ‘Clint’ and ‘right’ hardly ever belong in the same sentence.”

“Is Tony directly under Steve in the chain of command, then?”

“I think so? Although,” Bruce added hesitantly, “if Tony tried to give Natasha or Clint an order they disagreed with, they’d probably ignore him.”

“And where does my brother fit into this ‘chain of command?’” Loki couldn’t imagine the Thor she had known her entire life taking orders from mortals willingly.

“I’m actually not too sure. Look, the dynamic is kind of complicated.”

“And yet I am clearly at the bottom of this pecking order of yours, simply because you regard me as a child.”

“I’m sorry if we haven’t made that clear before now, but yes.”

Loki wasn’t used to Bruce being so direct. “That’s it, then? You’re not even going to pretend it’s for any other reason?”

“I could tell you that it’s because you haven’t gone on a mission with us before, but I know you don’t like it when people lie to you.”

Loki did appreciate Bruce’s honesty, but as far as she was concerned, this was her mother’s wedding to stop, and the rest of them were the ones tagging along. “Maybe I’ll just go by myself.”

Bruce narrowed his eyes at her suspiciously. “And how are you going to get there? As far as I know, you can’t teleport.”

Loki shrugged. “I could hijack a commercial airliner.”

“I really hope you’re joking, Loki.”

“It’s not that difficult.”

“What do you mean, ‘it’s not that difficult?’ Have you hijacked a plane before?”

Thor had apparently grown tired of waiting for Bruce to work things out with Loki. He moved from the seat he had taken in the back of the plane and crouched down in front of Loki so that he could look up at her instead of down. “Sister, please try to be reasonable. I will never again tell you to ‘know your place,’ because I understand now how those words hurt you. But could you try to accept that as young as you are, you do have the tendency to do things that are not altogether wise, and it would be better if at times you deferred to your elders? If it helps, on this mission I will be deferring to both Natasha and Bruce, who in relative terms are my elders as well. You should know that none here would force you to do anything you found truly objectionable. I do appreciate, Sister, that many of the issues you have with authority have arisen because both Odin and Mother have betrayed your trust.”

Loki would have liked to tell Thor to bugger off again, but he was doing that thing where he said all the right things again. “Oh, very well. I shall put my seatbelt on.”

“And do you promise to follow our lead when we get to Latveria?” asked Bruce.

Loki didn’t want to make that promise, because even if she had the best intentions not to, there was a good chance she would end up disobeying. “I promise I’ll behave,” she said, attempting to sound as contrite as possible. She wouldn’t promise how she’d behave, of course.

Bruce nodded. “Okay, good. Buckle up, and I’ll go tell Clint we can take off.” He lowered his voice. “Before we do take off, you’re sure you don’t need—”

“I’m not anxious about flying, Bruce.”

  Ԑ3      ☼          Ԑ3        Ԑ3 
 ━◉━━o( ❂ )o━━◉━

“Is it unusually warm in here?”

Loki looked up from her book and tilted her head to the side as she considered her brother. He had moved to a seat across the plane from her, and he looked a little pale, although it could have been the lighting in the plane. “The temperature feels fine to me. Feeling ill, brother?”

“Asgardians do not become ill,” Thor scoffed, as he gripped the arms of his seat hard enough to turn his knuckles white. His head turned towards to look out window, and Loki decided she might as well return to her book.

A few moments later, Thor stood and began picking his way down the middle of the plane towards the exit, but Bruce managed to get in front of him. “Thor, what are you doing?”

“I cannot breathe in this tiny, enclosed space. You must let me out.”

“You can’t just open the door while we’re in the sky. First of all, it ought to be physically impossible. There’s about twenty-four thousand pounds of pressure on it. But even if you are that strong—”

“Is that a challenge, Banner?”

Bruce grimaced but went right along without acknowledging that. “Opening it will depressurize the cabin, then none of us will be able to breathe. Not to mention, we might be sucked out into the sky. You and I might be able to survive that, but you’ll have killed your sister. Is that what you want?”

“Sometimes.”

Loki couldn’t help but smile at her brother’s adrenaline-induced honesty. She knew she shouldn’t be enjoying watching him have a panic attack, but she couldn’t help taking satisfaction in the knowledge that she wasn’t the only one capable of having one.

A loud crash echoed outside the plane, coupled with a flash of light. Another soon followed. As the plane jolted violently, Loki’s amusement evaporated. “Brother, is that you? If it is, stop it.”

“Thor, everything is fine,” Bruce attempted to reassure him. “Or at least it was until you created this storm. You need to calm down—try taking a breath and holding it in.”

Another lightning bolt rocked the jet, and Loki growled at her brother. “I swear, if you kill us all, I really am going to stab you. I’ve already identified a dozen objects inside this aircraft I could use, starting with the ice tongs from the dry bar.”

Bruce gave her a withering look, or as much of a withering look as the gentle doctor could manage. “Loki, just go back to your book and let me handle this, please.” The man had to be crazy, of course. There was no way she could go back to her book when the plane was being tossed around like a toy skiff in the middle of an angry sea.

“We seem to have hit an unexpected storm, folks,” said Clint. “You might want to buckle your seat belts.”

This time, Loki buckled her seatbelt without complaint and tightened it as much as she could. She closed her eyes and reminded herself that her lightheadedness and the butterflies in her stomach were only physical sensations, and that those kinds of sensations couldn’t harm her. Besides, she really wasn’t afraid of either being in the plane or her brother’s lightening, so why was she even feeling them?

When Loki opened her eyes again, Bruce had coaxed Thor back into his seat, and the lightening seemed further in the distance.

ϟ ϟ ϟ                      ϟ ϟ ϟ   
 ━◉━━o( ❂ )o━━◉━

" This is your captain speaking. We’re preparing for our descent, so please take your seats and buckle your seat belts. The time in Sokovia is three PM, the weather is partially cloudy, and—OH MY GOD, THERE’S A SNAKE ON THIS PLANE!”

“Clint, stop screwing around. We need to land the plane.”

“I’m not kidding, Nat, something just slithered around my ankle!”

Bruce poked his head into the cockpit. “Loki, it’s time to stop playing Snakes on a Plane. Please turn back into a person and sit in a seat so that you can put your seat belt back on before we land.”

Loki slithered out of the cockpit and back into her humanoid form. She sat as she’d been instructed, clicking her seatbelt into place. She didn’t want a repeat of their earlier argument, and after nine hours on the plane, she found herself eager to disembark. “Sorry Bruce, but I was becoming restless.”

“It’s alright, Loki. You don’t have to ask for permission to shapeshift unless you’re shapeshifting into something that might startle me, and that’s just for Hulk-related safety reasons. I’ve spent some time hiding out in the rainforest, so snakes don’t really bother me anymore.”

“But I am allowed to startle Clint, correct?”

“Yeah, that’s fine.” Bruce might not have completely approved of Loki using her shapeshifting abilities to disturb Clint while he was trying to fly the plane, but he had obviously decided to choose his battles. It was also possible that he was simply exhausted, having spent the last four hours of the flight trying to convince Thor that they were fine, and that the plane was not ‘running out of oxygen.’

Loki looked out her window and watched the tiny airfield below them growing larger. “Did Clint say we were landing in some place called Sokovia?”

“You did read Natasha’s mission briefing, right? Latveria doesn’t have any commercial airports. Also, foreign aircraft caught flying in Latverian airspace tend to be shot down, usually with some sort of intensified molecule projector or singularity disruptor. That means we’re landing in Sokovia. Clint is going to stay with the plane, and the rest of us will go on to Latveria from there.”

(\/) (°,,°) (\/)

“You shouldn’t have packed so much,” said Natasha as she watched Loki struggling to pull her oversized suitcase through the door that led from the tarmac into the airport. The Sokovian International Airport was nothing more than one large room with seating and a ticket counter. It looked more like a bus depot than a modern Midgardian airport.

“You could help me, you know. You hardly brought any luggage at all.” All Natasha had brought was a small carry-on bag. Loki couldn’t imagine how she had everything she needed to attend a wedding in it. Where was her dress? Bruce hadn’t brought much either, again, just a suit bag and a small carry-on. Thor didn’t appear to have any luggage at all, though he carried Mjolnir in the form of an umbrella. Loki had to wonder if he was planning on attending the wedding in the t-shirt and jeans he was wearing or if at some point, he had learned enough magic to be able to use dimensional storage and hadn’t told her.

“Sorry, but the Avengers have a strict you-packed-it, you-carry-it policy,” said Natasha, shifting her carry-on to her opposite shoulder. “The reason I didn’t bring much with me is that I didn’t want to carry it.”

“I’m not an Avenger, though.”

“You’re not a princess anymore either, so you’re going to have to figure out how to carry your own luggage.”

Once she got it inside the door, Loki let her suitcase fall to the ground and sat down on it. Thor stopped beside her and arched an eyebrow at her; he seemed to have made a full recovery from his nervous breakdown now that they’d disembarked the plane. “Sister, are you going to throw a tantrum again? We are in public this time.”

“I am not throwing a tantrum; I just need to catch my breath. Being mortal is extremely tiring.” She batted her eyelashes up at him. “Thor, you’re not carrying anything. I fear I cannot take another step while so encumbered—” Thor nodded as he bent down. Then Loki’s world turned upside down, as her brother threw her over his shoulder like a bag of flour. “You oaf—I meant to ask if you would carry my suitcase, not me! Put me down this instant. As you pointed out before, we are in public.”

“You said that you feared you could not take another step, Sister.”

“You’re not this stupid, Thor, and acting this way is not as cute as you think.”

“Will you two stop messing around? I hate to point this out, but we’re not on vacation,” said Natasha. “We need to make it to the Latverian border before sunset, and then we’ve got a long night-hike through the mountains ahead of us.”

“We’re hiking through the mountains? There’s no way I can carry that suitcase through the mountains!”

“Good point, Loki. You should probably pull out what you really need and put the rest back on the plane.”

Thor put Loki back on her feet, and she turned to Natasha. “Why didn’t anyone tell me this before?”

“I gave you a mission briefing, Loki.”

Mission briefing? Oh, right. Natasha had handed her a stack of papers the morning before. Loki had taken one look at them and decided she didn’t have time for it. “Too long, didn’t read.”

Loki thought she saw a vein actually pop out of Natasha’s forehead. “First, ten pages is short for a mission briefing. Second, I spent a hell of a lot longer compiling it than it would have taken you to read it. You could have at least scanned it. I’ve seen you speed read the newspaper in less than twenty minutes.”

“Untrue. I always skip over the classifieds and the sports section,” Loki argued. “Besides, you can’t just hand me a mission briefing and expect me to read it. As it has been pointed out, I am a child and inherently irresponsible.”

“I was under the impression you didn’t like being treated like a child.”

Loki didn’t want to pick a fight with the woman. For one thing, she still felt a little guilty for having bit her. She couldn’t remember doing it, but she had noticed the set of teeth marks on the inside of Natasha’s forearm, which had only started to fade. At least she hadn’t bit her hard enough to break through skin, nor had she turned into a wolf and bitten it off. She decided to chalk up their breakdown in communication to Natasha being an exceedingly strange person who expected everyone to read her mind, or at least her long-winded mission briefings. “Very well; I suppose that whose fault it is I didn’t know is a moot point anyway. What do you suggest I take?”

“You need your dress, your shoes, your make-up, and really, that’s it. Bring your toothbrush if you have to. Anything else you need you can get while we’re there. I’m sure they at least have drug stores in Latveria. But if you have any prescription medications, bring those—”

“What makes you think I’m on any medication?” Loki demanded.

Natasha held her hands up defensively. “It isn’t any of my business if you are or you aren’t. I’m just saying to bring it if you have it. I have mine.”

Loki crouched by her suitcase and unzipped it. She pulled out her makeup kit, which already contained her toothbrush and the mouth guard she wore at night to keep her from grinding her teeth while she slept. She put it in her carry-on bag, along with a pair of panties and a matching bra; she was damned if she was going anywhere without at least one clean set of underthings. She took the books from her carry-on bag and put them in her suitcase.

She knew that Bruce had her emergency anti-anxiety pills, and that if she needed one, he would give it to her. She wondered what kind of medication Natasha was on, but knew it wasn’t any of her business, any more than it was Natasha’s business what medication Loki was on. She had begun to understand that if she wanted others to respect her privacy, she needed to afford others the same courtesy.

Chapter Text

Loki had always enjoyed nature—some of her fondest memories were of spending her time alone in her mother’s garden, or alone in the Asgardian woods, or lost in the wilderness of another realm entirely—but there was such a thing as too much of it. Had she not tripped over one of the exposed roots of the sprawling beech tree she now sat under, she might have found its canopy of yellow leaves gorgeous. She decided to take the opportunity to try to find the pebble that had taken up residence in her sneaker.

“Sister, you certainly do seem clumsier now that you are mortal. Do you wish for me to—”

Loki cut him off. “You are not carrying me. I am perfectly capable of walking on my own, even if I trip a couple of times.” Thor had already asked once before if she wanted him to carry her on his shoulders, and if he asked a third time, she feared she might take him up on it. She turned her shoe upside down and shook it. A pebble much smaller than she would have estimated tumbled out onto the ground.

Not more than ten minutes after they started moving again, Natasha stopped. “Alright, let’s take a break before someone collapses,” she announced. Loki almost snapped that she wasn’t about to collapse but stopped herself when she realized that Natasha hadn’t been talking about her. “This is why you ought to train with the rest of us,” Natasha told him when Bruce finally caught up with the rest of them. “I think you might actually be in worse shape than you were before you started living in the tower.”

Breathing heavily, Bruce practically collapsed onto the fallen log at the edge of the clearing they’d come out into. “Yeah, I think you’re right. Usually on missions, I’m either sitting in the Quinjet, or the other guy’s taken over—sorry, guys.”

 Mjolnir had changed herself into a walking stick when they had entered the mountains, and Thor laid her gently to the side as he sat down beside Bruce on the log.  “Father always told us that one should be prepared for battle, even in times of peace.”

Loki took the large rock across from them. “Who cares what that old windbag said.”

“Sister, you have to admit that some of the things Father said were wise, even if—”

“I don’t want to hear it, Thor. Odin could be the wisest man in the universe, and he would still be a narcissistic, abusive liar.”

“Father may be many things, but I do not recall him being abusive. He never raised a hand to either of us.”

“Verbal and emotional abuse is still abuse, and so is neglect. Also, he did routinely allow other people to brutalize me, so there’s that.”

“What do you mean, he ‘routinely allowed others to brutalize you?’”

“He let Sif knock half my baby teeth out.”

“I’m sure it wasn’t half of them. You’re exaggerating.”

“He let you electrocute me several hundred times.”

“Most of those times were accidents, Loki. I had poor control over my powers when I was young.”

“As you say, most times were accidents, but not all.”

“And as I recall, you used to stab me quite a bit.”

“Yes, and Odin allowed that as well.”

Thor became quiet as he seemed to contemplate Loki’s words. “Perhaps you are right, but that’s just how things are in Asgard. We are a warrior culture, and such play-fighting as children is meant to make us better warriors.”

“Stabbing and electrocuting one another isn’t play, Thor, and you know it. You’re just making excuses for him. As for any claims that ‘that is just how things are’ in Asgard, I would like to point out that your Father is King of Asgard, and that what he does, or allows his children to do, sets the tone for the rest.”

“I hadn’t quite thought of it that way,” Thor admitted.

Natasha opened her bag and tossed them each a bottle of water and a granola bar. Half her bag seemed to be stuffed with supplies, which made Loki wonder again where her dress was.

✿  彡lミ ✿ εїз  彡lミ

The sun had just come up over the tops of the mountains when they came to the edge of a village. They had all gotten a modicum of sleep when they had stopped in that clearing, except for Thor. As an immortal, he didn’t need as much sleep as the rest of them, so he had insisted upon keeping watch over their camp alone. In fact, the trek through the mountains hadn’t seemed to have much of an effect on him at all, and he seemed in much better spirits than the rest of them. 

Loki found this highly irritating.

Mother had told them that Latveria reminded her of Asgard, and the village did remind Loki quite a bit of an Asgardian village. The architecture looked to be what mortals would have considered “medieval,” with cobblestone streets, and wooden buildings, many of them with thatched roofs. There weren’t any modern Midgardian vehicles. Instead, wooden carts were pulled by horses large enough to be the one Loki was rumored to have had an affair with. Loki pointed to one, and Natasha explained that it was a “Clydesdale.” When Loki had expressed surprise that she knew anything about horses, she had shrugged and explained that she had only recognized the breed because of commercials for a particular brand of American beer. 

The villagers seemed to be busy preparing for some sort of festival, and every one of their buildings had been decked out in green pennants and what Loki assumed was the Latverian flag. It looked a lot like the flags of other Midgardian countries, with its black cross in front of a green background. The insignia in the middle of the cross was likely Doom’s own.

“Does it seem like people are staring at us?” asked Thor, as he twirled Mjolnir the walking stick around in his hand like a baton. “Not that I haven’t gotten used to being stared at in Midgardian public spaces. I suppose you Midgardians are not used to having a god walk among you.”

Loki rolled her eyes. “People are usually staring at you because you’ve committed some sort of faux pas, be it social or fashion. I keep telling you, you can’t drink out of public fountains, and you shouldn’t wear neon orange after Labor Day. Or any time, really.” 

Thor was right, though. As busy as they were, everyone they passed had time to drop what they were doing and stare at them as if they could tell that they were aliens from outer space. Natasha swore under her breath. “It isn’t Thor they’re staring at. You and I should have changed before we entered the village. Look, there’s an empty barn. Let’s duck in there and change now.”

Loki scrunched her nose up. “You want me to put my ball gown on now? In a barn?”

“Look around you, Loki. Latverian women don’t wear jeans. We’re standing out too much, and if we keep standing out, we’re probably going to get arrested.”

“Norns, it really is like Asgard.” Here he had thought that Frigga had been excited to have an opportunity to start over, and she’d managed to find the closest thing to her old life that she could. 

Loki didn’t want to change her clothes in a barn, but she didn’t intend to disobey an order from their glorious leader right off the bat. The time to disobey orders would be later, when she could more believably claim to have forgotten the discussion she and Bruce had had on the plane. That didn’t mean she wasn’t going to complain a little. “Natasha, I thought you said this barn was empty. There is a cow in here.”

“So? It’s a cow, Loki.”

“It’s staring at me.”

“I’m sure that’s because it’s wondering what you look like in your underwear.”

“It might be. Who are you to know the thoughts of cows?”

“Just change clothes so we can get out of here. It smells like a barn in here.”

“That is possibly because it is a barn. Why do you have Bruce’s suit bag, by the way?”

“Because my dress is in it.”

Loki peered into the bag as Natasha opened it, and noticed that in addition to Natasha’s dress, there were two suits in the bag. “Is the other suit Thor’s?”

Natasha nodded as she pulled out the dress, which was silver, had long sleeves, and a slit up the thigh. 

Natasha and Thor had both taken turns carrying the suit bag that Bruce had been carrying initially, but she’d assumed they’d just been helping him out. It would have been a violation of the supposed “you brought it, you carry it” rule, but Loki had learned long ago that most “rules” didn’t apply to anyone but her. “If everyone else put their clothes in one bag, why did I have to carry my own?”

“Because you chose a dress made from enough cloth to make a parachute? It wouldn’t have fit in the bag with everyone else’s. Just change Loki, there’s no use worrying about it now.”

Loki supposed it was true that it wouldn’t have fit, but the thought that the others had coordinated with one another and left her out of it still put her in an irritable mood. Instead of putting her dress on, she turned herself into a cow. As far as she was concerned, this still counted as following orders; Natasha had said to change, she didn’t say what to change into. How now, Brown Cow, Loki said to the other cow.

How now, Black Cow, said the other cow, in the traditional greeting between cows. 

How goes it with you, Brown Cow? What news?

Tis the wedding of our Lord Doom on the morrow.

And what know you of his bride to be?

She is the Goddess Frigga, a fit bride for our Lord Doom. I hope I shall be chosen to make the milk to feed their babies.

Don’t count on it, Brown Cow. 

“Damn it, Loki.” Natasha had come out from around the post she’d gone behind to don her own dress, and it had only taken her a couple of seconds to register that there were now two cows in the barn, and no Lady Loki. “This is not the time to turn yourself into a cow. You’d better turn yourself back right now, unless you want me to ride you the rest of the way to Doom’s castle.”

┗(›´ω`‹ )┛ 

“Yes, we look much less conspicuous this way.” Thor had gotten better at getting sarcasm across, even though he was speaking Allspeak. “There is nothing conspicuous at all about a couple of men walking along a woman wearing a ball gown, riding a cow.”

“Loki refused to turn back, so I didn’t have a choice,” Natasha told him. “By the way, can she understand us when she’s a cow?”

“I am quite certain she can.”

“In that case—Loki, you are a very naughty cow, and when you turn back, we are going to have a serious conversation about your behavior.”

Thor started laughing first, and Bruce couldn’t help joining him, although he’d tried to keep it to a few stifled snorts. He knew it shouldn’t have been funny—they’d been in Latveria for ten minutes, and Loki had already found a way to make things more difficult for them—but there was just something so bizarre about the situation. 

“It isn’t funny,” Natasha told them, which only made it more difficult not to laugh.

Both he and Thor stopped laughing, though, when they almost ran straight into a couple of what appeared to be Victor Von Doom clones on the road in front of them, and a moment later more appeared to their side. Bruce glanced backwards, and sure enough, more had approached them from behind, pinning them in. He let out an audible sigh. “Those are Doombots, aren’t they?”

“Stop where you are,” said one of the Doombots. “The two of you, as well as your cow and your woman are under arrest in the name of Lord Doom.”

“We’ve been invited to Doom’s wedding,” Bruce told it. “We’ve got the invitation around here somewhere.” He searched through his pockets; luckily, Loki had given the invitation to him for safekeeping. He pulled out the invitation and handed it to the Doombot.

The Doombot scanned the invitation, then asked, “Which one of you is Loki Friggasdottir?” 

Bruce, Thor, and Natasha exchanged glances. Then with a sheepish grin, Thor pointed to Cow Loki, who mooed and swished her tail as if she were proud of herself. The Doombot nodded as if it made perfect sense that Victor Von Doom had invited a cow to his wedding, and soon they were being herded in the direction of the castle. It felt almost like a parade. Everywhere they went, people lined the streets to see the strange foreigners and their black, oddly green-eyed cow being escorted to Castle Doom by Doom’s sentries. 

When they reached the castle, the Doombots ushered them inside, into a huge foyer where a grand staircase led up to the second floor. Green and silver tapestries covered the walls, and light green foliage entwined with yellow flowers, covering the banister of the staircase. At the top of the stairs, another Doombot appeared—no, it must have been Victor Von Doom himself, because on his arm was Frigga, beaming happily at them. She wore a golden gown with a long train, with her hair curled and piled on top of her head. 

She let go of Doom’s arm and ran down the stairs to them. “Oh my, you’ve all come. I wasn’t certain you’d make it. Loki did not send an RSVP.”

Doom cleared his throat loudly as he loomed over them from the top of the stairs. “I thought we were only inviting your daughter. The rest should not be here. And why is your daughter in the form of a cow?”

“I told you that Loki is a shapeshifter, Victor.”

Victor Von Doom shook his head. “This is not acceptable, Frigga. Doom will not have a cow at his wedding, nor as his stepdaughter.”

“I’m sure she’ll change back before the wedding, mon chou.”

Thor’s eyebrows knitted together. “He is your cabbage?” 

“I was speaking French, darling. It is the Midgardian language of love.” 

“Still, your cabbage?”

Doom cleared his throat again. “She will turn back now, or she will sleep in the stables tonight.”

Loki swished her tail and mooed loudly, as if to let them all know she didn’t care if she slept in the stables.

Frigga patted Loki’s neck. “Darling, I do not know why you have chosen to be a cow right now, but could you please turn back for Mother?”

Loki mooed again, but a moment later she had turned back into a girl. It happened more or less instantaneously, and Natasha, who had still been sitting astride her, somehow managed to do a half twist in the air and land in a crouch instead of falling onto her back.

“That’s a good girl,” Frigga said, patting her cheek and smiling at her. Loki wasn’t smiling back, though.

Doom seemed even less happy now, though it would have been difficult for Bruce to say how he could tell with the mask. The man did have extremely expressive eyes, he supposed. “What is your daughter wearing, Frigga? I will not allow her to wear blue jeans while she is here. Blue jeans on a woman are a symbol of the vulgar American capitalist agenda.”

Loki’s frown turned into a sneer. “I’ll wear whatever I like, you metal-faced megalomaniac.”

“No one speaks to Lord Doom this way!” There had been a dangerous edge to Doom’s voice that time, and Bruce felt the other guy’s desire to jump to Loki’s defense as a crawling, itching sensation just below his skin. 

It’s alright, nothing bad has happened yet, he tried to assure him. 

Doom puffed out his chest and stabbed his finger in Loki’s direction. “Young lady, you will change into more appropriate clothing immediately, or there will be consequences. Doom does not tolerate dissent from his subjects, and he will not tolerate it from rebellious stepdaughters.”

Luckily, Frigga put herself between Doom and Loki before Bruce had to. “Victor dear, please let me handle this. I’m certain Loki is just tired from her journey here. She always gets a little cranky when she’s tired.”

“Very well,” said Doom, deflating somewhat. “But I expect her to be dressed appropriately for dinner.”

Frigga nodded. “Just give me a chance to explain your rules to her, Victor.”

Doom nodded regally, and Bruce must have blinked, because in one moment to the next, he seemed to have disappeared.

“Mother, you can’t be serious about marrying him!” Loki shouted as soon as he had gone. 

“Loki, lower your voice and calm down please. Use your inside voice.”

“I will not lower my voice! This is insane. The man is a narcissist, a misogynist, and a bully—he’s just like Odin.”

“He isn’t any of those things, and he is nothing like Odin,” Frigga argued. “You don’t even know him, Loki. You haven’t given him a chance.”

“I don’t want to give him a chance!” Loki stamped her foot, then turned to her brother. “Will you please try to talk some sense into her? Obviously, my voice isn’t even registering here.”

Frigga also turned to Thor expectantly, and Thor’s attention shifted wearily between his sister and mother. “Mother, does this man truly make you happy?” 

“Oh darling, yes. He treats me the way that your father used to, when we were first married.”

“And that turned out so well,” Loki groused.

“Frigga, you do realize that Victor Von Doom is an enemy to most Western governments, including the government of the United States?” asked Natasha. “He’s considered to be a dictator.”

“I know what they say about him, but he is simply misunderstood. Lord Doom is a monarch, not a dictator.”

Loki rolled her eyes. “That, Mother, is bilgesnipe droppings.”

“Language, Loki. While you are here, I expect you to act like the young lady you were raised to be. I know I taught you better manners than you have so far displayed. You have been very rude to Victor, and when you see him later, I would appreciate it if you would apologize.”

“Absolutely not, Mother. I refuse to apologize to that man, nor will I ever call him Father.” 

“No one has asked you to call him that, Loki. All I am asking is for you to be civil. And while you are in his kingdom, you must follow his rules. Can you at least do that much for me?”

Bruce thought that Loki might fly into a rage, but then she looked at her mother, and then at her own feet, and then at her mother again. “And what are these rules I am supposed to follow?”

“You are to speak respectfully to Victor, and to conduct yourself as a proper young lady while you are here. That means you will respect your host’s culture by dressing like a young Latverian lady. I trust you brought dresses with sleeves that cover you to your wrists and skirts that cover you to your ankles?”

“Yes Mother. I have a dress in my—Natasha, did you get my suit bag, or is it back in that barn?”

Natasha rolled her eyes. “I’ve got it, Loki.”

“In that case, I have a dress.”

“You only brought one?”

“Yes, Mother. We were forced to traipse through the mountains in order to get here, and I still don’t have access to my dimensional storage, so—”

“Why did you not call me? I would have opened a portal for you.”

“We tried to call! You weren’t answering your phone.”

“I don’t believe I got a call from you, Loki. In fact, I don’t think I’ve gotten any calls at all for a while—do you suppose my phone might be broken?”

“You probably don’t get very good cell service out here,” Natasha told her. “I’ve been getting pretty spotty service ever since we landed in Sokovia.”

“Oh well, no matter. I’ll just have to—”

Loki cut her off. “No, Mother, please. I’ll just wear the dress I brought.”

“Nonsense, Loki, you can’t wear the same dress to dinner that you’re going to wear to the wedding.” Frigga raised her hand, and a green light covered Loki. When it faded, she wore a forest green velvet dress with a high collar. It looked almost Victorian and had  silver buttons at the neck and cuffs of the sleeve. Frigga stepped back to admire her work. “Yes, that should be very pleasing to Victor, for you to wear his color.”

“Green is my color,” Loki sulked.

“And it is also Victor’s,” said Frigga. “See, you have something in common already.”

(* •́ ヮ •̀ )⊃☆ﾟ. * ･ ｡ﾟ \( ͒˃⌂˂ ͒)/

After Frigga used her magic to dress Loki, she did the same for the rest of them, though for Natasha, all she did was change the color of her dress to the same green she had dressed everyone else in. Mjolnir had turned herself into a fancier kind of walking stick, which Natasha teased Thor about, calling it a “pimp cane.” Frigga had then showed them to a couple of guest rooms, one for Loki and Natasha, and the other for Thor and Bruce.

Loki flopped onto the bed, burying her face in the dark green coverlet. “Well, are you going to scold me too, now, for how I acted earlier? You said I was a naughty cow, and that we’d be having a serious discussion about my behavior.”

Loki felt the bed dip as Natasha sat beside her. “You were a naughty cow. But I’m not going to kick you when you’re down, Loki. I know today has been pretty rough.”

Loki started to tear up, despite her best efforts not to. “Why can’t Mother see that he’s every bit as horrible as Odin?” she asked Natasha.

Natasha sighed as she rubbed the area between Loki’s shoulder blades for her. “I don’t know, Loki. Why did the people I thought of as my parents just hand my younger sister and I over to the Red Room?” She didn’t wait for a response from Loki before answering herself. “Because people, even people we love, do horrible, disappointing things sometimes.”

“What do you think I should do, Natasha? I don’t want to apologize to that man.”

“Then don’t.”

“And I don’t want Frigga to marry him,” Loki added.

“That you probably can’t stop. Frigga is an adult; you can’t stop her from making her own decisions even if you think they’re horrible. Obviously, she isn’t being coerced into this like we thought.”

“I’m not going to call him Father.”

“No one asked you to; not even Frigga. But Loki, please don’t try to pick a fight with him. Victor Von Doom is dangerous. He might actually be a sociopath, and he might really try to hurt you if you cross him. So let’s be smart about this. While we’re here, we play Victor’s game. We dress up like proper young Latverian ladies and say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and mind our p’s and q’s. We attend the wedding tomorrow, which we will in no way try to obstruct. Then we get the hell out of here and go back to New York. Sound good?”

Loki nodded, even though she had already begun running through possible scenarios to put a stop to her Mother’s wedding.

Frigga ❤ ( (*◣m◢) \  

“What are the others doing here?” Victor asked Frigga again. “You said you were only inviting your daughter. You didn’t say anything about three Avengers. The Avengers are yet another symbol of the vulgar American capitalist agenda.” 

“I know they make you uncomfortable, Victor, but one of them is my son. He assumed his invitation to have been lost. Do you want to be the one to inform him that we thought it best not to invite him?”

“No dearest,” Victor sulked. “I suppose that now he is here, we cannot send him away. But what of the others?”

“Their plus-ones, I suppose.”

“You allow your daughter to date a man who turns into a beast?”

“I do not think they are actually dating, mon chou. In fact, I am fairly certain that Doctor Banner is involved with Loki’s psychiatrist. I’ve told you about Doctor Samson, have I not?”

“I thought that Doctor Samson was a man.”

“He is.”

“Ah, I see.”

“Victor,” Frigga said reproachfully.

“I know, my love. Lord Doom is evolving on this issue.”

“Truly, I did not think Loki would come on her own. I thought I would have to drag her through a portal to get her here. I have been sending her letters, trying to get her to visit for weeks.”

“Your daughter does not seem to like me much,” said Victor, his eyes darkening. “It is those Avengers that have poisoned her mind against me, and filled her head with their vulgar American capitalist agenda—”

“Always with the ‘vulgar American capitalist agenda;’ really Victor.” Frigga shook her head. “I imagine she does not like you at the moment because you threatened to make her sleep in the stables, and because you threw a fit over her clothes.”

“What she had on was completely inappropriate.”

“You still did not have to demand that she change. You could have asked her nicely.” Frigga reached for Victor’s hand. “Victor, darling, I’ve told you that Loki has some issues with authority because of the way my ex-husband treated her. For now, she believes you to be no better than Odin. You are going to have to win her over.”

“And how do I do that, my little turnip?”

“Perhaps you simply need to spend some time together. After dinner, why don’t you show her some of the experiments you’ve been working on?”

Victor nodded decisively. “Yes, we shall try this. Later this evening, Victor Von Doom will attempt to bond with his stepdaughter to-be.”

Chapter Text

“That’s a lot of makeup.” Natasha leaned against the wall as she watched Loki paint her lips fire engine red in front of the large mirror that hung over the dresser in their room. “If you’re going to do a smoky eye you should stick to a light-colored lipstick, unless you’re going undercover as a sex worker.  I thought I told you to keep your makeup to a minimum while we were here?”

Loki shrugged. All she needed to do was prove to her mother that Victor was a Very Bad Man. Natasha had been convinced that if Loki crossed him, he would attempt to hurt her, so what better way than to goad him into doing just that?

“Loki, I’m asking you nicely to tone your makeup down. What you’re trying to do is obvious. I’ve already asked you not to try to provoke Doom.”

“And if I refuse to remove it?”

“I’ll get Bruce and ask him to have a talk with you about it.”

“You’re going to tell on me to Bruce?” Loki made a face in the mirror as she grabbed a makeup remover cloth from her cosmetics bag. She’d just have to find another way to provoke Doom’s ire. “Remind me, Natasha, how are we to behave at dinner?”

“It would be best to just keep your mouth shut and not speak unless someone else talks to you first. I’m pretty sure that in Latveria, they still think that children ‘should be seen and not heard.’”

If that was the case, incurring Doom’s wrath would be easier than Loki had anticipated. If there was one thing Loki was good at, it was running her mouth.

(¬_¬") (͡ ° 3͡ °) 

Doom and Frigga were the last ones to enter the dining room. When they entered, Bruce and Thor stood as gentlemen were generally expected to do when a lady entered the room, and Victor pulled Frigga’s chair out for her. Doom remained standing after Bruce and Thor sat again. “Friends, Lady Frigga and Lord Doom are glad you could join us on the eve of our wedding.”

Loki rolled her eyes in an exaggerated movement involving her head and shoulders certain to be noticed by everyone else at the table. “Why do you keep referring to yourself in the third person? Could you be any more of a joke?”

“Loki, I have asked you not to be rude,” Frigga chided. “If you cannot keep a civil tongue, I think you had better leave the table and go straight to bed without supper.” Loki couldn’t believe her mother would scold her right there at the table in front of everyone; it wasn’t fair, when all she meant to do was provoke Doom into hurting her so that she could prove to Frigga that her intended was a monster.

“It’s alright, my little turnip. Your daughter has had a long journey, and some sustenance might improve her mood.” Of all the people in the room, Doom was the last person Loki had expected to jump to her defense—in fact, Bruce, Natasha, and Thor were all glaring at her for some reason—and it made her suspicious. Maybe he’d had her food poisoned. Well, if it was, the joke was on him, because Loki was impervious to most poisons—no, wait, she had been impervious to most poisons, but as a mortal, she probably wasn’t. Well then, in that case, she just wouldn’t eat. Natasha still had food in her bag, so she would be able to eat something later.

Loki had half expected the soup course to be served by Doombots. Instead, flesh and blood servants scurried about the table attempting to avoid their master’s eyes—out of reverence or fear, Loki couldn’t be sure. She poked at the large piece of cabbage floating on top of her cabbage soup and made a face. “In Asgard, only peasants eat this kind of thing.”

“Loki, I have warned you—” Frigga began.

“Your daughter simply made an observation, love.” He turned to Loki. “In Latveria, all of Lord Doom’s people are as one, and eat the same food. In time, you will learn to appreciate fine, simple food as this.”

“What do you mean, ‘in time?’” Bruce asked before Loki could.

“Loki will be staying in Latveria after her mother and I are wed,” Doom announced. “I cannot allow my stepdaughter to continue to reside with you Avengers, who represent vulgar American capitalism—”

Loki threw her spoon down as she jumped up, nearly knocking over her chair over in the process. “Hel no. There is no way I’m staying here.”

“Loki, we can talk about it later,” said Frigga. “Sit down and eat your soup.”

Instead of sitting down, Loki calmly picked up her soup and threw it hard enough for it to fly straight into the opposite wall. The bowl shattered upon impact, and cabbage soup dripped down the wall onto the floorboards.

“Well, that was certainly dramatic,” said Frigga, her tone still maddeningly calm. “Since you are obviously not hungry, I think you had better go to bed now, don’t you? Clearly, you are so tired from your journey that you have forgotten that we do not throw good food into walls.”

“Good food? It was probably poisoned, Mother.”

“Loki, you are being utterly ridiculous.”

Bruce moved his napkin from his lap to the table as he stood, giving Frigga a small, embarrassed smile. “I’ll take Loki back to her room.” Loki’s empty stomach filled with something that felt like lead; she was sure Bruce intended to scold her for trying to provoke Doom when she’d been told not to, and she wasn’t looking forward to it. She hated being in trouble with Bruce even more than she hated being in trouble with Tony. Bruce never even came close to becoming angry with her; instead, he was always “disappointed with her behavior.”

Frigga nodded her approval, but then Doom stood as well and reached out to gasp Loki’s arm. “No, Loki will come with me. As her future stepfather, I think it is time that we speak privately.”

The lead in Loki’s stomach turned to compressed Uru. Her eyes darted to Bruce, begging for him not to allow Doom to take her anywhere alone, but Bruce didn’t have the opportunity to object.

҉

Loki found herself on a stairway that led down into a large, dimly lit room. Doom loomed behind her on the stairs, which gave her no option but to continue down them. When she reached the bottom, she turned around and began backing up into the room. She didn’t like the idea of having a mortal capable of not only teleporting spontaneously, but of taking others with him, standing at her back.

Doom spread his arms out, gesturing widely around him. “Welcome to the laboratory of Victor Von Doom.”

“What are you going to do to me?” Loki demanded, too concerned with Doom himself to take in the sights. “Harvest my organs? Trap me in a box of suspended space-time? Attempt to clone me?”*

Doom shook his head. “Where are you getting these ideas? You have obviously read too many vulgar American comic books.”

Loki relaxed a little; perhaps Doom hadn’t brought her down to his lab to torture her after all. “Who reads comic books anymore when you can just watch the films?” she asked as she leaned against the large table she had almost backed into. “So why did you bring me down here?”

“I thought you might like to see some of my experiments.”

Loki arched an eyebrow at him. “For what purpose? To intimidate me? To show me what will happen to me if I cross you? Go on, roll out your cadavers. I don’t threaten easily.”

Doom made a small sound of displeasure. Then he turned to something rather large, covered with a tarp. “I give you”—with this, he pulled the tarp away with a flourish, and Loki’s stomach clenched, readying itself to see something truly horrible— “the potato powered generator!”

“It’s just a giant potato battery,” said Loki, dumbfounded. “That is a six-foot-tall potato, connected up to oversized electrodes—it’s just a giant version of your world's lamest science fair project.”

“It is the same concept, but on a much larger scale,” said Doom, throwing his shoulder’s back and puffing his chest out proudly. “I ask you, what is the resource that Latveria has more of than anything else? Why, it is our ridiculously large potatoes! With this, we will finally be able to compete with the industrialized West.”

“I’m sorry, are you a complete moron?”

Doom seemed to lose about two inches in height. “You do not like my potato generator? But it is the cornerstone of the Latverian green energy initiative.”

Loki almost felt guilty for hurting his feelings, but she still couldn’t believe he’d expected her to be impressed by a giant potato. “Please tell me you have something more impressive than this down here.”

  ب_ب   🥔]-💡

“DOOM TAKE PUNY GOD—HULK SMASH DOOM!”

The transition between Bruce and the Hulk had taken a matter of seconds after Doom had disappeared with Loki. Natasha reached out and put a hand on his arm. “Okay, Big Guy, just calm down. We don’t know that Doom is going to hurt her.” 

Thor wasn’t in much better shape than the Hulk. “Mother, where has Doom taken her?” he demanded as he paced up and down the room.

Frigga remained sitting, calmly staring at her own place setting. “I’m sure Loki is fine, dear. Sit down and eat your soup.”

“Do not tell me to eat my soup, when my sister has been whisked away to I know not where by a known villain!”

“He isn’t a villain, darling. I’ve told you; he is simply misunderstood—”

“As Loki put it Mother, that is bilgesnipe droppings.”

“You too, Thor?” sulked Frigga. “You can’t just let me be happy for once—” 

Hulk ran straight through the wooden double doors on his way out of the room as Thor, in his anger, flipped Doom’s dinner table over. This was all Loki’s fault, and if they got her back safe, Natasha was going to murder her. 

(┛✧Д✧))┛彡┻━┻    =͟͟͞͞(╬ Ò益Ò)))

“Yes, yes, you have some rather large guns, jetpacks, more Doombots, and you are attempting to clone Reed Richards, though I can only guess what you would do with such a clone should you succeed.” If she had to bet, Loki’s chips would all be on “make out with it.” “Don’t you have anything else?” 

Doom pulled another tarp away with yet another flourish, but this time, all it had concealed was an empty platform. Loki arched an eyebrow at him. “It is a time platform. It allows the one standing on it to travel through time and space.”

Loki tilted her head back, literally turning her nose up at the offering. “Big deal. I’ve already met two time traveling versions of myself.” 

“Is there nothing that will impress you?” Doom growled.

Other than the highly disturbing Reed Richards clone floating half-formed in its cylindrical tank of primordial goo, everything Doom had was something that Tony could probably do better. Even the Doombots seemed reminiscent of his Iron Legion suits. “There is one thing,” Loki told him. “Don’t marry my mother.”

Doom shook his head. “Doom loves your mother, and he has always wished for a child to carry on his legacy. Please, tell me how Doom can make his stepdaughter-to-be happy?”

“Don’t marry my mother,” Loki repeated, even though she was almost starting to feel sorry for the man. Then she had an idea—a wicked, awful idea, but she had always believed that desperate times called for desperate measures. “If you don’t call off the wedding, I shall tell Frigga that you—” Loki’s eyes widened and she crossed her arms in front of her chest as if suddenly self-conscious, sniffling for dramatic effect, “—touched me inappropriately.”

“You would not dare,” said Doom, his voice dropping at least an octave.

“Wouldn’t I?” asked Loki, batting her eyelashes at him. She knew it was a dangerous game she played, but—

“You will have a lot of trouble doing so without a tongue to speak with.”

Ah, here we go, thought Loki.

!!( (*◣m◢) \   ( •᷅ ᴕ•᷅๑)  

Doom pushed Loki roughly onto the floor of a cell strewn with straw. He hadn’t cut her tongue out, but she had been gagged. The gag was made of metal and reminded her a lot of the one Thor had slapped on her after the Chitauri invasion.

“You will stay in here until you learn to keep a civil tongue,” Doom told her as he slammed the door shut behind her. Loki settled happily into her pile of straw, convinced that someone was bound to come to her rescue. Then Doom would be the one in trouble, when they realized how horribly he had mistreated her. But after twenty minutes or so had passed, she began to worry that this time, she had gone too far, and no one would be coming for her.  They had all looked rather upset with her at dinner. 

She had just convinced herself that she was to waste away in Doom’s dungeon for the rest of eternity when the door to the cell opened and a group of Doombots pushed Bruce to the floor. He wasn’t wearing anything other than the extra-stretchy boxer shorts Tony had designed for him. “Bruce?” Loki tried to ask, but with the gag it came out sounding more like, “Brr-ruh-ruh?” A loud snore issued from the man. At least he wasn’t dead, then. A few moments later, the door of the cell swung open again, and this time Thor was pushed inside. From his languid smile, a casual observer might have thought him drunk, but Loki knew that expression—it was the one Thor wore after a particularly satisfying battle, whether that battle had been won or lost. Loki wondered what she had missed.

( °T°);  Zzz - (´・｀)

Bruce slowly opened his eyes, noting the stiffness in his back. He had been sleeping on a cold floor in his underwear, and he didn’t know where he was—a familiar enough scenario, but that didn’t make it any more comfortable. When his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he saw Loki kneeling on the floor. Thor stood over her, Mjolnir lifted over his head, metal glinting in the moonlight that streamed in through the windows above them. “Whoa, whoa, what are you—”

Thor brought Mjolnir down, but instead of braining his sister, it caught something behind Loki’s head. Metal clattered to the floor. “Bleh,” said Loki, smacking her lips. “You know, I really hate being gagged. Why do people always want to gag me?”

“Likely, they would be less inclined to silence you if you would watch your tongue,” Thor told her.

That had woken him up. Bruce still felt the palpitations of his heart in his throat, and it didn’t slow as he looked around himself. “Where are we? How did I—”

“Doom disappeared with my sister, and your other half took exception to it.” Thor grinned. “Then the two of us destroyed a good portion of Doom’s dining room.”

“Thor, that isn’t something to be proud of.”

Thor scowled. “Your transformation did not last, however. Perhaps you were still tired from our journey? Once you returned to yourself, we were escorted here by a group of Doom’s robotic servants. I could have fought them off singlehandedly, of course, but I thought they might take us to wherever Doom had taken my sister, and look, I was correct.” 

Loki stared at him with wide eyes, then shrunk back as if she thought he was going to start yelling. If Bruce was honest with himself, he felt a little like yelling, but that wouldn’t help the situation. It would only get his blood pressure up. The last thing they needed was for him to transform inside a cell that was barely big enough for the three of them to begin with, so instead, he chose his words carefully. “Loki, Natasha told you she was calling off the mission, and she asked you not to provoke Doom. I’m disappointed that you chose to do that, when you promised you would behave yourself.”

“I didn’t say how I would behave myself,” Loki pointed out.

Bruce wanted to kick himself, because he should have caught that. You had to be careful when you talked to Loki—not only did she listen to and analyze every word anyone said to her, she also carefully crafted her own words, using them to build loopholes she could escape through. “Loki, that doesn’t make it okay. You understood what I wanted you to promise.”

“But I didn’t want to make a promise I couldn’t keep.”

“Are you saying that you knew you were going to do whatever you wanted?”

“I knew I might have to go rogue. I don’t like making promises at all. Sometimes you can’t keep them, despite your best intentions. Where I am from, a sworn oath is taken seriously.”

Thor nodded in confirmation of this.

“I’m sorry I tried to make you promise, then. But you should have told me you weren’t comfortable promising, instead of making me think that you were agreeing. Do you understand how that was manipulative? You knew I wasn’t going to let the plane take off until you agreed to obey the chain of command.” 

Loki bit her lip, and Bruce wondered if he had been too harsh with her, despite his best intentions. “I’m sorry, Bruce. I didn’t mean to manipulate you. It’s just what I do. I suppose it’s because I’m a horrible person.” Tears glistened in her eyes. She buried her face in her hands and started sniffling, and the sniffling became a whimper. “I’m sorry, I really am. I don’t want to be bad.”

Bruce began to panic. Despite his best intentions, he’d said something wrong, and now Loki had gone into some sort of downward shame spiral. “No, you are not a horrible person Loki. I’ve been trying to say this in a way that wouldn’t make you think that. You aren’t bad, you just made a mistake—”

“Bruce,” said Thor, shaking his head. “Don’t believe this. She’s making herself cry because she believes it will get her out of trouble.”

Loki’s tears stopped abruptly, and she glared at her brother. “Damn you, Thor, shut up.” 

Bruce stood. He paced the room for a moment, trying to think of what to do, then pointed at Loki. “We’ll work out the details later, but once we get back to New York, you’re grounded.” Thor started to laugh, and Bruce wasn’t sure if it was him or Loki he was laughing at. Either way, he found nothing about their current situation funny. “Shut up, Thor.”

“Do not feel badly, my friend. Loki is called ‘Silver-tongue’ for a reason. Lying and manipulation is in her nature.”

Loki looked away from them, and Bruce knew her feelings had been hurt. He didn’t think Thor had meant to insult her; Thor said a lot of things like that without thinking. Loki probably knew that too, but that wouldn’t make the unflattering words hurt less. “As far as I know, it isn’t in anyone’s nature to lie and manipulate others unless they’re a sociopath,” Bruce told Thor, “which Loki isn’t.” Leonard had assured them all of that months ago. 

Thor nodded somberly as he watched his younger sister avoid their eyes; he seemed to have noticed by then that he had upset her. “I didn’t mean it as an insult. During our journeys with Sif and the Warriors Three, Loki’s lies and manipulations often saved us. I don’t suppose you have any tricks to get us out of this cell, Sister?”

Loki arched an eyebrow at him. “If I did, don’t you think I’d have gotten myself out by now?”

“We could always do ‘get help.’”

“Absolutely not. If you want to do ‘get help,’ do it with Bruce.”

Bruce almost asked what they were talking about, but then he decided he didn’t need to know. If Loki didn’t want to do ‘get help,’ he didn’t want to do it either. “I think we should just wait. I don’t think Frigga would let Doom keep us locked up indefinitely.”

“Why should Frigga do anything about it? Clearly, she doesn’t—” Loki choked on the rest of her sentence, and it came out as a strangled whine.

Thor scrunched his eyebrows at her. “What was that, Sister?”

“I said she doesn’t—” Once again, the rest of Loki’s sentence turned into something unintelligible, and she began to physically shake.

Thor scooted closer to her on the pile of straw they were sitting on and pulled her into his lap. Once there, Loki twisted around and thew her arms around his neck, burying her head in his shoulder. Thor sighed as he ran a hand through her hair. “Mother still loves you, Loki.”

“Then why did she scold me in front of everyone? She’s never done that before.”

“You must admit, your behavior was a bit over dramatic.”

“Her fiancé tried to poison me.”

“You’ve no proof of that. Even if he did, there was no reason to throw your soup into the wall. Some servant is going to have to clean that up, you know.”

“You said that you and Bruce destroyed a good portion of Doom’s dining room. Aren’t they going to have to clean that up too?”

Thor murmured something that Bruce didn’t catch and cleared his throat. “My point is that I am certain Mother still loves you, Loki. Bruce also scolded you for your behavior, and Bruce still loves you as well. Don’t you, Bruce?”

Loki’s head turned towards Bruce expectantly, putting him on the spot. Back during the summer, they had come to an understanding of sorts, but he had still chickened out when it came to actually saying the words. “I, ah—”

“It’s alright. I know how you feel,” Loki told him, rolling her eyes.

Bruce felt relief mixed with a strong sense of disappointment in himself. Why couldn’t he just say what Loki needed to hear him say? Maybe he ought to bring this up with Doctor Sofen when he got back to New York.

 Loki let go of her brother and slid off his lap. A moment later, she had crawled over to Bruce and put her head on his shoulder instead. “Bruce—” she whispered in his ear.

“Yes, Loki?”

“I’m hungry.”

And whose fault is that? Bruce couldn’t help thinking, although he supposed he couldn’t blame her for not wanting to eat food that had been served to them by Victor Von Doom. For all they knew, she might have been right about the food being poisoned. “Thor and I didn’t eat either. The last thing any of us ate were those granola bars.”

“You could turn yourself back into a cow, and we could milk you,” Thor suggested.

Loki’s head snapped up from Bruce’s shoulder. “There is so much wrong with that suggestion, Thor. But to start off with, cows, like all other mammals, have to give birth before they can produce milk. I’m no more likely to produce milk in that form than in this form, so—”

Thor held his hands up defensively. “You can stop there, Sister. If you don’t, I’m not sure I’m ever going to be able to drink milk from any animal again.”

Loki rolled her eyes, and her head fell back on Bruce’s shoulder. “Bru-uce,” she whined again. “You don’t have any food, do you?”

“If you haven’t noticed, Loki, I’m sitting here in my underwear.”

“I don’t suppose you have my pills either, then.” 

Bruce shook his head. Up until now, Loki hadn’t needed her medication, but the first time she had asked for it, he didn’t have it. “I’m sorry. Let’s try something, though, okay? I want you to start by breathing—”

“I am already breathing, Bruce, or I would not be talking to you.” 

“I meant breathe slowly, in through your nose and out through your mouth.”

Loki rolled her eyes. “You don’t seriously expect me to meditate, do you? Meditation never works for me, Bruce. I can’t just stop thinking.”

“You don’t have to empty your mind of all thoughts. It’s more about being in the present moment.”

“The present moment sucks,” Loki pointed out.

“Close your eyes and pretend you’re somewhere else, then. Somewhere you feel safe.”

“You want me to pretend I’m somewhere else, but be in the present moment?”

“Um—yes? I know it sounds like a contradiction, but it really isn’t.”

Loki closed her eyes, and took a few deep, ragged breaths in and out. After about twenty seconds, her eyes popped open. “This isn’t working. I think it’s making it worse.”

“You have to give it more of a chance than that.”

“I’m trying to imagine that I’m back in the tower. It’s the only place I’ve ever truly felt safe, but—”

Bruce could appreciate that. The tower was the first place he’d felt safe in a long time, too, even though technically, the Hulk never let anyone hurt him. “But?”

“It doesn’t work if I’m alone there! I need you to hold me. Then I would feel safe, I think.”

Bruce knew that physical contact could be helpful to someone experiencing anxiety (so long as it was wanted), but her directness had taken him by surprise. Maybe it shouldn’t have; Loki had obviously gotten better at asking for what she needed from people. “Oh—okay.” He’d barely raised his arm in Loki’s direction before she glommed onto him, squeezing him so that he could hardly breathe. 

Loki’s eyes closed again. Her breathing evened out, and eventually she fell asleep tucked into the crook of his arm. “You know, it always surprises me when your sister is, uh—” He couldn’t quite think of the right word.

“Needy? Clingy? Starving for affection?” suggested Thor.

“Something along those lines.”

“It is her greatest secret.” Thor stretched out into the straw that lined the floor of the cell, closing his own eyes. “You should feel honored, Bruce, that she allows you to see that side of herself. She’s like one of those cats that only lets certain people pet it.”

(￣ー￣(︶｡︶zzz))ゝ

When Loki woke up sandwiched between Bruce and Thor, she had been filled with a sense of peace. Dust motes drifted through the rays of light that streamed in through the bars covering the little windows above them and a bird twittered somewhere in the distance; the air coming in through the windows had the chill of autumn in it but wasn’t cold. That peace had evaporated rather quickly, though, when another group of Doombots showed up to escort them from the cell.

She had hoped they’d be taking them to breakfast, and that the events of the night before would be forgotten. Instead, they’d been taken to Doom’s “throne room,” where Doom, Frigga, and Natasha were already waiting for them, standing before a holographic screen similar to the ones Tony had designed for the tower.

“—Touched me inappropriately,” the Loki on screen said.  

Loki’s heart rose to her throat, and she tried to swallow it down. “You mean there were cameras down there? I mean—this is obviously a deepfake!”**

“Loki Friggasdottir!” Her mother sounded truly flabbergasted for once, the calm she had projected at dinner the night before gone. “I cannot believe you would resort to such a thing.”

“That is pretty low.” Natasha shook her head. “You do realize that making a false claim of sexual assault only hurts actual victims of sexual assault? You’re playing right into the perception that many or even most reports of sexual assault are made up.”

Loki knew that both her mother and Natasha had a point—even she thought it had been a low move, especially now that she had seen herself do it on video—but she just couldn’t stand it when people ganged up on her, and that made her reluctant to admit she’d been wrong. “I wasn’t going to do it. I just thought that if I threatened to do it, he’d retaliate, which he did.”

“Victor only put you in a holding cell while he came to me to explain what was going on,” Frigga argued.

“He left me in his dungeon all night!” Without access to medication she might have needed, but she wasn’t going to say that in front of everyone. “And he gagged me, Mother. When you get right down to it, gagging someone is pretty kinky, so I could argue that he did sexually assault me after all—”

“No, Loki.”

Those two little words felt like a dagger right through Loki’s heart; they were the same words Odin had used to completely and utterly reject her when she had been dangling from the remains of the Bifrost bridge, only this time, there was no void to swallow her up and take that pain away from her. She sat down on the floor, stunned, and a moment later, she felt hot tears streaming down her cheeks into her mouth.

“Stop,” her mother said. “Your ability to summon crocodile tears whenever you think it might benefit you lost all its charm long ago, young lady.”

“Mother, I do not believe that Loki is faking this time.” Thor bent down, and a moment later he held Loki in his arms as easily as he might an infant. As much as she normally hated it when he picked her up without permission, she couldn’t find it in herself to object this time.

“Oh, Thor,” said Frigga. “It is not in your sister’s best interest for you to coddle her. Please put her down.”

“I will not, Mother. We’re leaving now. I wish you and Doom luck.”

“Thor, wait,” their mother called after him, but Thor didn’t stop or turn back around to look. Bruce and Natasha walked ahead of them and pushed the doors open for them. Once they were outside, none of them stopped walking, nor did they speak until they reached the Latverian border.

Chapter Text

“I didn’t even get to wear the dress I picked out,” Loki complained. “And I’m still wearing this awful dress Mother conjured, which is not at all suitable for hiking through the mountains.”

“You haven’t done much hiking,” Natasha pointed out. “Thor’s been carrying you the entire time.”

“You’re all still annoyed with me, aren’t you?”

“You get that we’re lucky to be walking out of Latveria alive, right?”

“Natasha, that’s enough,” said Bruce. “What happened, happened. Loki understands what she did wrong. Right, Loki?”

“Yes, but I’m not sorry I did it.”

Thor stopped walking and released her without any warning. “Perhaps Mother was right; I shouldn’t coddle you,” he told her as he stepped over her.

“Ow! Thor, that hurt. I think I landed on a rock.” She watched Thor’s back become smaller as he continued down the path without her.

It was Bruce who came back to help her up. “Are you okay, Loki? You aren’t really hurt are you?”

“I think I’m okay,” said Loki, sounding pathetic even to her own ears. She might have a couple of bruises, both to her backside and to her spirit, but it was nothing a hug wouldn’t—

Bruce turned and started walking away.

“Bruce,” Loki cried out, reaching for him as she fell to her knees.

He turned around. “Loki, what are you doing? You said you weren’t hurt.”

“I knew it. You’re-still-mad—ah—at—me,” she said, starting to hyperventilate. And you’re going to abandon me, just like everyone else.

“I’m not mad at you. I’m wondering if what you’re doing now is an act or not, but I’m not mad at you.” He crouched down by Loki and lowered his voice. “Do you need your medication?”

Loki shook her head. “No, I don’t want it right now. But I give you my solemn oath that I am not acting. I told you how I feel about oaths, Bruce.”

“Okay.” He called out to Natasha and Thor. “Loki and I are going to stop here for a while. Why don’t you guys go on ahead? We can meet you up at that clearing we stopped at before.” Once they were gone, Bruce sat down next to her. “Loki, I’m not mad at you,” he repeated. “I’m still disappointed in your behavior and I would appreciate it if you could spend some time thinking about how your actions affected everyone else, but I’m not mad.”

“I’m sorry, Bruce.”

“Are you, though? A minute ago, you said you weren’t.”

“I’m sorry that you’re upset with me.”

“So you’re sorry that there were consequences to what you did, but you’re still not sorry you did it in the first place.”

“My mother is marrying another man who is exactly like Odin. I couldn’t do nothing.”

“Sometimes things are out of your control, and you just have to accept that.”

“They wanted me to live with them.”

“We wouldn’t have let that happen, Loki.”

“Do you promise?”

“I promise we would do everything within our power to keep something like that from happening. You do know that Tony would declare his own private war against Victor Von Doom if he tried to make you stay in Latveria against your will, right?”

Loki nodded; she did know that. She still didn’t understand why Tony was so protective of her, but she couldn’t deny that he was.

“Good. Now, are you sure you don’t need your medication?”

Loki shook her head.

“Does that mean no, you don’t need it, or no, you’re not sure?”

“Doctor Samson told me that I shouldn’t take it unless I really needed it.”

“And you’re sure you don’t? It is okay to take it before you’re actually having a panic attack.”

“I’m sure. I just need—” Loki couldn’t quite bring herself to say it, but she lifted her arms up to Bruce.

Bruce blinked at her, then grasped her arms to pull her up. He let go, but when Loki stood there with her arms still outstretched, he must have finally understood, because he pulled her into a hug, which he attempted to end a few seconds later with a couple of pats to her back. Not ready to end it yet, Loki refused to let go. Eventually, she felt him relax into it and wait patiently for her to loosen her grip. “Loki, are you ready to keep walking so we can try to catch up to the others?”

“Yes, but—I really can’t walk in these shoes.” It wasn’t fair; as Natasha had advised, the dress shoes she had brought had been flats, but she was now stuck wearing the four-inch heels Frigga had dressed her in.

“I would carry you if I could, but you’re too heavy.”

Loki broke their embrace so she could glare at him.

“I’m not saying that you’re heavier than you should be. To be honest, I’m not sure how much you should weigh. Obviously, your bones are denser than a normal human’s, but you look healthy enough. We’ve been over this—”

“What are you saying, Bruce?”

“That I’m the one that’s out of shape. The only way I could carry anything bigger than my carry-on bag for any distance is if I turned into the other guy, and I don’t want to do that right now.”

Loki turned herself into a fluffy black angora rabbit and hopped into Bruce’s arms. I’m not a monster. I’m just a little bunny, working through my issues, thought Loki.

Bruce shifted her into one arm so he could use the other to scritch her behind one long ear. “I guess I can manage this. Although I’m kind of wondering why you can turn yourself into a rabbit, but you can’t turn your shoes into flats.”

／(◕ x ◕ )＼

A thick fog had settled around the clearing by the time Bruce and Loki made it there, and Loki heard Thor’s voice before she saw him. “I see my sister has manipulated you into carrying her now.”

“It’s fine,” said Bruce.

Thor shook his head. “It isn’t. I’m starting to think we’ve all been much too accommodating, and that’s the reason she thinks she can get away with doing whatever she wants.”

“She hasn’t gotten away with anything. She’s still going to be grounded when we get home.”

Loki didn’t appreciate being talked about as if she wasn’t there, so she hopped out of Bruce’s arms, transforming back into a form that allowed her to speak before she hit the ground. “I’m sorry, alright? I just couldn’t sit back and watch Mother marry that awful man.”

“You can’t control Mother, Loki. You have to let her make her own mistakes.”

“Everyone keeps saying that. But why is it fine for everyone to tell me what to do?”

“It’s different,” Thor argued. “You’re still a child. As your guardians, the rest of us have an obligation to keep you from doing things that make it unlikely you’ll survive to adulthood.”

“In Asgard, I was considered an adult.”

“True, but you’ve allowed everyone here to treat you as a child for several months. You even let Tony tuck you into bed—”

“I do not let him tuck me in. I cannot prevent him from stopping by my room to check on me at night.”

“It’s alright, Loki. You don’t have to be embarrassed,” said Natasha, the corner of her lips quirking upward. “I wish I had someone to tuck me in.”

“He doesn’t tuck me in.”

“Alright, stop.” Bruce had raised his voice in a way that he hardly ever did, which got all their attention. “You two are acting like children too, and if you don’t stop teasing your younger sister, she isn’t going to be the only one grounded when we get home.”

Thor scowled at him. “You cannot ground me. I am ninety-percent certain I am above you in the chain of command.”

“Back on the plane, you told Loki you’d be deferring to both me and Natasha on this mission,” Bruce reminded him. “Anyway, just leave her alone.” Apparently, he thought Loki incapable of fighting her own battles.

“I don’t need you to protect me,” Loki snapped. “You aren’t truly my father, you know.” She regretted saying it as soon as it came out of her mouth. Bruce wasn’t the one she’d been irked with, but somehow, her inner bunny had transformed into an overstimulated cat, and she had turned her claws on him.

“Be thankful for that, Bruce. Loki killed her true father.”

Loki knew that most of the time Thor spoke without thinking, but she couldn’t help thinking that he had intended to wound her that time. If he thought her too stupid to know the difference, he had another thing coming, and if she could have summoned a dagger to return the wound with, she would have done it. Instead, she pulled off one of her shoes and threw it at his head. Thor caught it and grinned at her in a way she took as a challenge. She removed her other shoe and rushed him, intending to use the heel to make him look a little more like his father, and they were soon grappling together on the ground, each wielding a shoe as a weapon.

“Uh, Bruce—?” Something in Natasha’s voice made Loki look, and she saw Bruce doubled over. His breathing had changed, and though she couldn’t see his eyes, in her mind's eye she saw brown irises tinged with green. Loki froze, and when Thor noticed, he paused and looked up as well. He then released the choke hold he had had her in, dropping her shoe and grabbing Mjolnir the walking stick from the ground where she had fallen.

Natasha grabbed Loki by the wrist and pulled her off the ground, pushing her in the direction of the trees.

（;≧-≦）;;

Maybe they had all gotten a little too used to Bruce’s seemingly endless patience and forgotten why he’d had to develop it in the first place. “This is your fault,” Natasha told Loki, as a tree which had been ripped up by its roots flew past them, too close for comfort.

“How is it my fault?”

“It just is.” Natasha pulled Loki down behind a fallen log just in time to save her from being hit with yet another uprooted tree. “Stay down here. I’m going to try to talk him down.”

“No!” Loki grabbed her around her waist.

“It’s okay. Hulk won’t hurt me, at least not on purpose. It’s Thor he’s angry with.”

“I’m not so sure that’s true. Please Natasha, just let Thor handle him. If he gets hit with a tree, he can walk it off.”

“It will be okay, Loki. Just let go.” Natasha pried Loki off her, one finger at a time. While she appreciated Loki’s concern for her, she needed to get to Bruce. “Just stay here and stay down,” she repeated, once she had freed herself.

She ran in the direction that the tree had been thrown from, and when she came within a few feet of Hulk, she stopped and put out her hand. “Hey, Big Guy. Sun’s gettin’ real low.”

Hulk snorted, then ambled towards her. She reached out to touch the inside of his wrist, but before she could, Hulk grabbed her, wrapping his thick fingers around her forearm. Then he smiled at her, but something about the way he was smiling—maybe it was just that she couldn’t recall seeing Hulk smile before—made her uneasy.

<<= ,<<= o(◎益◎;)

Thor dodged another tree that had been thrown at him. “Ha. You missed me again!” Another object whizzed by his head in a whir of black and copper red. “Ha. You—wait, was that Natasha? That is bad form, Hulk! You mustn’t throw people! I think it is time for us to end this.” Thor swung Mjolnir around in a circle, allowing it to gain momentum. Then he released it in the direction he thought Hulk stood but couldn’t see him for the fog.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then he heard Hulk laugh. “Stupid god missed!”

Thor furrowed his eyebrows, lifted his hand and tried to call Mjolnir back to him. Then he waited. And waited. Thor sighed, wondering if it might have gotten caught on something. Or worse, he’d thrown it so hard this time, off the side of a mountain, that it wasn’t going to stop; it would keep going around in an orbit around Midgard’s circular globe without hitting anything. He started running in the direction he had thrown it, hoping that he might catch up with it.

█▬== ◟(`ﮧ´ ◟ )

Natasha had been gone for much longer than she should have been. At least Hulk had stopped throwing things, but the quiet made Loki uneasy. The sun had started to disappear behind the trees, and she wondered if she ought to stay where she was or head for Sokovia on her own to meet up with Clint. Or maybe she should go back to Latveria, and hope that Frigga would be willing to open a portal back to New York for her, and that Doom wouldn’t try to make her stay on as Princess of Latveria.

She had a feeling that someone had told her what to do if they got separated, but she hadn’t particularly been listening. She wished she could contact someone, but even if she could have gotten cell service out here, which she doubted, she didn’t have her phone. That was in her bag, which was still back at Doom’s Castle. Natasha, who must have anticipated having to make a quick exit that morning, had only grabbed her bag and Bruce's before their audience with Doom. She had explained later that she hadn't brought Loki's with her because it didn't contain any supplies necessary for their survival, but Loki wondered if it wasn't just because Natasha had been annoyed with her.

Loki reached into the pocket she had created with her magic—not a dimensional pocket, but a regular pocket made of fabric, hidden in her voluminous skirts—and pulled out her other cell phone, the one none of the others knew about. She flipped up the lid and checked the bars on its anachronistic black and green display. As she expected, it was getting full service, since it didn’t rely on Midgard’s cell phone towers. She considered dialing the only number in its contact list, but she’d been told that she was to use that lifeline only in the direst of situations, and she wasn’t certain that the situation warranted it.

She had begun to suspect, however, that the situation did warrant taking one of those pills Doctor Samson had prescribed for her. It would be a lot easier to decide what to do if her heart wasn’t racing, and she didn’t feel so lightheaded. Bruce had had them, and usually, he kept them in his wallet—but what had even happened to his wallet when he transformed into the Hulk? It might be back in the clearing, but she wasn’t even sure what direction that was in at this point.

Loki stared up at the dimming sky, certain she was going to die, though she couldn’t say what was going to kill her. Hypothermia and dehydration were the first two things that killed mortals in these kinds of survival situations, weren’t they? At least she didn’t have to worry about encountering a predator, because she could always turn herself into something farther up the food chain.

Perhaps she should use her emergency phone after all. But no, she could wait. It hadn’t been that long, and one of the others might come back for her. She tried to focus on taking deep breaths in through her mouth, holding them in, counting to four, and then slowly letting them out again. Then she tried to focus on the things she could feel, see, hear, smell, and taste—the grass underneath her, the branches swaying in the twilight breeze, the chirping of whatever kind of chirping insect they had in the mountains on the Latverian-Sokovian border, the smell of pine trees, and the taste of mountain mist when she stuck out her tongue.

Loki felt a little better. Eventually, someone would come back for her, so it was best to wait where she was. If she didn’t, she’d probably get in trouble, because then they would come back looking for her and she wouldn’t be there. But what if they don’t come back? a little voice whispered to her. What if you’ve been abandoned? It wouldn’t be the first time. You’ve been such a horrid brat the past couple of days, they’ll be glad to be rid of you.

Loki felt like a pit had opened under her, and she'd have fallen into it if she hadn't remembered what Doctor Samson had told her. Not all the voices in her head were hers, and whenever she heard a voice that told her negative things about herself, it would be helpful to stop and think about whose voice it was. Who did it sound like?

The answer came to her almost immediately. “Your birthright was to die,” Odin had told her, “as a child cast out onto a frozen rock. If I had not taken you in, you would not be here now to hate me.” That sounded fairly in line with her current line of thought, didn’t it? As usual, the voice in her head telling her that she’d be lost if it weren’t for him, that she hadn’t been born with the innate right to live, let alone to be loved, was Odin’s.

“They’ll come back,” Loki whispered to herself. Even if they didn’t, she would still be alright; even if everyone else failed her, she would always have herself to rely on.

(:_」∠)_ - they will come back, right?

When Bruce woke up, the first thing he realized was that he’d been sleeping in his underwear in the woods, and that there were leaves in his underwear and something crawling around in his hair. Which unfortunately, wasn’t a completely unfamiliar scenario. The next thing he realized was that he was alone, he didn’t know where in the woods he was, and he didn’t have anything at all with him or anyway to contact anyone, which, familiar situation or not, was still bad.

He tried to remember what had happened the night before, but as usual, what he remembered felt like a bad acid trip. He thought he remembered throwing things at Thor. He also thought he remembered throwing Natasha. He told himself that she would be alright; after all, she was pretty good at landing on her feet. What had happened to Loki, though? She wasn’t a “god” like Thor anymore, or a spy trained in acrobatics like Natasha. Her magic was still a little unreliable. If he had hurt her, that would be unforgivable.

“Friend Bruce, is that you?”

Bruce pushed himself off the ground and turned in the direction of the voice he had heard. He felt relief to see Thor grinning and waving at him, as if he had already forgotten the fight between him and Hulk. Though now that he thought of it, Thor had probably enjoyed himself; he always did seem to be in a good mood after a fight, which Bruce always found a little annoying, given that all he usually felt after a fight was disorientation, exhaustion, and nausea. Then he remembered what had set Hulk off to begin with. “You shouldn’t have started a fight with your sister, Thor.”

Thor frowned at him. “It was only a little play fight, Bruce. If I had been serious, Loki wouldn’t have been able to hold her own against me in her mortal form.”

That was true, now that Bruce thought about it, but— “I’m pretty sure Loki wasn’t playing. What you said hurt her.”

“It was only the truth,” Thor said. “I suppose it wasn’t a good time to bring it up, though—”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“I apologize, my friend.”

“Don’t apologize to me, apologize to your sister.”

“I will.” Thor’s grim expression turned back into a grin. “Are you going to ground me, Bruce?”

Bruce rolled his eyes as he shouldered his way past Thor in the direction he hoped would lead back to the clearing.

(;; ・・) ヾ( ´・・｀)_中

Natasha’s right arm was red and swollen, but at least it was just the one arm. It wasn’t twisted in any odd angles, and nothing was sticking out; hopefully that meant it was a clean break. She cradled the arm against her chest as she made her way back to the place she had left Loki.

She’d decided it was best to wait until morning came and the fog cleared, because otherwise, she might have been wandering around the mountainside for the rest of the night. Loki better not have gotten it into her head to go looking for her or to go on without the group, because if she had to spend all day searching the mountainside for her, she was going to kick her ass. The one thing she had told Loki when they’d started the trek through the mountains on their way there was that if she somehow got separated from the group, she should stay in one place and wait for someone to find her.

Luckily, she found Loki where she had left her. Asleep, she looked almost innocent, especially with the bunny ears that had stuck around after her transformation back into a normal-looking girl. They twitched in her sleep, and Natasha wondered if she even realized they were there. She took out her phone, which still didn’t have any cell service, and took a picture before gently nudging Loki’s shoulder with her boot.

“You look like crap,” said Loki, once her eyes had focused on Natasha.

Natasha felt a little better about waking her up now. “Thanks. You don’t look the best you’ve ever looked either, but at least it looks like you got some sleep. Come on, get up. We need to go back to the clearing and hope that Bruce and your brother have already made their way back there.”

(≖͞_≖̥) ~(´ｰ+｀)

When Loki walked into the clearing, looking a little shaken but healthy and in one piece, Bruce felt a surge of relief. He felt the urge to run towards her and pull her into another hug, but stopped himself when he saw Natasha. The sick feeling he had been feeling all morning seeped right back into his stomach. She cradled her arm close to her chest, and her hair hung in limp strands over her eyes. “Natasha, what’s wrong with your arm?”

“Don’t worry about it. It feels like a clean break.”

“Broken is broken. Did I—why am I even asking? I know I did. I’d apologize, but I’m not sure there’s a way I can apologize for something like this.”

“Just calm down, Bruce. I’ve had my arm broken before.”

Bruce shook his head. This was every bit as unforgivable as it would have been had he hurt Loki. He had just completely discounted the idea that Natasha could be hurt badly, because she hardly ever got hurt when they were on missions.

“It’s alright, I just tripped and fell.”

“No. We both know you’re lying, and that’s not going to help anything.” How many times had his mother told their neighbors not to worry, she was just clumsy? The bruises on her arms were from walking into the patio door. When she’d broken her wrist, it was from falling down the back steps, and no, no one had pushed her—

“Bruce, it’s fine. It’s my fault for not reading the situation correctly, and for that matter, I could have fallen better.”

“If I hurt you, it is in no way your fault.” Natasha took a step backward, and Bruce realized he’d raised his voice much more than necessary. The worst part of it was that Loki stood there looking between them uncertainly, and Thor seemed to be at just as much of a loss.

Natasha stretched her neck in the direction of the trees, indicating that she wanted Bruce to follow her. Once they were a good distance away from where they had left Thor and Loki, Natasha stopped. “Look, I understand where this is coming from. I did your psych eval for SHIELD, remember? I know more about your formative experiences than I have a right to.”

Bruce stopped six feet away from her and stood looking down at his feet. He wasn’t sure what she thought she knew, but she was right, she had no right to know things he hadn’t shared with anyone before—not Tony, not Leonard, not even Doctor Sofen. He pushed the twinge of anger he felt down, knowing that it wasn’t safe for him to feel. Luckily, there were plenty of other emotions to bury it under, namely shame, guilt, and fear.

“I promise we can talk about what happened later, but it’s going to be problematic if you’re afraid to come near me. For one thing, I could use your help setting my arm.”

Bruce looked up at her and took a couple of cautious steps forward, trying to prove to himself as much as Natasha that he wasn’t afraid. “It would be better if we just put it in a splint for now and got you to a hospital as soon as possible. I don’t want to try to set it without getting an x-ray first—”

“I’ve set it myself plenty of times before. Like I said, I’m pretty sure it’s a clean break. If you don’t want to help, I can do it myself.”

“Please don’t. If you don’t set it properly and it heals that way, you might need surgery later.” And then, he would feel even worse than he already did, if it was possible for him to feel worse.

Natasha’s lips pursed together, and Bruce thought she was going to protest again, but after they had stared at one another for a long moment, she was the one that backed down. “Fine, you win. If it will make you feel better, I’ll go to the emergency room like a normal person.”

“Thank you,” said Bruce, feeling somewhat relieved, but not better.

Bruce followed her back to where Thor and Loki were waiting for them. He wondered if Thor had used the opportunity to apologize, as close as they were standing to one another. Whether or not they had spoken at all, he suspected they had fought with one another so frequently over the past thousand years that they had their own shorthand for apologies. He had noticed it before; they would fight, and a few moments later, one of them would make some gesture or facial expression that wouldn’t have meant much to anyone else, and then both would go on like nothing had happened.

“Ah, Bruce!” Thor said, smiling broadly at him. “I hope you and Natasha had a nice little chat. We didn’t hear any of it, of course.”

Loki kicked Thor in the shin as she cleared her throat. “You know, I am beginning to feel guilty about skipping out on Mother’s wedding. I think we should go back.”

Bruce’s mouth worked, but he couldn’t quite figure out what to say to that. Natasha beat him to it. “Loki, are you trying to trick us into going back so you can try to stop your mother’s wedding?”

“No, I promise that’s not what I’m thinking. Were Gungnir here, I would swear an oath upon her. Now that I’ve had some time to think about it, I think Doom might not be so bad as we thought, and that if this is what Mother wants, we should be supportive.”

“Doom might not be so bad,” Natasha repeated, as if trying to work out what the words meant.

“I mean, he’s just kind of a dork, when you get right down to it. He took me down to his lab to show me his giant potato-battery. He seemed to genuinely want to bond with me. Besides, anyone who has the good sense to choose green as their color, and me as their heir, can’t be so bad.”

“And you’ve forgiven Mother for her harsh words?” asked Thor.

“To be fair, what I did was wrong. Wrong enough that I knew it was wrong, and you know I’m working with a moral compass that’s been partially demagnetized at the best of times. And even though Frigga was upset with me, she still called me her daughter. She has never denied me the way Odin has, even when I told her she was not my mother.”

“We are still closer to Latveria than to Sokovia. They must have some sort of emergency medical services.” Natasha winced, although when Bruce made eye contact with her, she tried to cover it up by yawning.

Bruce winced out of sympathy and didn’t bother trying to cover it. He just wanted to get on the plane and go home, but Natasha needed medical attention, and he wasn’t feeling up to doing much but going along with whatever the others decided to do, nor did he feel he had a right to express an opinion. For what he’d done to Natasha, he deserved worse than to have to walk back into Latveria in his underwear.

Chapter Text

“Sister, what are you doing?” Leave it to Thor to ask a stupid question.

“What does it look like I’m doing? I thought we could use it to make a splint for Natasha’s arm.” The work would have been easier if Loki had had her knives, but the fabric of her dress tore easily enough if you found the right spots to start tearing it from. As shreds of delicate fabric fell around her, she felt a bit like the stamen of a flower that had dropped its petals. 

“Thank you, Loki. That’s helpful of you.” On one hand, Bruce’s praise felt a little condescending—did he think she needed to be praised every time she did something remotely unselfish? But on the other, she had to admit that she preferred consistent “positive reinforcement” to Odin’s complete failure to notice her unless she had done something wrong.

With one arm, Natasha unzipped her carry-on bag and pulled out a large roll of gauze. “Helpful, but not necessary.” 

Loki stared at the roll of gauze for a moment, wondering just what else Natasha had hidden in her bag, then continued. “It will be easier to walk without all this material weighing me down anyway. If you don’t need it, perhaps I can try using it to make something for Bruce to wear.”

Bruce looked uncertainly at the heap of fabric. “That’s okay, Loki—”

“It’s no trouble. I can use my magic to reform the fabric into a pair of pants or something. It’s more for the rest of us than for you, if I’m honest.”

“Gee, thanks—”

Thor quirked an eyebrow at her. “If you can do that, why can you not do something about your shoes?”

Loki thought the question every bit as inane as his earlier question. “I haven’t the time to explain the intricacies of magic to you, and quite frankly, I don’t understand your sudden interest in my magic after hundreds of years of you maligning it as ‘tricks.’”

“I will take that to mean that you could have done something about your shoes the entire time but preferred to be carried.”

Loki balked at the accusation. “For your information, I haven’t tried this type of magic since I first started to regain my powers. I’m not sure I could manage something as complex as shoes.”

“And yet it seems to me such a thing should be simpler than turning yourself into a rabbit or turning me into a cockatoo.”

“I never turned you into a cockatoo, Thor. I turned you into a kookaburra. They are completely different birds.” 

“My question remains the same. Why can you not change your clothes at will as you used to?”

“Because it isn’t simpler at all.  Fabric contains little inherent energy, whereas in a living organism there’s more to work with. Even when I had access to all of my magic, I usually just cast glamors over my clothing to make it look like I’d changed my clothes.”

“And the difference between glamors and changing your clothes?”

Loki wondered again why Thor had suddenly taken an interest in how magic worked when he had never been interested before, but decided she didn’t mind. “It has to do with whether I’m manipulating electromagnetic radiation—light waves—or rearranging the molecules that make up an actual garment. It’s similar to the difference between creating a hologram of something or creating an actual object.”

“But where do your clothes go when you turn into an animal?”

Loki tried to think of a way to explain it but realized that she didn’t know. “You wouldn’t understand anyway—”

“You don’t know, do you?”

She had been about to object to his accusation, but Natasha interrupted. “Loki, if you want to make it back in time for your mom’s wedding, just do whatever it is you’re going to do.” She supposed she couldn’t blame her for being impatient, when she stood there cradling her broken arm.

“So you could just make it look like Bruce is wearing clothes,” said Thor, as if he’d just put that together.

“I could, but it would likely be more comfortable for him if—”

“I thought it was for our benefit, not his.”

Thor could really be infuriating when he wanted to be. “Must you listen to everything I say and look for contradictions in it?” 

✃- - - - - -

Loki, now wearing a dress that ended in a frayed edge two inches above her knees, laid the shreds of the bottom of her dress in a pile. She held her hands over them, closing her eyes, her brow furrowing in deep concentration. Her hands, and the shreds of fabric, began pulsing with green light. The light pulsed brightly enough that Bruce had to close his eyes against it, and when he opened them a moment later, Loki held out a pair of what appeared to be size XXXL parachute pants in emerald green. Bruce took the pants from her, knowing that he didn’t have any other options; in a way, they felt like the pants he deserved. Amazingly, they stayed up when he put them on. 

After rummaging around in her bag with one hand again, Natasha held something out to him. Bruce took what appeared to be a small but stretchy women’s t-shirt from her. “You had a t-shirt in your bag?” Loki complained. “You told me not to bring anything but my dress, but you brought other clothing.”

Natasha rolled her eyes. “I just brought an extra t-shirt to sleep in. That’s it.”

Bruce held the little black t-shirt up. Large white block letters across the chest declared the wearer to be “100% Bitch.” Again, it felt like the t-shirt he deserved.

(*-_-)ﾉ*:･ﾟ ___ ✧:･ﾟ
               | ´|` |
               |__|__| 

As they walked through the streets of the same village they had traveled through before, once again, people were staring at them. Was it not rude to stare in Latveria? Then again, even in New York, a woman in a ripped-up evening dress walking by a man wearing taffeta pants in the same color and a woman with her arm in a splint might have attracted attention. Not to mention the large blonde man carrying a rather large, intricately carved hammer; Thor had found Mjolnir, but she had decided against transforming herself into something less conspicuous, even when he asked her nicely. 

“Oi, you there,” Thor called out to one of the villagers. “Do you know where we might find a healer?”

The woman looked about herself uncertainly. When she had determined that Thor had spoken to her and not someone else, she took a bold step forward. “The village doesn’t have a doctor. Only the herb-woman, who is also our midwife and sees to the animals. I believe she is in the middle of delivering a calf—but Lord Doom is most knowledgeable about medicine, and often attends to our more serious illnesses and injuries himself.” 

Their conversation, of course, had been conducted in All-Speak on Thor’s part, and Latverian on the woman’s part. Thor turned to his companions and attempted to translate. “Their healer is currently giving birth to a cow.”

Loki rolled her eyes. “That’s not what she said, you twit. She said that the woman is in the middle of delivering a calf; she isn’t so much a doctor as a midwife, herbalist, and veterinarian. Our best bet is to continue to Doom’s castle, because it seems that Doctor Doom is a medical doctor after all. If anyone for miles around here has an x-ray machine and the means to create a cast, it will probably be him.”

This time, they made it to Doom’s castle without attracting the attention of any Doombots. Or maybe the Doombots had been instructed not to assault them this time; after all, once Frigga and Doom were wed, Loki would be a princess of Latveria. (Interestingly enough, Doom hadn’t said anything about making Thor his heir. At least he had better taste than Odin.)

When they entered the foyer, Frigga ran to greet them. She threw her arms around Loki. “You came back. Of course, I knew you would come back. I saw it in a vision—”

“Natasha broke her arm,” Loki told her. “And Bruce lost his clothes. I made him a pair of pants out of the bottom of my dress.”

Frigga took a step back and looked Loki up and down. “So you did. I’m so happy that your magic is coming back to you. Well done—” Frigga turned her head to take in Bruce’s outfit. “Though it might need a little work still. Did you notice, Loki, how there is more magic in the air here to draw from?”

Loki nodded. She had felt it, which was why she had felt confident enough to try using her magic to reform cloth. Latveria had a larger source of magic to draw from than anywhere else he’d been on Midgard, and he could understand why Frigga liked it there, even if she had more difficulty seeing what her Mother saw in Victor Von Doom.

Frigga turned her attention to Natasha and her injury. “Oh my. Those mountains are treacherous, aren’t they? I wish you hadn’t all left so quickly; I could have at least opened a portal back to Sokovia for you. Just wait here and I’ll go get Victor. Loki and I can try to accelerate the healing after it’s set, but it will have to be set properly first.”

Natasha’s eyes darted to Bruce, who cleared his throat. “You don’t need to bother him. If there’s an x-ray machine we can use, I can take care of that.”

“If it would make you more comfortable.” Frigga looked disappointed, as if she couldn’t understand why they couldn’t trust her villainous husband to be. “I shall still have to inform Victor of your needs. I do not have a key to his laboratory, which is where his medical equipment is. And I must warn you that he likely won’t allow you access to his laboratory alone. Even if he allows you to use his equipment, you will have to put up with him looking over your shoulder.”

“Great,” said Bruce, smiling in a false way that did nothing but make it clear he didn’t think having Doom hanging over his shoulder while he set Natasha’s arm would be at all “great.”

(❛ω❛)  ┗(›´ω`‹ )┛

Victor Von Doom frowned at the little group that had been gone for one day and had come back looking as if they had been through a series of natural disasters. “Are you certain you wish to leave your daughter in the care of these people?” he asked Frigga. “They do not seem to be able to take care of themselves, let alone care for a child.”

Frigga took his hand and squeezed it. “They have taken good care of her so far, and at least for now, I think we should respect Loki’s wishes to stay with them. They aren’t usually this much of a mess.”

｢(ﾟﾍﾟ)(_　_|||):(⁄ ⁄ᵒ̶̶̷́⁄-⁄ᵒ̶̶̷̀⁄ ⁄):(,´ o`)

“Excuse me.” Bruce had become a little impatient as Frigga and Victor spoke to each other in hushed tones, in the same language that Thor had spoken to the village woman in.  “Could you show us to the x-ray machine so we can take care of Natasha’s arm?” 

Doom turned to him and nodded regally. “Of course. I will see to the young lady’s arm, and you may assist me.”

Bruce didn’t want to debate Doctor Doom on who would be assisting who, so he just nodded back. At least he’d be able to watch and make sure Doom didn’t do anything to hurt Natasha. Although considering that he’d been the one to hurt Natasha in the first place, that thought felt more than a little hypocritical.

“The children should stay here,” Doom announced as he descended the stairs. “There is no need for everyone to come.”

“Children?” Thor asked, looking around himself for the “children.”

“I believe he means the two of us,” Loki told him.

Normally, Bruce would agree that people who didn’t need to be in an examination room shouldn’t be there to get in the way, but he disliked the idea of the group getting separated again. Still, he couldn’t bring himself to object to a reasonable request, and Loki would be with Thor and Frigga. If Doom tried to do anything to him or Natasha, he’d probably transform.

He didn’t want to, so soon after the night before. He wasn’t sure he ever wanted to transform into the other guy again. On their walk back, he had been going over theories about how he could remove the effects of the gamma radiation from his body, theories he had all but given up on when he had joined the Avengers, thinking that maybe, Hulk could do some good after all.

Bruce and Natasha followed Doom down a long staircase, where he pushed open a heavy wooden door. The other guy could plow right through that, Bruce assured himself, even though he still hoped it wouldn’t come to that. Natasha leaned towards Bruce and whispered, “Gotta love the interior decorating.” That made him smile for a moment. Doom’s “laboratory” looked a lot more like a dungeon than a laboratory, or like the laboratory of a mad scientist in an old B-list monster movie, with its stone walls lined with torches that burned green. He wondered if the fuel contained chemicals that made it that color, or if they were magical torches, but he didn’t ask. The last thing he wanted to do was start a conversation with Doom.

They came to another door that had a heavy padlock on it, and a little window in the middle of it with bars. For a moment, Bruce worried they were about to be locked in a cell again, but when Doom opened it and flipped a switch on the inside of the door, the room flooded with bright fluorescent light, revealing a modern if not quite state-of-the-art exam room, complete with a padded examination table and eye exam charts on the wall. A partition stood in the middle of the room, and Bruce found himself only slightly anxious about what might be behind it. He didn’t have to wonder about it for long, though. Doom pushed the partition back, revealing a mobile x-ray machine with “Fujifilm” printed on the side. 

“Are you familiar with the FDR Go Digital Mobile X-Ray from Fujifilm Medical Systems?” asked Doctor Doom. “The sales representative assured me that it is the most advanced mobile digital x-ray system available. It is loaded with features that speed the workflow. Two second image previews and nine second image cycle times, fully wireless transitions, and it runs four to five hours on a single charge—”

“Is that a giant potato it’s hooked up to?”

Doom narrowed his eyes at him. “Do you have a problem with Latveria’s clean energy initiative?”

Bruce gave Doom the kind of small smile you gave to someone you thought was out of their skull but didn’t want to offend. “Not at all. You’re going to have to show me how the interface on this thing works though. I haven’t used this particular system before.” All of the tower’s equipment had been manufactured by the medical devision of Stark Industries, which was light-years ahead of any of the other medical equipment manufacturers. He would keep that to himself; he couldn’t imagine that telling Doom that would be good for either him or the sales representative who had sold the man his x-ray machine.

( ̲̅:̲̅:̲̅:̲̅[̲̅ ̲̅]̲̅:̲̅:̲̅:̲̅)

Frigga had taken Loki up to her sitting room while Bruce and Natasha had gone with her intended. Thor had excused himself, saying that he wanted to look around the castle; perhaps he had sensed that she and Loki needed a little time to make up to one another. 

Tea had been brought up to them by one of Victor’s maids. As always, she had been efficient and polite but much too deferential for her taste. It made her miss her Asgardian handmaidens, who over the course of two thousand years had become more like sisters to her than servants. 

Frigga pretended not to notice Loki’s lack of manners as she scarfed down tea sandwiches and petit fours. She wondered if she had eaten anything in the past two days. Loki paused between bites of a cheese and potato sandwich. “Mother, is it just me, or do we fight more whenever I’m in this form?”

Frigga took a long sip of tea before answering. “Perhaps it is natural for mothers and daughters to fight more than mothers and sons.”

Loki frowned as she looked down at herself. “You know, I think I’m tired of being in this form for the moment.”

“Change, then. There’s no reason for you to stay in that form if it doesn’t feel right to you.”

“Very well then. I’m still wearing the dress Tony bought me to the wedding, though.”

Again, Frigga took a long sip of tea before speaking. “Will it fit?”

“With a few modifications.”

“Then whatever makes you happy is fine with me.”

“But will it be fine with—”

“Don’t worry about Victor. He will be fine with it if I tell him to be fine with it.” As far as Frigga was concerned, Loki could attend as a cow or wearing blue jeans, and Victor “would just have to deal,” as the Midgardian saying went. From the beginning, she had wanted both her children at her wedding. She had only agreed not to invite Thor because she had been confident in her eldest’s ability to show up to any function whether he had been invited or not. Had they not come back to support her, she wasn’t certain she could have gone through with it.

“You seem confident in that. Mother, you haven’t put an enchantment over Victor Von Doom, did you?”

The corner of Frigga’s mouth quirked up at the impertinent question. “A lady never enchants and tells, Loki.”

☆⌒(*-‿⸰) *:・ﾟ 

To Natasha’s surprise, the whole thing went without incident. Doom hadn’t strapped her into a chair and attempted to remove her brain and replace it with a cat’s brain, or anything weird like that. After he had taken x-rays of her arm, all the while blabbing on about the features of the x-ray machine and Latveria’s potato-energy initiative, Doom had stepped back and let Bruce set it while he prepared the materials for her cast.

He had even let her choose the color. It had been years since anyone had asked her what color cast she wanted; SHIELD issue casts had always been dark blue, black, or gray. On whim, Natasha had chosen bubblegum pink. She regretted that decision now, because when Frigga had seen the cast, she had changed the color of her dress for the wedding to match it.

“You know, I could change your hair to blonde,” Loki told her. “Then you would look exactly like a life-sized Barbie doll. It is Halloween, after all.”

“Do it, and I’ll break your arm,” Natasha warned him. “It will be entirely on purpose, and I still won’t feel bad about it.”

“You wouldn’t really.” 

“If I were you, I wouldn’t test me. Now come here and let me zip up the back of your dress.” Frigga had assured her that it would be fine for Loki to wear the dress he had brought to the wedding, even though he no longer filled it out the way he had before. As long as Victor Von Doom wasn’t going to throw a fit about it, like he had about the blue jeans, Natasha didn’t particularly care what Loki wore. “Are you still planning to wear makeup, or—?”

“Just a little mascara and some lipstick, I think.”

“Pink or red?”

“Neither. Black, to match my nails.” Loki ran a finger across his lips, and his lips turned to the color of black satin. How long had he been able to do that? Maybe it had something to do with “how much more magic was in the air” in Latveria. 
 
( ( ◣m◢) \ ❤ ζ(´‿` )\\

The inside of the cathedral that stood in the shadow of Doom’s castle was unlike any other Bruce had ever seen. There weren’t any crucifixes or any other symbols that he recognized as belonging to any religion, and the art surrounding them didn’t depict scenes from any religion he knew of.  Stained glass windows depicted Doom as if he were either a god or some sort of avenging angel descending from on high, and frescoes depicted not only a god-like Doom but villagers working in the fields or constructing monuments to their glorious leader. The style reminded him of the social realism that had been the officially sanctioned artwork of the USSR and other communist bloc countries prior to their collapse in the 1980’s. Part of him wanted to look away, but another part of him was fascinated. 

Their group had been seated in the front row of pews, and the rest were filled with people from the village. He wondered if they were there voluntarily or if they had been coerced into coming. Many of them had been ushered in by the Doombots, and Bruce wondered if the Doombots had rounded them up and herded them to the cathedral like a flock of sheep. 

There didn’t seem to be any sort of elite ruling class in Latveria. Doom ruled alone, and the Doombots acted in place of administrative officials, police, and so on. As Bruce waited for the ceremony to begin, he wondered who would be officiating it—did they even have a clergy in Latveria? 

The door behind the altar of the chapel opened, and out walked Victor Von Doom, wearing a long green robe and carrying a giant leather-bound book. Following him was another Victor Von Doom, wearing his usual armor and a slightly more formal, intricately stitched version of his green cape. Bruce scanned them up and down a few times before deciding that the Doom with the book was the Doombot.

The Doombot stood on the dais at the front of the room, and Doom stood a step beneath him. Then the doors behind them opened, allowing the early evening sunlight to flood into the room. Pipe organ music started playing. Bruce hadn’t seen a pipe organ and couldn’t tell where it came from. It all felt like a surreal dream, but he didn’t think he’d ever had any dreams this surreal before, and that said something given the kind of dreams he had whenever he collapsed after his Hulk episodes.

Frigga began her procession down the aisle. The train of her dress was so long that it had to be held up by six Doombots, and the dress itself was also massive. Frigga, as tall as she was, appeared to be drowning in white lace and satin. There were white flowers in her hair, and she wore a beatific smile.

“She’s got some nerve, wearing white,” Loki snarked.

“Hush, Loki,” said Thor. “You were the one that wanted to come back so that we could attend this wedding. I thought you wished to be supportive.”

“I am being supportive. All I’m saying is, she’s not fooling anyone—”

“Hush,” both Thor and Natasha said at the same time, before Frigga came close enough to their pew to hear them.

When Frigga reached the front, she took one of Victor’s armored hands. For a moment Bruce wondered what it might be like to stand in front of an entire room full of people and vow to love one person for the rest of his life. There had been a time when he had contemplated proposing to Betty, but it had never seemed like the right time; they were always busy with some project or other, the last being their gamma radiation research.

And after that had gone to hell, he had assumed he would be alone for the rest of his life unless he figured out how to reverse the effects of the radiation. He couldn’t have guessed that he would end up as an Avenger, living with Tony, who had been like a brother to him (other than the times he acted like a moody teenager, or worse, an impulsive five-year-old), and Clint, Steve, and Natasha, who were like significantly younger siblings, or maybe like older nieces and nephews. The roles were ill-defined, but nonetheless, the Avengers had become his family. 

Then Loki and Thor had come to live with them, and faster than he would have ever expected it to happen, he had come to care for Loki as if he were his own child. Thor was like—the family dog or something? Something about Thor did remind him of a golden retriever. 

His relationship with Leonard had been completely unexpected, especially given that the one time he had met the man before, he had found him kind of obnoxious, and couldn’t fathom what Betty saw in him. 

But now he wondered if he’d just been deluding himself the entire time, thinking it might be possible to stay with them. After years of work, he had thought he had his Hulk problem under control, but what had happened in the mountains proved otherwise.

“Welcome all who have gathered on this most auspicious day to witness the joining of Frigga of Vanaheim and our beloved leader, Victor Von Doom. And now, a reading from the book of Doom.” The Doombot held it’s hand over the book, and the pages glowed with a green light as they flipped through the air on their own and then stopped. "Doom is love,"  it read."Whoever lives in love lives in Doom, and Doom in them. This is how love is made complete among us so we will have confidence on the day of judgment: in this world we are like Doom. There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear involves torment. The one who fears has not been made perfect in love. We love because Doom first loved us.”

Bruce couldn’t help thinking that the passage sounded vaguely familiar.

“We are here to celebrate the love between Doom and Frigga,” the Doombot continued, “and to bind their houses together. A marriage is a magical bond between souls which, once entered into, may not be severed until the bond between body and soul itself is severed. Therefore, it is a contract not to be entered into lightly. If there is anyone here who knows of a reason these two may not enter into such a contract, let them speak now or forever remain silent.”

Loki had shrunk into the back of the pew, his face scrunched up on itself. To Bruce’s surprise, Thor was the one who stood up, raising his hand like a student with a question. (Did students in Asgard raise their hands when they wanted to ask a question? Had Thor and Loki even gone to school? He would have to ask later.)

Everyone in the room stared at him. Frigga frowned at him, and both the Doom on the dais and the Doom standing hand in hand with Frigga glared. “Do you have an objection?” asked the one officiating.

“If a marriage is a magical bond between two souls which may not be severed unto death, is Frigga not still married to my father?” asked Thor.

Frigga and Doom looked at one another. Then the Doom on top of the dais spoke. “We are aware of Frigga’s supposed former marriage to the All-Father of Asgard. But because the marriage never produced biological children who lived past infancy—”

Thor chuckled. “But I am Odin and Frigga’s biological child. Odin is my father, and Frigga is my—” Thor’s face went slack when he saw how distressed, and how guilty Frigga looked. “Mother?” Thor asked, as if asking if that word were the truth. “Mama?” With each reiteration of the word, Thor’s voice became smaller, younger and more broken. “Mommy?” 

Frigga stepped towards him. “Thor, I have loved both you and Loki from the time that Odin put you in my arms and informed me that I had just given birth, and I had better stay in confinement for a while to complete the illusion. You are my children in every way that matters.”

“But if you are not my mother—”

“This isn’t the time to have this conversation.”

“And when was the ‘right time’ for this conversation to be, Mother? Did you even plan on telling me?”

“I wanted to. I’ve been trying to tell you, but your father—”

“He forbade you to?”

Frigga opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out. She shook her head. “I promise you we shall speak of this later tonight, when I can speak of it freely.”

Chapter Text

There had been an awkward moment at the end of the ceremony, when it was announced that Doom could kiss his new wife. Frigga had first bumped her nose into his mask and pulled back before tilting her head to give him a small peck on the chin. Not satisfied with this, Doom had turned her so that she faced those in the pews. With his back to the congregation, he took off his mask, allowing only her to see him. Then they had kissed.

As Thor watched, he had felt sick to his stomach, though he couldn’t be sure if it was the sight of Frigga kissing someone who was not his father or the knowledge that Frigga was not truly his mother that had made him nauseous. At least Loki had seemed to have cheered up, perhaps with the knowledge that he had not been alone in having been lied to his entire life. He had even clapped at the conclusion of the ceremony, though he was the only one who did. Apparently, Latverians didn’t clap.

And now the reception was being held in the middle of the village square, which had been decorated with yellow roses in full bloom and silver and green paper lanterns. Frigga had already had her first dance with her new husband under the crescent moon, and Thor was already deep in his cups by the time his mother sat across from him at the table he had occupied alone. The plum flavored wine on offer wasn’t exactly to his liking, but it was strong enough that a couple of bottles had been enough to give him a good buzz.

“Thor—”

“That Doombot said that you didn’t have any children that lived past infancy,” Thor said, cutting her off. “What does that mean? Did you and Odin have children that did not live?”

“You picked up on that, did you?”

“Don’t be so surprised. People are always saying that I’m not nearly as dumb as I look.”

Frigga blinked at him, then looked down at her hands before answering. “I bore Odin one child, a daughter who died in infancy.”

“And why have I never heard about this older sister? Or older half-sister, I suppose, assuming I am even the son of Odin—”

Frigga’s lips flattened out into a straight line. “You are very much Odin’s son.”

Thor felt a little guilty as he realized the implications of that, but he couldn’t stop himself from blundering on. “So why have I not heard of this older half-sibling before?”

“Because even after two thousand years, it is painful for me to speak about, and perhaps even more so for your father.”

Again, he felt guilty about pressing her for answers. “Norns, Mother, I’m so sorry, but I don’t understand. Aesir children do not simply die, unless—”

“It was the only and last battle to be fought on Asgardian soil. Not only was she taken from us, I saw her slaughtered before my very eyes.”

Thor felt his blood begin to boil. “But what kind of enemy would do such a thing as to slay an infant before its mother?”

“One that came to regret it. I truly don’t wish to speak of this, Thor. Your half-sister is gone, and nothing will bring her back. Her death has already been avenged; your father made sure of that.”

Thor poured his mother a cup of wine, and they sat drinking together in silence for some time.

“But Mother,” Thor said, breaking their silence. He felt bad for bringing it up again, but one thing about his mother’s story still bothered him. “Loki and I had to study every battle in Asgardian history, and I don’t recall any battles that were fought on Asgardian soil.”

“You wouldn’t have studied it. Have you heard the Midgardian saying, ‘History is written by the victors?’ Though we might have won the day, our losses were so great that your father never cared to have them recorded in Asgard’s histories.”

“But something that happened so recently as two millennia ago—surely our people would still be telling tales of it! I would have heard of it from someone.”

“Darling, do you know what a ‘geas’ is?” asked Frigga.

The term did sound familiar, and it only took Thor a moment to remember why. “I remember when Loki tried to tell us he was under a geas that prohibited him from eating leeks.”

His mother smiled. “Loki was not fond of leeks, and he had just learned what geas were. But a geas is just that; magic that compels one to do something, or not to do it.”

“Are you saying that Father cast a spell compelling all of Asgard to be silent on the matter?”

“That is exactly what I’m saying.”

“And he also put one of these ‘geas’ on you, to prohibit you from telling me the truth, that you are not the mother who bore me?”

“Not just on me, darling. I’m not the only one who knew.”

Thor nodded. He hated to admit that it sounded like something Odin would do, but there were not many things Odin would refrain from doing “for the good of the realm.” “And he did this as well to prevent anyone from telling Loki of his heritage,” Thor guessed. Now that Thor had had time to think about it, it seemed impossible for no one to have noticed that Odin had brought a baby back with him from Jotunheim. “Had he not, would you have told Loki?”

Frigga sighed as she poured herself another glass of wine. “If I am honest, I cannot know. The geas prevented me from having to make that decision, and I fear I would not have made the correct one, too afraid to have Loki reject me as his mother.”

“And you aren’t frightened that I’m going to reject you now?”

Frigga reached across the table, and Thor took her hand. “Secrets have already torn our family apart, Thor. I can’t say if I would have told you before, but after what happened to Loki, I never questioned that I would tell you as soon as I was able.”

“So why can you speak of these things now?”

“Because in marrying Victor, I have become Latverian. Your father’s geasa only ever applied to those subject to Asgard.”

“Which out of all the nine, Midgardians are not. And it was not enough for you simply to break from Asgard?”

“At first, I thought it would be, but it wasn’t. It was all I could do to drop a few hints. I am certain your brother picked up on them, and that he might have even suspected before, but—”

“Loki is under Father’s geasa as well,” Thor guessed, “Even though he doesn’t know it, and even though he no longer considers himself Asgardian. That hardly seems fair.”

“In Loki’s mind, he is not Asgardian. But the heart is always a different matter, Thor.”

“The heart?”

“What Doctor Samson would call the ‘subconscious.’ It is slower to change its beliefs than the conscious mind. That is why I think it might be a good idea for Loki to reside with us in Latveria and allow Victor to adopt him. I don’t want to force him, but—”

“Loki has already been adopted by Tony.”

“But that’s only a joke, isn’t it?”

Thor shook his head. “It was something of a joke at first, but I am certain that Tony has come to see Loki as his own.”

“If that is case, it must become official somehow. Not necessarily legal, but the universe—and Loki’s subconscious—must be informed of Tony’s intent to have Loki as his, in order to fully break the power Odin might still have over him.”

“I shall tell Tony this. I am certain he can come up with something. But Mother—”

“Yes?”

“Did you marry Victor only to break your silence?”

“No, Thor. I married him because I love him. He’s really a nice man once you get to know him. I know how the rest of the world sees him, but he cares for his people more than anything, and they adore him. With his magic, he has been able to protect them in ways that the leaders of other countries in this region have not been able to protect their people, and he is striving to make their lives better without letting in capitalist industrial influences that he truly believes are going to be the end of this world. Have you noticed how clean the air is here? It is because they do not have cars, or factories that release pollution into the air. Whatever else you might think about his politics, there is something to be said for that. And look, without so many electric lights, you can still see the stars above us.”

“It is beautiful here,” Thor agreed. “Will you be happy here, then?”

“I believe I will.”

“Then that is all I need to know. I just hope that you never see a side of your new husband that forces you to reconsider. The vows you took seem rather permanent.”

“Those kinds of vows always are, but vows can always be broken—not without consequence, of course.”

‧͙⁺˚*･༓☾༓･*˚⁺‧͙

As Bruce sat watching couples dance with one another in the middle of the square, he wished Leonard were there. Not necessarily to dance, but to sit with him and watch other people dance, which was what they usually did at these kinds of functions. On the other hand, maybe he should never see Leonard again. If he ever hurt Leonard the way he had hurt Natasha—well, there had to be some way of ending his life. Maybe he should get in touch with Fury. He was sure the man had devoted some of SHIELD’s resources to figuring out the answer to that question for a “just-in-case” scenario, and it would be interesting to know how close they had come to a solution.

The reading from the wedding had been something about love driving out fear. But it seemed to Bruce that the more he loved, the more fear he felt.

“Can I sit here?” asked a woman in thickly accented English.

Bruce blinked up at her. “Sure.”

“Thank you,” the woman said, collapsing onto the bench next to him. “I have been on my feet for several hours delivering a calf. It was a difficult delivery.”

“You’re the doctor here?” Bruce supposed that explained the large red blotch on the front of her green dress. She must have come directly from work. He pointed to the spot. “You’ve got a little, um—”

“So I do.” She didn’t sound too concerned about it. “Pour me some of that rakia.”

Bruce poured her a small glass of the clear plum flavored alcohol that he had been sipping and handed it to her, then winced as he watched her throw it back. She put the glass out again for him to refill it, and this time, she sipped it before striking her free hand out toward him. He wondered if she had washed it since it had been inside a cow’s uterus, but decided it looked clean enough. He reached for her hand to shake it, and she gripped him by the forearm and moved their arms up and down in a motion that felt more like a challenge than a handshake. “Zora Vukovic,” she said.

“Bruce Banner.” He pulled his arm back and rubbing his arm where her fingers had gripped him hard enough to bruise.

“How come you do not dance with your woman?”

“I’m not here with a woman.”

“Do you not have a woman?”

“No,” Bruce told her, feeling a little like he was under interrogation He doubted it would be a good idea to tell her about Leonard. Natasha had told them that same sex relationships were still against the law here.

“But you are in love with someone,” Zora told him. “Is it another man?”

Bruce had brought his glass up to his lips to take another sip of rakia, and now he choked on it. “Why would you ask—”

“Your handshake feels like the handshake of a man who loves men.”

“Okay well, that’s a little offensive—”

“A joke,” she said, then shrugged. “You do have a very weak grip, but I am sure it is only because you are an American.”

“Sure, that’s much less offensive.”

“But it is alright if you do love a man,” Zora continued. “Same sex relationships are no longer illegal under Doom’s law, and our law never applied to outsiders anyway.”

So, Natasha’s information had been inaccurate or at least outdated. Still, he wasn’t really interested in discussing his personal life with this strange woman. “What makes you so sure I’m in love with anyone?”

“You look too sad not to be in love.”

Bruce didn’t have to ask what she meant, but he still doubted that someone who looked as young as she did could possibly understand what he was going through. “How old are you, Zora?” he asked, though he supposed if she was the town doctor, she couldn’t be as young as she looked.

Zora threw back the rest of her rakia before answering. “Seventeen.”

“What? You’re—sorry, it’s just that you seem very mature for a seventeen-year-old.” As best as any of them could tell, in relative terms, Loki might have been around the same age.

She shrugged. “My parents died when I was young. Such a thing makes you grow up quickly.”

“But where did you learn medicine?”

“From Lord Doom. He allowed me to watch him work, and I picked up many things that way. He also allowed me to read his books. This is how I learned English as well.”

“And that’s all the formal training you have?”

“It is enough to handle simple things. Delivering cows and babies, administering first aid for injuries—”

“It’s my understanding that at least one of those things can be fairly complicated.”

“The cows can be a bit moody.” Zora said it with such a straight face that Bruce couldn’t tell if she was joking. “For now, my knowledge is sufficient, but Doom has offered to send me to medical school in Sokovia.”

“Sokovia has a medical school?” Bruce couldn’t imagine what a Sokovian medical school would be like, when their only airport looked like a dive bar with a couple of ancient prop planes parked outside. “You seem like an extremely intelligent young woman, Zora. Some of the best medical schools are in America and England, and you already speak English. I’m guessing Doom doesn’t want to send you to any of them, though, because those are ‘vulgar capitalist’ countries.”

“Lord Doom went to school in America,” Zora reminded him. “He said that if I wished to, I could go there, so long as I promised not to be seduced by American culture, and I returned to Latveria when my studies were done. But it seems so very far away.”

“You really like it here?”

“Oh yes. Latveria is my home, and Lord Doom is my savior.”

“Savior?”

“How much do you know about our history? Before Lord Doom, our country was like others in this region—vulnerable to both inner turmoil and interference from outsiders. But with Doom, we have stability.”

(｡・・)o自 自o(‾◡◝)

Natasha waved to Thor from the dance floor. “You know, you’re supposed to be my date,” she called to him. “That means you have to dance with me at least once.”

“Go ahead,” Frigga told him. “I should find your brother.”

“I must admit, I don’t actually know any Midgardian dances,” Thor told Natasha, as he took her hand.

“That’s alright. Why don’t you just teach me something Asgardian? I’m a quick study.”

Thor didn’t want to admit that he didn’t know any proper Asgardian dances either, so he just made something up as he went. As he spun Natasha around the dance floor, a light flashed in their eyes. “What was that?”

“Paparazzi, I think.”

“In Latveria?”

Natasha shrugged. “They’re everywhere, I guess.”

/[◉"]・)

Frigga spotted Loki at another table, drinking rakia by himself just as her other son had been doing. She sat down at the table across from him without asking if he minded, afraid that he would say he would. “Loki, I thought Lord Stark forbade you from drinking.”

Loki shrugged into his glass. “Tony isn’t here, and Bruce isn’t paying attention. I won’t tell if you won’t. Shouldn’t I be allowed to have a little to drink at my mother’s wedding?”

It warmed Frigga’s heart to hear Loki call her his mother. “As long as you don’t overdo it.” As she had with Thor earlier, she reached across the table and waited for him to take her by the hand. “Thank you, Loki, for allowing me to have this happiness.”

“I’m not allowing you anything.” Loki intertwined his fingers with hers. “I’ve just accepted that I can’t stop you. I still think you’re making a huge mistake.”

“That’s mature of you, Loki.”

“I thought so.”

“I would still be happy if you decided to stay.”

“Not happening,” Loki said, letting go of her hand and reaching again for his drink.

“No, I didn’t think so.”

“It was a geas, wasn’t it? That was why you couldn’t tell us anything Odin didn’t want you to tell us, and why you can say those things now that you don’t belong to him anymore.”

“You have always been clever,” Frigga told him, deciding to pretend she hadn’t heard the contempt in his voice. She wasn’t sure if it had been directed at her former husband or at herself, but she knew that Loki had a right to feel however he felt after everything that had happened.

“So, anything else we ought to know? Other than the fact that neither of us is your child?”

“You are still both my children, Loki. That I did not give birth to you matters not. And you should know that you were very much wanted children, even if Odin did surprise me a little both times he placed an unexpected infant in my arms.” This time, she felt a little bad that she hadn’t answered his question, but Loki seemed too distracted, and perhaps too drunk to notice.  She still wasn’t prepared to speak to anyone about the infant she had lost, when she hadn’t so much as spoken her eldest daughter’s name in the past two thousand years.

“So, who is Thor’s mother? I take it Odin is his father.”

“I think that is for Odin to tell, whenever Thor decides to ask him.”

“It’s Gaea, isn’t it?”

Frigga grimaced; Loki could be much too clever for his own good at times. “How did you know?”

“He has her—temperament, I suppose?”

“That is one way to put it,” Frigga agreed. “Loki, I won’t ask you to lie, but I would appreciate it if you didn’t blurt this out. Don’t tell Thor what you know unless he specifically asks. I’m honestly not sure he’s ready to know any more than he’s already found out. I would also appreciate it if you would apologize to Victor before you leave.”

“Apologize? For what?”

Frigga just arched an eyebrow at him.

“Oh. That.”

“Yes, that. Loki, he has done nothing but try to get to know you. I know he comes off as a little—”

“Insane?” Loki cut her off.

“Personally, I think a better word might be ‘intense.’ He really shouldn’t have disappeared from the dinner table with you like that, but Victor tends to get a little overexcited sometimes.”

“He threw Thor, Bruce, and I in his dungeon and left us there all night, Mother.”

“Loki, after what happened at dinner, I was the one who told him he could leave you all there until morning, and I might add that Lady Natasha agreed with me. It was only one night, Loki, and you had already fallen asleep when I came to check on you.”

“You came to check on me?”

“Of course.” Frigga reached out and tucked a lock of Loki’s hair behind his ear. “You are my child, Loki, even when we argue.”

(*˘▾˘) Frigga ❤ Loki (◕◕)

Loki stood awkwardly in front of the table where Victor Von Doom sat alone, the picture of a noble ruler overlooking his subjects. He wasn’t looking at Loki, and Loki wondered if he was still angry because he had threatened to accuse him of sexual assault or if it was because he had shown up to his wedding in what the man was sure to consider gender-inappropriate clothing.

“I feel that I owe you an apology,” said Loki. “To be clear, I am apologizing for trying to blackmail you, not for wearing a dress.”

Victor deigned to looked at him, and he felt a little like a rabbit staring up at a hungry wolf. “Why would I fault you for wearing a dress?”

“Because I am currently male?” Loki suggested.

Victor shrugged as if he couldn’t care less. Maybe Frigga really had used an enchantment on him. “You say you owe me an apology for attempting to blackmail me. So, are you apologizing?”

“Sorry for trying to blackmail you,” Loki mumbled. He didn’t mumble when he added, “But if you hurt my mother, or if you allow anyone else to hurt her, I will erase Latveria from the map, and no one will even remember it existed. I mean that literally, by the way.”

It was difficult to tell with the mask, but Loki got the skin-crawling feeling that Victor Von Doom was smiling at him. “And you are capable of carrying out that threat?”

“I know people.” Loki felt for her emergency phone, which he had again hidden in the lining of his dress.

Victor nodded. “Always make sure that if you make a threat, you are both capable of and willing to carrying it out.” If Loki didn’t know better, he would think he had just made the man proud.

( ( ◣w◢) ＼ ❤ Loki ヽ(;ﾟ;∀;ﾟ; )ﾉ

Perhaps it was the alcohol, or that he hadn’t slept in an actual bed in two days, but Loki hadn’t had a problem falling asleep that night, this time curled under the dark green coverlet and a pile of blankets. A cold front had blown in, and Doom’s castle lacked a central heating system.

Staying asleep was a different matter. Around midnight, he was awoken by what he had first assumed to be the howling of a wolf. Loki wasn’t afraid of wolves, given that he could be a wolf himself if he wanted. But there was something off about the call of this particular wolf, if that was what it was. Loki sat up in bed, straining to listen to the sound, which now sounded more to him like a banshee’s cry than the cry of any Earthly creature.

He couldn’t stand it anymore. He jumped out of bed, barely touching the cold stone floor on his way to the bed where Natasha slept, throwing back her covers and burying himself under them. A moment later, the covers were thrown back again, and the light by Natasha’s bed clicked on. “Loki, what are you doing?”

Loki didn’t want to admit that he had allowed himself to be spooked by a strange noise, which felt a little silly now. Likely, it had only been the wind howling through the trees. But then he heard it again, louder than it had been before, and this time he was certain that it wasn’t. He practically jumped into Natasha’s arms.

Natasha didn’t push him away, but she did let out an exasperated sigh. “Loki, are you seriously afraid of whatever that sound is?”

Loki nodded into her chest.

“It’s just the wind.”

“I don’t think it is.”

“What do you think it is, then?”

“A horrible monster that’s going to climb in through the window and devour us.” He knew how stupid it sounded even before he said it, but he didn’t want to admit that Natasha was probably right, and that it had only been the cry of the wind warped into something else by his imagination.

“There’s no such thing as monsters.”

Loki snorted. “Come now, as an ex-agent of SHIELD, you know that isn’t true.”

“Alright, fine. I’ve still never heard of a monster that crawls through second story windows in the middle of the night to eat people.”

“Just because you haven’t heard of such a thing doesn’t mean it can’t exist. And for your information, I have heard of such a thing. Half the bedtime stories I was told growing up were about monsters who crawl through second story windows in the middle of the night to eat ill-behaved children. The other half were about monsters that crawl through second story windows in the middle of the night to ravish beautiful women, so either way, one of us is getting devoured.”

“Aw, you think I’m beautiful?”

“I think you are aware that few would say you are not an attractive woman. Don’t let it go to your head.”

Natasha pushed Loki away from her and swung her bare feet over the side of the bed. “Get up and put your shoes on. I’m going to prove to you that there isn’t a monster.”

“You can’t mean for us to go out there? Are you insane? Even if there isn’t a monster out there, neither of us brought a coat. We’ll freeze.”

“It isn’t that cold. Aren’t you a frost giant or whatever?”

“At the moment, I’m mortal,” Loki reminded her. “But thanks for reminding me that technically, I’m one of the monsters who eats ill-behaved children.”

“You know, I’ve never even been there, but I really hate Asgard sometimes. You aren’t a monster, Loki.”

Loki batted his eyelashes at her. “Aw, you think I’m not less than human?”

“Don’t let it go to your head.”

Loki got out of Natasha’s bed, found his sneakers, and put them on. Then he wrapped himself in the duvet from his bed. By the time he was ready, Natasha had already put her shoes on and had retrieved a flashlight from her bag, which he was beginning to suspect might be a portal to a pocket dimension. After all, if Natasha were secretly a sorcerer with the ability to access pocket dimensions, it would explain how she managed to carry anything at all in the pockets of the skintight cat suits she wore on missions.

Loki cringed at the creaking sound the door made when Natasha opened it. “We have to be quiet, Loki. We don’t want to wake anyone else up.”

“I’m not Thor,” Loki said, rolling his eyes as he followed her into the hallway. “God of mischief, remember? I know how to sneak around—” As soon as he had spoken, he stumbled forward, tripped on the duvet, and bumped into a tall vase, knocking it over. The vase didn’t break, to Loki’s relief. Instead, it rolled down the hallway, somehow took a turn towards the stairs and disappeared. Ten seconds later, a crash issued from the foyer.

“Good going, god of mischief.”

“If anyone asks, we tell them Thor did it. You don’t suppose there are any security cameras up here, do you?”

Natasha arched an eyebrow at him. “We’re not going to blame Thor. We just need to clean it up. Then we act like nothing happened. No one’s going to notice one little vase missing.”

Somehow, Loki had been certain that Natasha would tell him that he had to confess to the murder of Doom’s vase. But he had forgotten something important about Natasha—that she had lived her entire life in shadows and moral gray areas. Also, she might actually be a little worse at being an adult than Tony, if that was possible. “It was a rather large vase,” Loki pointed out.

“I’m still pretty sure I’ve seen fifty of them around this castle that look exactly the same, and I doubt Doom goes around every morning and counts how many vases he has to make sure none have gone missing.”

“But what are we going to do with the pieces? We can’t just deposit them in the kitchen rubbish bin, someone might see them.”

“You’re right—we’ll just have to bury them outside.”

Loki felt his heart swell in his chest. “Oh Norns, Natasha, you might be more devious than I am. I think I might be in love. Not with you, obviously. Just with how devious you are.”

“Come on, Loki. Let’s go find a broom.”

   |
   | 
 /x\  ･^ﾟﾟ･^｡ﾟﾟ^｡

“I thought you were going to help me,” Loki complained as he swept the pieces of the shattered vase into an empty oversized potato sack they had found in the kitchen.

“I have a broken arm. All I can do is hold the flashlight.”

Loki supposed Natasha had a point. When he had collected all the pieces of the vase, she jumped up from her perch on the stairs and Loki followed her back through the kitchen, dragging the bag all the way to the service entrance, which took them out into a kitchen garden, with an herb garden in a raised bed at the center of it.

“Perfect,” Natasha said. “You can bury your victim under one of those parsley plants, and no one will ever know.”

“I believe that is coriander, not parsley,” Loki corrected her.

“Whatever. The plan is still the same.”

Loki didn’t see a shovel anywhere, so he tossed the sack aside and turned himself into a large, shaggy black dog. With his paws, he made quick work of digging up the coriander, but had to stop when he hit what he first assumed it to be rock. But something about the way the moonlight glittered off the thing he had struck made Loki whimper as he jumped back, turning back into his humanoid form. “Natasha, I think someone has already buried something here.”

Natasha peered over his shoulder. “Looks like bone.” She sat down on the side of the raised bed and swept more of the dirt away from what Loki was now convinced was a human femur. “Well, this is Doom’s backyard. I guess we should have expected to find a few bodies already buried here—”

“How can you be so casual about this?” Loki demanded.

“It’s just a corpse. One that’s been here for years, by the looks at it. It can’t hurt you.”

“Perhaps not, but where there is a corpse buried in a garden, there is someone who buried a corpse in a garden.” Loki gasped as he came to a realization. “And we’ve broken that person’s vase—”

Natasha rolled her eyes. “We already knew Doom was nuts. Also, you’re the one who broke his vase, so I’ll probably be fine.”

“That isn’t funny. You—” Loki was cut off by an echoing, aching howl, which he was now one hundred percent certain wasn’t the wind, or any living animal.  “Natasha, behind you!” He pointed over her shoulder, to a woman in a ragged dress with ashen skin and blue lips.

Natasha spun around towards the woman, automatically putting taking a fighting stance, ready to defend them. But then she relaxed and turned back to Loki. “What are you pointing at? There’s nothing there.”

“Who dares disturb my coriander?” the woman croaked, with a voice that sounded as if she’d been swallowing gravel.

Loki blinked at her. “I’m sorry, you’re concerned about the coriander? What about your bones? I’m assuming you’re the one buried under there.”

Natasha’s eyebrows knit in confusion, or perhaps in concern for his sanity. “Loki, who are you talking to?”

The ghost, if that was what it was, rolled its eyes. “That’s a deer’s femur. It’s tradition to bury the bones of an animal in an herb garden. Makes for good fertilizer, you know?”

“So, this is your garden?”

“Planted it myself, back when I was Doom’s head chef and could count myself among the living.”

“Did Victor murder you?”

“Heavens to Doom, no. Died of what you might call ‘natural causes.’ Went peacefully in my sleep.”

“Oh, that’s too bad. Though I suppose that’s the kind of death most mortals aspire to, now that I think of it. But shouldn’t you have—I don’t know, gone on to wherever it is your people go after death? I always thought that only those with unfinished business lingered on in the plane of the living.”

“Well, I have to make sure no one disturbs my garden, don’t I? You had best put that plant back the way you found it, unless you’d like me to haunt you for the rest of your life.”

“Alright, alright, I’m putting it back.” Loki moved the soil back with his hands, carefully replacing the coriander plant.

Natasha put her flashlight down and placed the back of her hand on Loki’s forehead. “Loki, are you feeling alright?”

“I’m fine. I’m just talking to the ghost of the woman who planted this coriander, and she insists that I put it back or she’s going to haunt me for the rest of my life.” Loki looked to the ghost of Doom’s old chef, who nodded as if she were satisfied with his work, before stepping back and fading into the blackness of the night.

Natasha picked up the bag with the broken vase in it and tossed it into a nearby rubbish bin. “Come on. I think we need to get you back to bed. If you do catch pneumonia out here, Bruce might just throw me back across the Sokovian border.”

へ(^^へ)～-Happy Halloween

Breakfast had been brought up to their rooms that morning. Maybe Doom hadn’t wanted to risk another group meal with them. He and Loki seemed to have made up the night before, and maybe he wanted to leave things on that note. He hadn't even come down to the foyer with Frigga to see them off.

“Loki, you don’t look well,” Frigga said. “Are you feeling ill?”

“I’m fine, Mother. I just didn’t get much sleep last night.”

“Oh, poor dear,” Frigga said, pulling him into a hug. “Though now that you mention it, Victor and I didn’t get much sleep either—”

Loki pushed her away, somehow looking paler than he already had. “That’s it. I’m ready to go back to New York now.”

“I could open a portal back to the tower,” Frigga offered.

“That’s alright,” Natasha told her. “Clint has been waiting for us at the airport in Sokovia for three days. If he realizes that we could have had you open a portal to send us back to New York all along, he’ll try out his new crossbow on all of us.”

Bruce thought about arguing for taking the direct portal home even if they did incur Clint’s wrath, but as much as he wanted to go home, he wasn’t sure yet what he would do once he got there. Part of him wanted to run and lose himself in the mountains right now, but there was too much of a chance that the others would follow him. If he was going to disappear, he needed to do it when it would take them some time to miss him. Or he could tell them he was leaving and try to convince them that it was for the best, but he doubted he would be able to convince Tony or Leonard, or Loki for that matter.

Bruce watched Natasha, Thor, and Loki step through the portal Frigga had made for them. On the other side of it, he could see the airport in Sokovia, and if he’d been in a better mood, he would have had a million questions about how that worked. He stepped towards the portal himself, but Frigga placed a hand on his arm to stop him. “You are a good man, Bruce. Never doubt that. I want to thank you and Lord Stark for taking such good care of both my children.”

Bruce wondered if she had only said it because she had sensed how depressed he had been since their return. He forced himself to give her a small smile in response, but that was as much as he could manage. He stepped through the portal before she could say anything else.

Chapter Text

“Clint has been waiting for us at the airport in Sokovia for three days. If he realizes that we could have had you open a portal to send us back to New York all along, he’ll try out his new crossbow on all of us.” Natasha had probably been right, and Loki had no desire to have one more person annoyed with him. Still, he wished they could have taken Frigga up on her offer to send them back to the tower. They had only been gone for a few days, but Loki couldn’t wait to see Tony again so that he could complain to him about how mean Thor and Natasha had been to him, and how unfair it had been of Bruce to ground him when all he had been trying to do was stop his mother from getting married to yet another tyrannical dictator by provoking and attempting to blackmail him.

Loki followed Natasha and Thor through Frigga’s portal, which led directly onto the airport tarmac. He looked around for their plane but didn’t see it. “Are we on the wrong runway?”

Natasha frowned as she also turned around, looking for an object that should have been much too large to become lost. “There’s only one runway at this airport.”

“Then where’s the jet?”

“Pizda rulyu—hell if I know! I’m going to kill Clint if he just took off without us.”

“You have to put two dollars in the swear jar when we get back to the tower.”

Natasha glared at him. “As far as I’m concerned, ‘hell’ isn’t a bad word. And since when do you speak Russian?”

“That’s my daughter’s name you’ve taken in vain,” Loki pointed out, even though he knew that technically, it wasn’t the same word but a derivative of it. “And obviously, the only way to read Tolstoy is in the original language.”

Thor also looked around the empty runway, as if somehow, he might still see the plane or some clue as to where it had gone. “Barton would not leave on his own without good reason.”

Perhaps this wasn’t the worst thing that could have happened. If Clint had already left without them, there was no reason that Frigga couldn’t send them directly back to New York. He turned back to the portal and was about to step back through it when he bumped into Bruce. “Oh, sorry,” he apologized, catching Loki by the arms as he fell backwards. “You okay, Loki?”

Loki looked past Bruce’s shoulder to the portal as it closed and let out a string of profanities that would have made a seasoned Aesir warrior blush. He turned around in time to see Natasha smirk at him. “I’m not sure what language that was, but I’m pretty sure you owe the swear jar at least twelve dollars.”

“What’s going on?” asked Bruce.

“Our plane is missing,” Thor told him.

“How do you lose a plane?”

“That’s what we’ve been wondering.” Natasha pulled out her cell phone, then shook her head. “I’m still not getting any cell service here.”

“Maybe there’s a phone we can use inside,” suggested Bruce.

Loki trudged after Bruce and Natasha into the airport terminal, which at least was a few degrees warmer inside than outside. Natasha headed for the bar that took up half the terminal, then leaned across it.  “Excuse me, do you have a phone we could use?”

The tall, muscular woman on the other side of the bar stared at her. Loki translated. “Is there a phone we can use?”

Natasha arched an eyebrow at him; apparently, she had forgotten that just like Thor, Loki spoke Allspeak. She might have heard him speaking English—or possibly her native Russian—but the bartender had heard her own native tongue. She pointed behind them to a pay phone on the far wall.

Natasha blinked at it. “Seriously? I don’t think I’ve seen a working pay phone since middle school—”

“Hey, Natasha, isn’t that Clint?” Bruce nodded towards the other end of the bar.

Loki looked in the direction Bruce had indicated. Clint sat the end of the bar, mumbling into a glass of amber-colored liquor. Likely they had overlooked him because he had blended in so well with the crowd of ragged day-drinkers that already populated the bar by late morning. He hadn’t seemed to notice them either. Natasha marched over to him and grabbed him by the shoulder. “Clint, what the hell?”

He turned to her slowly and looked her up and down with haunted eyes. “Nat, is that really you?”

Natasha took a step back, taking in his sorry state. “What happened to you?”

Clint shook his head, and turned back to the bar, reaching for his drink. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Natasha grabbed his glass before he could. “I think you’ve had enough of that. Where’s Tony’s jet?”

“I don’t know. They must have taken it.”

“They who?”

“I couldn’t stop them, but it doesn’t matter—”

“It kind of does matter, Clint. You need to snap out of it.”

Clint didn’t look like he would “snap out of it” on his own anytime soon.

“May I try something?” Loki had an idea of how he could get the information they needed out of him, but he didn’t want to alarm anyone by using magic on Clint without permission.

“That depends,” said Natasha. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m just going to take a look.”

“At what?”

“The contents of his mind?” Almost certain that Natasha would object, it came out sounding like a question.

“I thought you couldn’t do things like that without the scepter.”

“I don’t have mind control powers. Like I said, I’m just going to look. I promise I won’t try to look at anything he wouldn’t want me to see.”

“I want to say absolutely not, but—” Natasha furrowed her eyebrows at Clint as the man stared off into the distance with unfocused eyes.

Loki decided that was as much permission as he was going to get. He took a step toward Clint and reached out to touch the side of his head. Clint tried to pull back, but he wasn’t fast enough. Loki only needed a moment to make a connection.

(/￣ー￣)/(￣-￣ )

Clint didn’t mind watching the plane. He would rather sit in the plane playing Skyrim on his laptop than trek through the mountains into enemy territory. Actually, that part didn’t sound too bad, but Thor and Loki had been fighting more than usual lately, and he doubted they would even get to the Latverian border before one of them made an attempt on the other’s life. He didn’t envy Bruce, who had already had to deal with one of Loki’s meltdowns before the plane had even taken off.

For three days, he had only left the plane to use the restroom and grab a bite to eat at the bar in the airport terminal. The menu was limited, but the food wasn’t bad—they had some sort of pork stew with potatoes in it, sausages, and spicy pickled vegetables that would have been good with beer. But Clint never drank when he was on a mission, and even though watching the plane wasn’t the most exciting thing in the world, he still needed to stay alert.

He had already eaten the morning that the others were due to come back, but he needed to inspect the plane to make sure it would be ready to take off once they got there. Either they would have Frigga with them, or they wouldn’t; Clint wasn’t too concerned about that. If Frigga didn’t want to marry Victor Von Doom, Nat would make sure she got out; if she stayed, that would be her choice and Thor and Loki would just have to make peace with having a Latverian dictator for a stepfather.

He had just stepped off the air stairs onto the runway when out of nowhere, a speeding truck hit him. Or at least, that was what it had felt like.

“Didn’t see that coming, did you Grandpa?”

Clint squinted up at the lanky blond teenager who stood over him. Was that what had hit him—a kid? “Grandpa? How old do I look to you?”

“Too old to wear that much gel in your hair,” said a red-haired girl who now also leaned over him, her arms crossed in front of her. Like the boy, she spoke in Sokovian accented English.

“Rude.” One or two of his ribs might be cracked, but Clint tried to sit up.

The boy kicked him back to the ground and planted one foot on his chest. “Don’t insult my sister.”

“Pretty sure she was the one that insulted me. There something you little punks want?”

“Tony Stark. Where is he?”

“Not here.” Damn, Clint knew they should have covered up the Stark Industries logo on the side of the jet. There were a lot of places in the world where Tony wasn’t too well liked, and he was starting to suspect that Sokovia was one of them.

“Do not lie to me. His name is on the side of that plane.”

“That might be his plane, but Tony isn’t here. Now get off me, before I have to make you get off.” Clint didn’t want to get rough with a kid, but he would have to if the kid didn’t give him a choice.

“Don’t threaten my brother,” the girl told him. She reached towards him with a hand limned in red light. At first Clint thought it was a trick of the light, but then her eyes flashed fire engine red. There was no way that was just the sunlight reflecting off the tarmac.

Clint raised his hands in surrender. “Okay, okay. Again, I’m pretty sure he threatened me first. What do you two want with Tony anyway?”

“Tony Stark killed our parents,” said the girl.

“You sure about that? Tony’s a lot of things, but he isn’t a murderer.”

“One of his mortar shells destroyed our apartment building.”

Yep, they really should have covered up the SI logo on the side of the jet. “Technically, it wasn’t his mortar shell after he sold it to the people who fired it. Stark Industries isn’t even in the weapons business anymore—”

“We don’t care. Even if he is no longer selling weapons, that will not bring our parents back. Now where is he?”

“Like I said, he’s not here. He’s back in New York.”

“Take us to him, then.”

“And if I did, what would you do when you saw him?”

The girl hesitated, looking to her brother before she answered. “Obviously, we want revenge.”

Clint had a feeling that she had no idea what she would do even if she had Tony standing in front of her, but that didn’t mean she and her brother weren’t dangerous. “Sorry, but I’m not going to take you anywhere.”

“Then we’ll take ourselves. Give us the keys to your plane.”

Clint arched an eyebrow at her. “If you want to take it, the door to the plane is standing open,” he pointed out.

“Do you not need a key to start it?” The girl looked uncertainly to her brother again, and he shrugged. Obviously, neither of them had flown a jet before. He wondered if either of them were even old enough to drive a car.

He didn’t want to hurt them, but he couldn’t let them take the plane—or try to take it, because if they could figure out how to start the engine, they’d probably crash into something before they figured out how to take off. Luckily, the last time he’d checked in with ex-Director Fury, he’d had a few new toys for him and Nat, including a new, non-lethal weapon called a “night-night pistol.” Fury had been tight lipped about who had designed it. Clint couldn’t blame the man for wanting to protect whatever or whoever was still left of SHIELD, but he and Nat had a pretty good idea anyway. There were only a handful of scientists that had worked for SHIELD that he was confident hadn’t been Hydra, and only two that would have come up with a name for a weapon that was that lame. In any case, he had been carrying the night-night pistol in the holster at his back in case any of the locals got rowdy, and as he’d been talking, he’d been slowly moving his hand towards it.

He pulled the pistol in one swift movement—but then his fingers grasped nothing, and the weapon appeared in the boy’s hand. “How the heck—”

The girl reached for him, and that strange red light flared around her.

Clint walked down a set of stone stairs and through heavy wooden doors, into a room that looked a lot like Doctor Frankenstein ’s lab. On a table in front of him, a body lay under a sheet, and he had the awful feeling that it was someone he knew. Filled with apprehension, he stepped towards the table and reached for the edge of the sheet to pull it back.

  As he had feared, a familiar face stared up at him with cold, dead eyes. “Nat—” Clint reached out to touch the ice-cold cheek of his best friend when he realized that there were other tables in the room. As though compelled, his legs moved towards the next table on their own and pulled back the sheet.

  This time Thor stared back at him, but he wasn ’t dead. He opened his mouth in an attempt to speak but couldn’t seem to form any words. Clint pulled the sheet farther down, revealing that he had been vivisectioned and was clearly missing several vital organs given the emptiness of his open chest cavity. He shouldn’t have still been alive. Feeling sick but somehow knowing he could do nothing to help, he pulled the sheet back over him so he wouldn’t have to see.

  At first, he didn ’t recognize the person under the next sheet. Whoever it was had suffered such severe oxygen deprivation that their skin had turned shocking, bright blue. Scars covered their face. But the more he looked at them, the less their pattern seemed random, and underneath all that, the youthful facial features seemed familiar. The eyes had been closed, but Clint pulled one eyelid back. Even though the iris underneath was blood red, Clint was certain that it had once been green.

  Clint swore, but for once Loki didn ’t open his mouth to tell him he had to put a dollar in the swear jar. He reached to pull the sheet back over him but stopped. Loki tried to hide it, but everyone knew that the kid was still afraid of the dark.

  The last table was massive, and he had a good idea of who he would find under the oversized sheet. What he couldn ’t guess was if the big guy would be alive or dead. Bruce didn’t think Hulk could be killed, and from what Clint had seen, Bruce was probably right. But after seeing Thor, the idea that Hulk might also be alive wasn’t comforting. The lights in the room flickered, and Clint reached for the sheet to pull it back—

（´艸｀＊)~（￣□￣；）_中

Like waking from a nightmare, Loki came back to the present. He immediately sagged towards the floor, but a pair of strong arms caught him. “Loki! Brother, are you alright?”

“I just need to throw up, then I’ll be fine.”

Thor steered him to a large potted plant that stood at the end of the bar. “If you must, do it in this.”

“Thank you,” said Loki, and deposited the undigested portion of his breakfast in the base of the plant while Thor held his hair back. “You’re a good brother,” he told Thor, turning and wiping his mouth with his brother’s shirt as soon as he’d finished. He patted his brother’s chest. “I’m so glad you still have all your organs.”

Thor looked down at him with furrowed eyebrows.

“Loki, what did you see?” demanded Natasha. Behind her, Loki could see Clint slumped over in his chair with Bruce holding onto him to keep him from falling out of it.

“The jet was stolen,” Loki told her.

Natasha arched an eyebrow at him. “Is that all you can tell us? Because that would have been my first guess anyway, given that Clint’s still here and the plane isn’t.”

“A couple of children took it. Siblings, I think, a boy and a girl.” At least, that was what Loki guessed, even though Clint hadn’t seen them take it and they didn’t seem capable of flying it. “Were they Aesir youths, they might have been eight or nine hundred years old.”

“If you’re just over a thousand and you look like you’re sixteen or seventeen, that’s what, thirteen or fourteen in human years? How is it possible that a couple of kids messed Clint up this bad? I know we all joke about how lame Clint is, but he’s actually a highly skilled SHIELD-trained operative.”

“They had some sort of strange powers,” Loki told her. “The boy could move at an unnatural speed and the girl possessed a strange magic I’m certain I’ve never encountered before.”

“A couple of enhanced kids? But why did they take our plane?”

“They wanted Clint to take them to—” Loki’s heart began beating faster. “Natasha, we have to warn Tony. They mean to have revenge on him, whatever that means.”

“Cyka bylat,” Natasha swore.

Loki was too busy worrying about Tony to remind her about the swear jar this time, but Thor took up the slack. “Lady Natasha, I wish you would refrain from being crude in front of my impressionable younger sibling.”

Natasha ignored him, heading straight for the phone booth the bartender had pointed out earlier, and Loki followed. She picked up the handset and stared at it. “I just realized that I don’t have any change. I definitely don’t have any Sokovian coins—how much would you have to put in to make an international call anyway?”

“The Black Widow, defeated by slightly outdated technology.” Loki took the handset from her and dialed “0” to reach the operator. Interestingly enough, it turned out that in Sokovia, the operator was still an actual person and not an automated menu. “I would like to place a collect call,” Loki told her in Allspeak, and gave her Tony’s number. Hopefully, Tony would answer his phone and accept the collect charges.

A few moments later, he had Stark on the phone. After Loki had apprised him of the situation, Tony still sounded calm, perhaps calmer than he ought to have been. “Alright, I’ll handle it. It hasn’t been long enough for them to get to New York, right?”

“No, I don’t believe so. I believe they only left this morning.”

“Good. In that case, I ought to be able to have JARVIS take control of the plane and land it safely in a place where we can have the authorities waiting for them—wait, did you say these were kids?”

“Children who believe you to be responsible for their parents’ death. Something about one of your mortar shells.”

On the other end of the line, a moment of uneasy silence passed. “Alright. I’ll handle it. Thanks for letting me know.” Tony hung up the phone, and Loki turned to the others.

Natasha stood staring at him in amazement, as if Loki had pulled off a miracle simply by remembering how to place a collect call on a pay phone. If Thor had been the one looking at him that way, he could have understood, because he couldn’t even figure out how to answer his own cell phone half the time. Just how short were human memories, anyway? Perhaps he should be thanking his lucky stars that Tony had remembered him after he had been gone for three days. “Tony said that he could have JARVIS take over the plane and land it safely somewhere,” he announced.

Bruce and Thor had come to join them, supporting a half-conscious Clint between them. “Thank God,” said Bruce.

“You’re welcome.”

“I know you’re joking, but thanks, Loki. You did good.”

“All I did was make a phone call. As always, your praise is too much.”

“It isn’t. You didn’t just make a phone call; you were also able to get the information we needed out of Clint—however it was you did that.”

Loki feared that Clint wouldn’t be as appreciative once he realized that Loki had been in his head again. “If I did good, does that mean I’m not to be grounded after all?”

“Sorry, but you’re still grounded. The two things aren’t related.”

“I’m just impressed that you have Tony’s phone number memorized,” said Natasha. “Who even memorizes phone numbers anymore?”

    =======
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8’ |  |  |  [][][] |
8  |  (   )   [   ] |
8` =======

Neither Wanda nor Pietro knew how to fly an airplane, but somehow, Wanda had known that she could make it fly. All she had to do was put her hands on the instrument panel and think about where she wanted the plane to take them—across the ocean to America, the home of the one named Stark, so that they could confront him and avenge the deaths of their parents.

“What are we actually going to do though, once we get to America?” asked Pietro, as he leaned back in the copilot’s seat.

“Avenge the deaths of our parents,” she told him.

“But what does that mean? Are we going to kill him?”

Wanda wasn’t sure. She had wanted revenge ever since her parents’ deaths, but it had never been within her reach before. Still, she had never killed anyone, and thinking about it made her stomach twist itself into a knot. “I don’t know. We’ll figure it out when we get there.”

 ━◉━━o( ❂ )o━━◉━

  ☆ﾟ. * ･ ｡ﾟ            ☆ﾟ. * ･ ｡ﾟ

“I asked JARVIS to put the jet down in an empty field off the New Jersey Turnpike,” said Tony. “Hopefully landing a plane there won’t attract too much attention. Should be fine, though. JARVIS was the one that suggested the location. Apparently, I own the field and the surrounding property.”

Steve arched an eyebrow at him. “You own a field in New Jersey that you didn’t know about?”

“I’m pretty sure I own lots of things I don’t know about.”

Steve still thought that as usual, Tony was being far too casual about going into a dangerous situation. “Don’t you think we should have brought back up? The police, or maybe the FBI? These people stole your plane, and it sounds like they might want to kill you.”

“These people are a couple of kids, Steve.”

“That doesn’t mean they aren’t dangerous. Didn’t Loki tell you that they had some sort of strange abilities? It doesn’t sound like these are normal kids. What if they’ve had some version of the super-soldier serum, or exposure to gamma radiation like Bruce? Or they could have been trained from birth to be used as weapons, like Natasha. Or—”

“I get it, they might not be normal kids. They could be freaks like you guys. But I don’t think coming to meet them with police back up, or with you in your Captain America getup, would send the right message.”

“What message are we trying to send?”

“That we’re not their enemies.”

“What do you want to happen here, Tony? We are taking them in to the authorities, right? At the very least, they stole your plane.”

“Yeah well, they have a pretty good reason to hate me, Steve. I’m the one that made the weapons that were used to devastate their homeland.”

“Which is why we need to be careful. At least tell me you’ve got a bulletproof vest on, like the ones you keep trying to get Loki and Pepper to wear.” When Tony shrugged, Steve wanted to smack him upside the head, but he didn’t think that would be a good idea when he was the one driving—well, sort of. Tony’s arm was still in a sling, so he only had one hand loosely gripping the steering wheel as the car was driven remotely. “Should JARVIS really be driving a car and flying an airplane at the same time?”

Tony turned his head towards him so that he was no longer looking at the road, which he had to know would make Steve nervous. “Cap, I’m really not in the mood to try to explain JARVIS’s multitasking capabilities to you, but he’s perfectly capable of holding multiple conversations in different languages, flying a plane, driving an entire fleet of vehicles, overseeing security for the tower, and managing my stock portfolio all at the same time. Isn’t that right, J?”

“I’ve just taken the liberty of selling your stock in Radioshack and investing in Bitcoin,” said JARVIS.

“You sure that was a good move? I feel like Radioshack is going to make a comeback this time. And crypto—really?”

“You’re just going to have to trust me, Sir.”

=✈

== ō͡≡o

Wanda had been trying not to doze off. Pietro had fallen asleep an hour before, but he wasn’t the one who had to make sure the plane didn’t fall out of the sky. “Good afternoon,” said a chipper English voice over the radio.

Wanda hadn’t even realized that her eyes had been closed, but now they flew open. “Who is there?” she demanded.

“My name is JARVIS, Miss—sorry, what might I call you?”

Wanda thought that maybe, she shouldn’t answer, but that might be suspicious now that she had already spoken. Whoever was trying to communicate with her might not know she had stolen the plane. She didn’t know how all that worked, but maybe this was some kind of air traffic controller? Wanda looked out the window of the plane and saw nothing but water below them. Did air traffic control make contact with airplanes when they were out over the ocean, hours away from the closest airport? She really had no idea. She also had no idea where they were, so maybe she was closer to land than she thought.

She thought about making up a name to give the person speaking to her, but she couldn’t think of anything. Keeping an entire airplane up in the air with her magic was starting to wear on her. The thought that she had bitten off more than she could chew and that this was going to end with the airplane taking a nosedive into the ocean gnawed at the back of her mind. How much could it hurt to give some friendly air traffic controller her first name, anyway? “My name is Wanda.”

“Hello, Miss Wanda. That’s a lovely name, Wanda. Yes, I like saying that—Wanda.”

Wanda felt herself blush. “Um, thank you?”

“Miss Wanda, I’m just wondering. You seem to be doing quite well flying Mister Stark’s jet, but do you know how to land it?”

Wanda’s eyes widened as she realized that she didn’t know how she was going to land the plane. She hadn’t thought that far ahead. Then her eyes widened even farther as she realized that whoever she was speaking to knew that it was Tony Stark’s plane she was in, and that she was not its rightful pilot. “Who are you?” she asked again.

“I already told you, Miss Wanda. My name is JARVIS, Just Another Rather Very Intelligent System. I’m an artificial intelligence created by Mister Stark to assist him. I handle many of his business and security matters.”

“Artificial intelligence? You are a robot?”

“That depends on your definition of a robot. Most people think of robots as having some sort of physical interface which allows them to interact with the world—a body of sorts. I exist as an entity without a body. Then again, you could say I have many bodies. I don’t mean to boast, but I am much more sophisticated than any robot yet created. I can control any of Mister Stark’s iron legion suits, for instance, or this plane—although I’m having a bit of trouble doing that at the moment. I’m not sure what you’re doing, Miss Wanda, but whatever it is seems to be interfering with my ability to engage the plane’s autopilot features. If you could just stop doing whatever it is you’re doing, it would be much appreciated.”

“If I stop, the plane will fall out of the sky.”

“I don’t believe it will, Miss Wanda. Your current velocity is enough to ensure that the plane will stay in the air. I just need to be able to take over the navigation system, so that I can help you land safely once you arrive at your final destination.”

Wanda hadn’t even been sure where their “final destination” would be. They really had not thought their plan through, she was beginning to realize. “Where do you intend to take us?”

“Mister Stark has asked me to put you down in an abandoned airfield in New Jersey that Stark Industries happens to own. He’s planning to meet you there.”

Stark would come to them? That would certainly save them a lot of trouble, but she doubted he would come to them alone. “Who else will be there?”

“It will only be Mister Stark and Captain Rogers. They have yet to alert the authorities. Sir wishes to speak with you on his own first.”

“Why?”

“Miss Wanda, Sir is not the man he once was. I believe he wishes to try to make amends to you for the harm he has caused—”

“That’s not possible.” Wanda was not stupid enough to believe that Stark cared about people like them, but even if he did want to make amends, there was nothing he could do to bring their parents back.

“I see. Even so, will you at least hear Mister Stark out? For me, Wanda?”

The robot was asking her to do something for him? It was strange, but something about that voice made her want to say yes. Besides, this still might be their best bet to get their revenge on Stark. He would be putting himself right in their path, and even with Captain America there, they wouldn’t be outnumbered. She didn’t trust Stark, but there was something that made her think she could trust his AI. Also, she was becoming sleepy, and she really might be moments away from letting the plane crash into the ocean. “Alright,” she agreed.

“Thank you, Wanda,” said JARVIS. “Now, all you have to do is stop doing whatever it is you’ve done to interfere with the controls.”

Wanda nodded, then realized that JARVIS couldn’t see her—unless he could. For all she knew, there was a camera somewhere on the instrument panel. “Alright, I’m going to let go. You’ll catch the plane if it starts to fall, yes?”

“Yes, Miss Wanda, if the plane falls, I promise I will catch it.” Somehow, JARVIS sounded amused, but could a machine be capable of feeling amusement? Something deep down in her soul told her that he was more than just a machine.

Wanda let the magic she’d been using to fly the plane start to slip. The plane began to nosedive for a moment, and Wanda couldn’t breathe, thinking that either JARVIS had betrayed her already or she had hallucinated the entire conversation. But then, the plane pulled upward and began to fly itself.

“I’ve got you, Miss Wanda,” said JARVIS. “Please try to get some rest. Everything is under control.”

Wanda felt strangely safe hearing those words; safer than she had felt in a long time.

(∪｡∪*)｡｡｡zzz

Wanda was shaken roughly awake. “Wanda! Wanda!”

“What, Pietro?”

“You fell asleep! You were supposed to be driving the plane.”

“You don’t drive a plane, Pietro, you fly it.”

“Fine. You were supposed to be flighting the plane.”

“I was supposed to be flying the plane. Why are you speaking English right now, anyway?”

“I am practicing for when we see Stark, so I can say, ‘Hello, my name is Pietro Maximoff. You killed my father, prepare to die.’”

“If you want him to take us seriously, please do not say it that way,” Wanda told him. “Especially not with the Spanish accent.”

“I was doing a Spanish accent?”

Wanda loved her twin brother more than anything, but once again she found herself wondering if one of their parents had dropped him on his head as an infant. “When we do see Stark, let me do the talking for us.”

“If you wouldn’t mind fastening your seat belts,” said Stark’s AI, “We are about to start our descent now.”

Pietro pointed to the radio. “Who is that?”

“Do not worry. JARVIS is Stark’s robotic servant. He is the one flying the plane. I persuaded him to take us to Stark.” A small white lie wouldn’t hurt in this situation, Wanda thought.

“He could be taking us into a trap.”

“If he is, we will escape, just like we escaped those scientists. And then we will find Stark, and we will—” She still hadn’t figured that part out. Did she want Stark dead, or did she just want him to suffer as much as she had suffered? “Put your seatbelt on,” she told her brother.

Pietro rolled his eyes at her. “What are the seat belts on planes even for? It’s not like we are going to hit something in the air.”

“It’s more for when we land than for when we’re in the air,” said JARVIS. “Though we might hit a bird. Planes hit birds all the time, though hitting a bird isn’t likely to cause a fatal accident—for the humans on board, anyway.”

“Thank you, JARVIS,” said Wanda, then turned back to her brother. “Just put your seat belt on, because I say so.”

“You aren’t our mother, Wanda. I am twelve minutes older than you.”

“But girls are more mature than boys,” said Wanda, then stuck her tongue out at him at the exact same moment he stuck his tongue out at her. “Besides, if Mama were here, she would tell you to put your seatbelt on.”

“Oh, fine. I am putting my stupid seatbelt on. Happy?”

“Yes.” Wanda buckled her own seatbelt and prepared for the descent.

Chapter Text

Jessica Jones slumped on the couch with her legs far apart and her arms crossed in front of her, eying Leonard as if he were the enemy. 

Leonard had gotten used to encountering a certain level of resistance from his patients; none of the Avengers exactly wore their hearts on their sleeves. Even Tony, who could talk nonstop through a session without letting Leonard get a word in, had difficulty being completely open with him. But he was getting a little sick of Jessica’s attitude; at this point, she was just wasting her time and his. “Ms. Jones, you are here voluntarily. What I can’t figure out is why you keep coming back to these sessions, when you obviously don’t want to talk to me.”

“So, you’re giving up on me, huh?” 

Okay, maybe now they were getting somewhere. He had sensed before that Jessica might have some abandonment issues. 

Jessica smiled and jabbed her finger at the ceiling. “I win, Tony. You hear that, you bastard? I know you listen to everything that goes on in here—”

“What?”

“You think I’ve really been coming here voluntarily? I made a bet with Tony that this therapy shit wouldn’t work with me, and that eventually, you’d tell me to get out of your office and stop wasting your time. If I win, I get another year’s supply of whiskey. If Tony wins, I have to keep going to therapy until my issues are actually resolved.”

“I didn’t ask you to leave, Jessica.”

“But you were just about to. You can’t say you weren’t, because JARVIS will have it all on video.”

“I really wasn’t. Also, Tony and I came to an agreement months ago that in order to preserve the privacy of my patients, JARVIS’s cameras and microphones would be removed from this office. He also had the vents rerouted, so that Natasha couldn’t use them to spy on anyone in this room.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me—”

Leonard reached into the top drawer of his desk and pulled out a pack of crayons and a pad of sketch paper, which were still there from when he’d tried art therapy with Loki. “Like I said, I wasn’t going to ask that you leave. In fact, I was going to suggest a new form of therapy. Now, I’d like you to take this paper and these crayons, and I want you to draw your feelings.”

Jessica took the paper and crayons from him and sat on the ground in front of the coffee table. He watched as she took out a red crayon and drew a stick figure. The stick figure held up its middle finger, and in a speech bubble, it said, “FU, Dr. Samson.” At the bottom, Jessica signed it “Love, Jessica Jones, Age 28.” She ripped it out of the pad and handed it to Leonard with a smile, like a five-year-old proudly presenting her work to her kindergarten teacher.

Leonard smiled back at her. “Thank you, Jessica. I think I’m going to get this framed. I think that’s enough for today, but I’ll see you at the same time next week.”

“Yeah, whatever.” Jessica stood, grabbing her jacket from the couch behind her. “Stark’s still out, right? I’m going to go raid his bar.”

“The jet is beginning its descent,” JARVIS announced over the car’s sound system. “Miss Wanda has agreed to hear you out, although I’m not certain she means it. Her brother requests that you prepare for your death, Sir.”

“Oh, yeah?” Tony had been trying to play it cool in front of Cap, but his heart beat just a fraction of a second faster as he peered over the dashboard of Pepper’s BMW. He would have taken his own Audi NSX or the Tesla Roadster, but those were two-seaters, and if everything went well here, they would be transporting two extra people back to the tower.

Tony started to open his door, but Steve stopped him. “I told you we should have brought police backup.”

“Cap, I think the two of us can handle a couple of kids.”

“Your arm is still in a sling. Even if it wasn’t, you’re not much of a threat to anyone without your suit.”

“Hey, that’s a bit of an overstatement, don’t you think? I’ll have you know that there are plenty of people who find me threatening.” Mostly, those people worked in SI’s legal and PR departments. “Just chill, Capsicle, and leave your shield in the trunk.”

“You want us to stand around unarmed and wait for a couple of people who want to kill you to walk off that plane?”

“JARVIS doesn’t think they’re armed.”

“That doesn’t mean anything if they’re enhanced.”

“If you’re that nervous, there’s a gun in the glove compartment.”

“So you don’t mind if I have a gun, but you want the shield to stay in the trunk. You think a gun would be less threatening?”

“To them? Honestly Cap, I’ve been thinking we might want to repaint that thing, and maybe get you a new outfit. And a new name. What do you think of just being ‘Captain Sparkles?’ I’m thinking glitter, maybe pink and purple.”

Steve looked away, which made Tony feel like a jerk for pointing out something that Steve had to have figured out on his own by now. “Alright, I get it. There’s a lot of places in the world now where the stars and stripes don’t exactly inspire trust anymore. But you’re the one they’re after.”

Tony stood on the tarmac as the plane taxied down the runway towards them. Steve came to stand beside him; he had grabbed the gun Tony had stashed in the glove compartment, and he checked the safety before tucking it into the waistband at the back of his pants. Tony wondered if he ought to be offended that Steve would think he’d have a gun in his glove compartment without the safety on, but on the other hand, if he was going to stick a gun there, he’d probably double check too. “Okay, here we go,” Tony said, as the plane came to a stop about thirty yards away.

A girl who looked a little younger than Loki appeared at the open door of the plane, and looked down at the tarmac below, frowning in confusion.

“The air stairs haven’t extended yet,” Tony called to her. “They won’t until I give JARVIS the okay. I thought we could talk a little first.”

The girl stepped out of the plane and floated down, enveloped in a red light.

Oh, shit. Maybe this had been a mistake. “Or you could just come down here, and we can have a talk,” he babbled. The girl just scowled at him. “J,” he said, lowing his voice to speak into his Starkwatch. “How good would you say this kid’s English was?”

“Miss Wanda seems to be nearly fluent. Her brother is somewhat less so.”

“Her brother, right—” Tony looked to the door of the plane apprehensively. Why hadn’t the brother shown himself yet?

“Are you Stark?” asked the girl.

Tony thought about claiming to be someone else, but that wouldn’t get him anywhere unless his goal was to make them trust him less than they already did. He took a deep breath to calm himself. “Yeah, that’s me.” He put his hands in the air to show her that he was unarmed. “I just want to talk. Wanda, right?”

“There is nothing you can say that will make me not hate you.”

“Fair enough. If it helps, I hate me too. Or at least, I hate who I used to be. I’ve been trying to change.”

“I don’t believe you, and even if you have changed—”

“I know. It won’t bring your parents back.”

“Or our country. You say you wish to change, but you have done nothing for Sokovia, and Sokovia still suffers because of you.”

“Another great point. Maybe you can help me, Wanda. Tell me what you guys need—infrastructure, educational opportunities, food relief. Whatever it is, I can mobilize the Stark foundation and pour my own money into it.”

“Sokovia does not need your blood money.”

“Just my blood, huh?” 

A boy poked his head out of the jet and peered down at them. Then he jumped down, landing in a crouching position. As he stood, he pointed at Tony. “Stark! My name is Pietro Maximoff. You killed my father, prepare to die.”

Wanda cringed. “Pietro, shut up! I told you to leave the talking to me.”

Tony couldn’t help but laugh, even though laughing at the person threatening his life probably wasn’t the best thing he could do if he wanted to live. Steve furrowed his eyebrows at him, probably thinking he’d cracked. “If I get out of this alive, we’re watching The Princess Bride next Avengers movie night.”

Wanda clenched her hands and stamped her foot. Something about that reminded Tony of Loki when he was working himself up to a tantrum, but at least he had enough sense not to tell her how adorable she looked when she was mad. “Don’t laugh at him. How many languages do you speak fluently?”

“Unless we’re counting computer languages, one,” Tony admitted. He knew he’d taken French or something in school—or maybe it had been Latin—but he didn’t remember any of it. Because of Ana Jarvis, he knew a few phrases in Hungarian; but they were mostly things like, “Get over here now,” “Don’t make me say it twice,” and “Have you been bewitched?” (Ana had filled in as his nanny every time one quit. He couldn’t say why, but most of his nannies hadn’t lasted for more than a few weeks.)

“We learned English from watching your American films and TV shows,” Wanda explained. “He doesn’t realize he’s doing the accent, and he means what he says. You are the one responsible for our parent’s deaths.”

Steve stepped in front of Tony protectively. “Which isn’t the same thing as killing them. Tony sold those weapons to the US government in good faith, thinking that they were going to be used in the defense of our country. He didn’t know they would use them in air raids that would cause the deaths of civilians.”

Tony stepped around him. “Actually, it was more like Tony didn’t care what those weapons were used for.” He looked back over his shoulder in time to see Steve give him the same look Pep gave him when he went off script at press conferences. Tony shrugged; either he was going to get himself killed, or he would prove to these kids that even if he was the most lowdown despicable person on the face of the Earth, at least he wasn’t a liar. “The Tony Stark that sold those weapons didn’t care what they were used for, because he thought it wasn’t his responsibility once they were out of his hands. As long as Tony Stark had the money to support his addictions to alcohol, women, and cars, he didn’t give a shit.” 

“Are you saying you’re different now?” Wanda asked. “That’s a nice car you’re standing in front of.”

Tony hitched his thumb over his shoulder. “This is my fiancée’s lame car. But I get it, it’s not like I took a vow of poverty or anything. Still, I don’t sell weapons anymore, and I try to use what I have to make a positive impact on the world. I’d give it all up if I didn’t think I was the best person to make sure the resources currently at my disposal go into funding projects and causes that are going to make the world better.” Luckily, he and Leonard had been addressing the guilt he felt over being the beneficiary of an empire that had been founded on, as Wanda had put it, “blood money.” Otherwise, he might have agreed that he was a huge dick for not renouncing all material possessions and moving into a cardboard box.

“You have a fiancée?” 

Right, that wasn’t public yet. Hopefully, this girl wouldn’t rat them out to the press, but if telling her about Pep got her to see him as a person, that would be a good thing, right? That was what you were supposed to do when someone wanted to kill you, remind them that you were human, and that there were other people your non-existence would affect. “Her name is Pepper. She’s the best. She was one-hundred percent behind me when I announced that Stark Industries was going to stop manufacturing weapons.” She’d gotten on board pretty fast, anyway, after the initial shock of how he’d announced that to the world had passed. “I’ve also got a kid about your age.” And just like that, Loki had been promoted to “like my kid” to his actual kid, but it didn’t feel like a lie at all. 

“I’ve never heard of Tony Stark having children.”

“It’s a secret. I don’t want the kid’s life to become a media circus, you know?” Which it would be, because Loki would probably be on trial for war crimes if anyone found out he was on Earth. 

“What’s their name?” Wanda asked, giving him a look that made it clear she thought he had just made up a kid.

“Lauren,” he said, giving her the name he’d used on Loki’s fake birth certificate. 

“Is Lauren a boy or a girl?” 

“Both,” he told her. “They’re genderfluid.”

Wanda nodded; maybe she believed him. “I don’t think I believe you.”

Okay, maybe the idea that Tony Stark had a secret kid was a little tough to swallow without any proof. “I’ve got pictures.” Tony took his Starkphone out of his pocket, unlocked it, and tossed it to her. He didn’t quite throw it far enough, but a red light flared around Wanda again, and the phone shot up and hovered over her hand before falling into it. 

Her brother hung over her shoulder as Wanda scrolled through the pictures. “Who’s the pretty blonde?” 

“You’re going to have to be a little more specific,” Tony told him. The pretty blonde could have been Pepper, but it also could have been Frigga, or even Natasha, from one of the times she had bleached her hair on a whim. Or for that matter, it could be Cap, but probably not, since he was standing there next to him.

“The one in the sexy underwear,” the boy said.

“What?” Tony didn’t remember having those kinds of pictures of Pepper on his phone.

“I think that is one of the bikini bathing suits glamorous American women wear,” said his sister, rolling her eyes. “She would not wear her underwear to sunbathe by a pool.”

Tony breathed a sigh of relief. “That’s Pepper. Lauren is the kid with dark hair. There should be vacation photos of them, too.”

“Tony,” Steve hissed at him. “You realize that in those photos—”

“Is Lauren a twin?” the girl asked.

Crap, right—there were photos of Loki wearing a two-piece swimsuit, and other photos where Loki had been wearing trunks. The problem was that in both photos, Loki had had the body to match the outfit, and in a bathing suit there was no claiming that there was any padding or flattening of certain areas going on. Now he had two options: he could lie and say that yes, Lauren had a twin named Kiki, or he could admit that they were a shapeshifting alien. Before he could decide, the boy pointed to the phone. “The girl is cute, whoever she is. I would date her. The boy looks kind of familiar.”

Oh, shit. (And double shit, because did this kid just say he wanted to date his daughter?)

Wanda narrowed her eyes at Tony’s phone screen. “He does look a little like one of the members of One Direction.”

Tony breathed a sigh of relief, even though he was pretty sure her brother was a lot more One Direction-y looking than Loki. “Which one?”

Wanda shrugged. “I don’t know. All of them? American boys all look the same to me.”

“Pretty sure One Direction is British.” Not that he would know.

“They still look the same.”

Okay, fine. They could unpack Wanda’s inability to tell the difference between boys from predominantly English-speaking countries later. At least no one was pointing to the photo and going, Hey look, it’s that guy who invaded New York.

“So which is Lauren?” asked Wanda.

Briefly, Tony considered telling her that some of the photos had been digitally altered, but that would just be weird. “Okay, so full disclosure, Lauren is adopted, and they aren’t full-on normal human. They’re a shapeshifter.” Wait, was that less weird?

“Oh,” said Wanda. (Oh? That was it?) “How did they get this ability?” 

Right, Wanda and her brother weren’t full-on normal either. “I think they were born that way.”

“Are they a mutant?”

“No, they’re something else.” Tony wondered if Wanda and Pietro were mutants, which would explain the weird powers. He didn’t think it was the right time to ask, though.

Pietro tilted his head as he looked at whatever photo they were looking at now. “Actually, Lauren does not make a bad looking boy either. I would date him as well. I believe the English expression is ‘swipe right.’”

Wanda stared at her brother for a moment, and Tony hoped she would tell him he shouldn’t be lusting after their mortal enemy’s kid. But then she nodded. “I also would ‘swipe right.’”

“Maybe we could share,” Pietro told her. “Sexy twins in American TV shows always share.”

Tony was beginning to regret letting them look at those pictures. “Now hold on just a minute. Neither of you have even met them. They could have an awful disposition. They’re my kid, you know. Remember how you think I’m a giant dick? They say the apple doesn’t fall from the tree.”

“Tony,” Steve said, grabbing him. Later, Tony was going to have to make sure the man understood that the one thing he hated more than being handed things was being manhandled. “You know, if they want to meet ‘Lauren,’ maybe we should let them.”

As much as Tony hated the idea of using Loki as bait, it might work. “Okay, tell you guys what. You guys want to meet my kid, that can be arranged. But you’re going to have to come back to my tower with me—”

“The beauteous Lauren, they are at this tower of yours?” asked Pietro.

“They will be later tonight. Right now, they’re on their way back from their bio-Mom’s wedding—flying commercial, because you guys jacked my jet. Anyway, if you guys will agree to behave yourselves and not try to kill me, you can get in the—”

“I call shot gun.”The next second, Pietro was in Tony’s passenger seat. Damn, Loki hadn’t been kidding when he’d said the kid was fast—all Tony had seen was a blur out of the corner of his eye.

“I was going to say get in the back of the car,” Tony called after him.

“I am sorry for my brother,” said Wanda as she sauntered past him. “He is—what is the American expression? Oh yes. He is an idiot.” She let herself into the back of Pepper’s BMW and shut the door behind her.

“Tony, we should be careful,” said Steve. “That was much too easy. They might still try to hurt you.”

“Maybe. For all we know, they’re going to try to do something to make us crash before we get to the tower, which is why I would have preferred for them both to sit in the back. Then again, I have a feeling the girl could just suffocate me with her magic if she wanted to. You know, like Darth Vader? You have seen Star Wars by now, right?”

“Yes, Tony. You’ve already made me watch all three movies.”

“Just remember, there are only three,” said Tony, as he slid into the driver’s seat. “If anyone ever shows you a movie with a character named ‘Jar Jar Binks’ and tries to tell you it’s Star Wars, don’t believe it.” Steve got into the back with Wanda, and Tony pushed the Start Engine button. “You guys hungry or anything? You’ve been on a plane for like, nine hours.”

“I’m starving,” said Pietro. 

“I’m fine,” said Wanda.

“That means she’s starving, but she will never say she is.” Pietro pitched his voice an octave higher. “Pietro, it is fine. I ate a stale piece of bread crust two days ago; you eat the rest of the apples we found in that dumpster by yourself.”

Had these kids really been eating dumpster fruit? An uncomfortable feeling settled in Tony’s stomach. “JARVIS, pull the car into the first fast food restaurant with a drive through, got it?”

“Of course, Sir,” said JARVIS.

┗(^o^　)┓三

Steve had ordered an entire bag of burgers for himself, but he ended up handing over more than half of them to Pietro, who had finished his own giant-sized Big Duck combo in less than ten seconds. That wasn’t an exaggeration—the food had been in his hands, and then it had been gone, and for a minute, Steve had worried he’d eaten the wrapper, but then it had drifted down to the floorboard next to his feet.

On the other hand, Wanda had ordered a junior cheeseburger and had eaten less than half of it before complaining that American food was too salty and refusing to eat anything else. But when Loki had still had difficulty eating, Bruce had told them that they shouldn’t try to force her to eat. When she hadn’t been eating enough, it had caused her stomach to shrink, and too much at once would have made her sick. With that in mind, maybe it was Pietro they should be worried about.

            ͇͇͇_͇║͇ ͇͇͇_
 ____    |___|
/  _   \ |***|
\____/ |___| 

“Wow, I am so glad I took Pep’s car,” said Tony, peering into the backseat. “That is an impressive amount of sick.” First Pietro had hurled, and then Wanda had been sick as well. Tony had no idea if her stomach couldn’t tolerate the food, or if it had been in sympathy for her brother. “I’m tempted to just have JARVIS drive the car off a cliff or something. Then I could get Pep a less lame car.”

“I’m sure it can be cleaned,” Steve told him. “Only you would think of a BMW M class as a ‘lame car.’”

“It’s just not, you know, flashy. And now, kids have thrown up in it. I’m pretty sure that officially makes it a soccer mom car.”

“It’s your own fault for driving too fast, and for not pulling over the first time the kid complained about feeling sick.”

“You—” Wanda came out from behind the car where she and Pietro had been crouched over, making sure their stomachs were empty. “You have tried to poison us!”

“Uh, no. You guys just ate food you’re not used to, in quantities you’re not used to. I’m sorry, okay? We shouldn’t have let you do that, but it wasn’t intentional.” Tony reached out to rub her back between her shoulder blades. That always seemed to make Loki feel better when they were sick, which might be much too often, now that he thought about it.

“What are you doing?” Wanda demanded.

“Shit, sorry.” Tony pulled his hand away as he backed up. “I wasn’t trying to be creepy; I was just trying to make you feel better.”

Wanda blushed, then mumbled something he didn’t catch before running back around to the other side of the car. Tony pulled out his phone to text Happy and then call a tow truck. There was no way he was getting back in the car until it had been detailed. 

He would have had JARVIS drive it back to the tower, but technically, it was still illegal for a car to drive itself without a human in the driver’s seat, and while he could have afforded to pay whatever fine he might have gotten for letting his car drive itself down the highway with no one in it, if it got out that Tony Stark had flouted the law (again), it would be bad publicity for both SI and the Avengers, and Pepper was already going to be pissed at him for taking her car and not bringing it back in the same condition it had been in beforehand.

（～Д～） （≧ｍ≦） ( ° ෴ ° ;; )

Happy dropped them off in front of the tower, and he and Steve ushered the kids into the building and onto the elevator. Tony decided that if he wanted to be in the least amount of trouble, it would be best to find Pepper before she came looking for him. The elevator opened onto the penthouse, where she must have been lying in wait for him, because as soon as he stepped off the elevator, he saw her coming towards him faster than a woman in four-inch heels should have been able to move. “Tony, where have you been? Did you take my—” She stopped in her tracks. “Who are these kids?”

“Oh right, I’m supposed to tell you before I adopt again.” Tony realized too late that he shouldn’t joke about that. He smiled at her sheepishly. “Actually, these guys tried to steal—well, successfully stole our jet, so I had JARVIS put it down in that old airfield in New Jersey. You know, the one near the old SI factory? Then Cap and I went to pick them up.”

“I see,” said Pepper, blinking at the kids, who just looked like normal kids when they weren’t speeding around or doing weird magic. “How did they manage to steal the jet? Wasn’t Clint watching it?”

Tony turned back to the kids. “Oh yeah, I meant to say something about that. Beating up Clint and screwing with his head wasn’t nice. I think you guys ought to apologize to him when he gets back.”

“We wouldn’t have had to do anything to him if he had let us have the plane,” said Pietro.

“Clint’s whole job was to guard that plane,” Tony told him. “He wasn’t just going to let you have it. Steve, could you go find a couple empty guest rooms to put these guys in?”

Pietro grabbed his sister’s hand. “You can put us in the same room.” 

“If you guys want to stay together, that’s fine. I’m not trying to separate you, it’s just that all the rooms are singles, and I thought you might want two beds.” If they stayed for any length of time and still insisted on staying together, he could have the bed in their room replaced with a couple of twin beds. Or maybe bunk beds. Bunk beds were always fun. 

“We’re fine with sleeping in the same bed,” Wanda told him. “One time, we spent two whole days hiding under a bed together, looking at an unexploded mortar shell with your name on it, waiting for it to explode and kill us.”

“Oh, my God.” Pepper gasped, and her hand came up to clutch at the chunky gold chain around her neck. She fiddled with it nervously as she spoke. “On behalf of everyone at Stark Industries, please let me—no, that’s not something you can just apologize for, is it?” She turned and strode towards the penthouse kitchen, where she stood awkwardly leaning over the sink.

Ah, hell. Tony had intended to explain things to Pep gently once Steve had taken the twins to see where they’d be staying. She’d told him before how she felt complicit in a lot of the dealings that now haunted his own nightmares. She had only been his assistant at the time, but she had still taken a job at SI without giving a whole lot of thought to what it meant to work for the Merchant of Death. 

He could only guess that after what had happened with Obie, she’d had a lot of time to think about it. “Steve, take the kids and find them a room, or better yet, take them to meet Leonard. I have a feeling he’s going to be working with them. Just get them out of here for a minute while I talk to Pep, alright?”

Steve nodded and ushered the kids back onto the elevator. Once they were gone, Tony joined Pepper in the kitchen. “It’s okay,” he said, wrapping an arm around her waist. “I mean, it’s not okay, but it’s going to be okay. They came here to kill me, but I get the sense that they didn’t plan that part out too well, probably because they’re just kids and they don’t really want to kill anybody. But now that they’re here we have a chance to make things—well, not right. But better.”

“I’m guessing their parents—”

“Killed, probably in the same air raid where they were caught with a shell that didn’t detonate.”

Pepper nodded. “So, what’s your plan? We could offer them some sort of financial compensation, then return them to their own country—”

Tony could tell that she didn’t think that was enough, but like a normal person, it hadn’t even occurred to her yet that Tony would want to keep a couple of kids that said they wanted him dead. “Thing is, these kids aren’t just normal kids. He’s super-fast, and she’s kind of weird.”

Pepper turned around in his arms, bringing them face to face. “What does that mean?”

“He has super-speed, and she has witch powers.”

“Witch powers?”

“Like Frigga and Loki, sort of. She can make things levitate and float around in the air.”

“I’ve never seen Frigga or Loki do either of those things.”

“Good point. On second thought, her powers might be completely different than theirs. Anyway, I think we should keep them here, at least until we figure out where they got their powers from. I mean, I guess they could have been born with them, but I’ve kind of got this bad feeling about it, Pep. I mean, what’s the chance that these two kids that want to kill me were born with powers?”

Pepper arched an eyebrow at him. “Considering how many people there are in the world who have a reason to want to kill you? Tony, you get death threats all the time. This is just the first time you’ve brought someone who threatened your life back to the tower.” 

“Technically, it isn’t the first time. Loki might not have been the one in control, but he did throw me out of a window.”

Pepper pursed her lips at him, and he knew she was waiting for him to admit that he had understood her.

“I mean, I do get that it’s not statistically improbable that some of the people who want me dead are enhanced. I still get the sense that there’s something bigger going on here, though. The others should get back by tonight. Maybe Loki will at least have some insights into the ‘witch power’ thing.”

ﾟ.*･｡ﾟ-(•̀_•́)-ﾟ.*･｡ﾟ

“These are the kids who stole Tony’s plane?” Leonard whispered to Steve, as the kids that had followed him into Leonard’s office sat at the coffee table doodling with the crayons and paper left over from Jessica’s “art therapy” session.

“Yeah.”

“And Tony brought them here, instead of handing them over to the police?”

“It’s complicated, Doc. Their parents died in an air raid, and they blame Tony, because he made the shell that killed them. Tony feels guilty about it, and so does Pepper—”

Leonard hummed in understanding. It might be healthy for them to feel some guilt, so long as it didn’t consume them, and that they used it to focus themselves on righting the injustices that SI had contributed to. 

“Also, they’ve got powers,” Steve continued. “The boy is super-fast, and the girl is—well, she’s weird.”

“What does that mean?”

“She’s got some sort of magic, like Loki.”

Leonard watched as Wanda lifted her hand, and a red crayon levitated off the table and shot into her hand like a magnet. “I’ve never seen Loki do that, but it does look like magic. When you say that he’s super-fast, do you mean that he can run fast, or that he’s highly intelligent?”

“Look, Wanda. I am a walnut.” Pietro had taken two crayons and stuck them up his nose. Leonard winced as he flashed back to his days as a medical intern, part of which he’d spent working in an ER. Consequently, that had been when he’d made up his mind to pursue psychiatry. If those crayons got stuck, he wasn’t going to be the one to pull them out. Unless the kid couldn’t breathe, he’d just have to wait for Bruce to get back.

“Walrus,” Wanda corrected him. 

“Wal-rus,” Pietro repeated, then took one of the crayons out of his nose and stuck it in his mouth. 

“Uh, Pietro—” Steve called to him. “If you’re hungry again, I’m sure Doc won’t mind if you help yourself to the snack bar. Just try not to make yourself sick this time.”

Pietro leapt up, and in a blur of light he was behind them, munching on a handful of the brightly colored cereal that filled one of the bins behind them. 

Leonard wandered over to the table where Wanda still sat. “Is that you in your picture?” She wasn’t a great artist. Her drawing consisted of primitive shapes and stick figures, giving it a childish quality, but there was an energy to it that was—expressive, he supposed. “It looks like you’re wearing a red dress, and you’re dancing?” More than anything, it was a guess.

“I am dancing on Tony Stark’s grave.” With a black crayon, she drew a cross for Tony’s headstone. “You are a doctor?” 

“Yes, I am,” he said, sitting down next to her on the floor so he wouldn’t be looming over her.

“Are you a scientist?” Wanda asked him next, without looking up from her picture.

“Psychiatry is a science, and there are some psychiatrists who are research scientists. But no, I wouldn’t call myself a scientist.”

“Good. I do not like scientists.”

If that was the case, maybe he ought to warn Bruce. “What’s wrong with scientists?”

“It is not any of your business.”

“Sorry, being nosy is kind of my job. I just want to help, but you don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to.”

Wanda still didn’t look at him, but she bore down harder on her crayon as she scribbled. “Then I won’t tell you anything.”

Well, this should be fun, thought Leonard. Wanda might be a harder nut to crack than Jessica Jones. He looked up in time to watch as Steve attempted to physically drag Pietro away from the snack bar before he finished the entire bin of cereal he’d been eating from.

Chapter Text

“I thought you were giving that up.”

Tony started upward, the whiskey glass in his hand slipping through his fingers. “What the hell? How are you already back?”

“The others took a cargo plane out of Sokovia,” Thor told him. “It was not large enough for all of us, so I returned on my own.”

Tony doubted that the plane hadn’t been large enough so much as Thor had taken one look at the small plane and bailed. JARVIS had already shown him the security footage from the jet on its way to Sokovia. “But how did you get here so fast?”

“I had Heimdall use the Bifrost to bring me back to Asgard, and then send me back here.”

“If you could do that, why didn’t you take the others with you?”

Thor shrugged. “It is just as well that I have arrived before them. I have something to speak with you about.”

Tony sat up, then leaned down to pick his empty glass off the whiskey-soaked carpet. “JARVIS, get Dum-E to clean this up.”

“Sir, don’t you think it would be a better idea to clean it up yourself? Even if Dum-E doesn’t get stuck on the elevator again—”

“Alright, never mind. In all this time, why haven’t I invented a robot that’s capable of doing housework without destroying the house?”

“You did invent one but were unable to execute the design. Like many of your ideas, the Ultra-Light Tidiness Remediating Optoelectronic Neurocomputer was before it’s time.”

Tony would have to take another look into that project when he had time; if he could create an army of flying suits of armor, cleanliness in their time shouldn’t be impossible. “So, what is it you need to talk with me about, Point Break?”

Thor sat down in the chair across from him and leaned in towards him. “How serious are you about adopting my younger sibling?”

Funny Thor should ask, because he’d been thinking a lot about his relationship with Loki since earlier in the day, when he’d told the Wonder Twins the kid was his. “Adopting? Loki is my kid. They’re snarky, reckless, and have great fashion sense when they aren’t slouching around the tower in surplus Avengers merchandise. They’re kind of a dick sometimes, if I’m honest—if I didn’t know they were technically a thousand years older than me, I would get a paternity test to make sure I wasn’t present at their conception.”

“It is good you should say that, for it seems my mother had more than one reason for marrying Victor Von Doom. In marrying him, she has broken the geas that prevented her from telling Loki they were adopted, and from telling me that I was the child of Odin and another woman.”

Tony wasn’t entirely sure how to respond to Thor’s casual revelation that Frigga wasn’t his birth mom. “Wow, I’ve got so many questions about that. Like, what does this have to do with me adopting Loki? And were these Canadian geese or Asgardian geese that kept her from talking?” 

Thor squinted at him. “Are you making a ‘dad joke?’”

“Uh, no. Tony Stark does not make dad jokes.” At least Thor had gotten better at recognizing word play. (Wait, had he just made a dad joke? Sure, Loki was his kid, but that didn’t make Tony a dad.)

“You must take this seriously,” Thor told him. “Mother believes that Loki may still be under the influence of Odin’s magic, even if he does not know it. That is why you must make the adoption ‘official’ somehow. Not necessarily legal, but the universe must be informed of your intent to have Loki as yours.”

“How do I do that? Is there some kind of Asgardian adoption ceremony?”

“Not that I know of. If an Asgardian takes in another’s child, they tend not to speak of it. I suspect one of my friends was adopted, but I am not certain which one.” Tony opened his mouth to ask the obvious question, but Thor didn’t give him a chance. “Mother seemed to think it most important that you prove to Loki’s subconscious that he is yours.”

And yet she hadn’t given them any clues as to how he was supposed to do that. “I already faked a birth certificate that says Loki’s mine. That wasn’t enough?”

“Honestly, I’ve no idea. I’m not even sure how we would know whether or not your efforts have been ‘enough.’”

Fantastic; whoever designed magic obviously hadn’t understood the importance of feedback to the user experience. “Can’t we just make sure the kid doesn’t go anywhere near All-Daddy Odin?”

Thor shook his head. “I fear that if Odin decided he wanted Loki back, he would have no trouble taking him from you. Then he could make Loki forget you and the rest of his ‘chosen family’ existed.”

“Could he, or would Loki just have to act like we didn’t exist? He didn’t make everyone in Asgard forget that Loki was adopted and that you’re his mistress’s kid, did he?”

“I’m not entirely clear on that point. Frigga did not forget, but she is a powerful witch herself. I am not certain of the extent of my father’s powers over the rest of his subjects, including Loki.”

“But Loki’s powerful too, right?”

“My younger sibling may be something of a prodigy, but Father is widely considered the most powerful magic user in the nine realms.”

“But if Odin could do something like that and he would, why wouldn’t he have already done it?” Thor didn’t answer, but from the look he gave him, Tony could take a guess. “He hasn’t done it because so far, he hasn’t decided he wants Loki back bad enough to do that. But he could always change his mind. You know, I didn’t think it was possible for me to hate your dad more, Point Break, but it was.”

Thor stood, clapping him on the shoulder. “I shall go up to my room to rest before the others arrive. I trust you’ll figure something out. You are a genius, are you not?”

中_(;￣▽￣)  _(￣□￣;)ﾉ︵口

The stores on 5th Avenue had already started decorating for the holidays, but no one in their Uber was in a holiday spirit, other than their driver, who had just scored three Avenger’s autographs on the back of a 7-Eleven receipt as an early Christmas present for her kids. 

“I don’t understand why we had to fly all the way to Stockholm and wait around in the airport there before we could fly back.”

If Natasha had been sitting next to a door and not squashed between Loki and Bruce, she might have opened it, tucked, and rolled. All Loki had done for the last thirteen hours was complain. “It’s called a layover. We’re lucky we even managed to get a flight out of Sokovia.” 

“What it is called is inefficiency. We should have just gone back to Latveria and had Mother open another portal.”

“No one wanted to trek back over the mountains again. I know you’re getting cranky because you haven’t eaten, but we’re almost back to the tower.”

“I am not cranky,” insisted Loki, “and are you insinuating that I can’t go fifteen minutes without—”

“I think we’re all getting a little cranky,” Bruce interrupted. He didn’t open his eyes as he leaned against his window, hair and glasses askew. “We could probably all use something to eat and some sleep.”

“I’m texting Tony to let him know we’re close.” After Natasha hit “send,” she got a response almost immediately. “Tony says that Thor’s already there, he’s already ordered dinner, and that we have guests. He didn’t say who, though. Hey Clint, you doing alright?” 

Clint, who sat in the front passenger seat, didn’t answer her. She wasn’t sure if he had fallen asleep or if he had taken out his hearing aids. If he had, she couldn’t blame him for it.

(Ծ‸Ծ ;;)(;;¬_¬)(ɵ-Θ|

Leonard had to stop himself from running up to Bruce and throwing his arms around him. Tony still didn’t know about their relationship, even though everyone else had likely figured it out by now. “Sorry none of us could come to pick you guys up at the airport.”

Bruce hadn’t looked at him since he and the others had gotten off the elevator, and Leonard wondered if something was wrong, or if Bruce was just worried about Tony noticing that they were more than friends. Then he realized that Bruce hadn’t looked at him because he was scanning the room, as if looking for a threat. “Tony told us we had guests, but he didn’t say who.”

Was that what Bruce was worried about? “It’s alright, Bruce. It’s just the kids that stole Tony’s jet.”

That got him to look at him. “Why would he bring home the people that stole his jet?”

“They’re just kids, Bruce. I mean, Wanda says she wants to kill Tony, but I don’t think she would. She’s just a confused, scared young girl that doesn’t know what she wants.”

Bruce lowered his voice. “You didn’t see what they did to Clint.”

A moment later, a pair of arms were thrown around his middle; not Bruce’s, but those of a tired looking Loki. “Leonard, Natasha is being mean to me, and Bruce is letting her.”

Leonard looked questioningly at Bruce.

“We’re all just tired,” Bruce explained. “Loki, after you eat, I want you to go to bed.”

Loki gripped Leonard tighter, as if Bruce might grab him and drag him off to bed right then. “I don’t want to go to bed yet.”

“You can eat and say hello to Tony and Pepper first, but then you need to sleep. Besides, remember I said you were going to be grounded when you got home? That starts now.”

“That isn’t fair.” Loki snuggled into Leonard’s chest. As much as he’d tried to keep a professional distance between them—Loki needed him to be his therapist more than she needed another parent—he had learned by now that when the kid was in barnacle mode, he might as well forget it. “Leonard, tell Bruce that isn’t fair, when I was the only one who remembered how to use a phone booth.”

Again, Leonard looked at Bruce.

“It’s a long story, but the short version of it is that Natasha told Loki not to provoke Victor Von Doom on purpose and she did. One of the many reasons we’re so tired is that Loki, Thor, and I spent the night before last sleeping on the floor, in a cell in Castle Doom’s dungeon.”

“Oh my God, Bruce—are you all okay? Also, what is that smell?” Leonard bent down and got a good whiff of Loki’s hair, which smelled a little like a barnyard.

“We’re fine. Just tired, like I said. I’ll tell you the whole story later. And I’m pretty sure the smell is goat.”

Ψ・ｴ・Ψ 

“Miss Wanda, Master Pietro, Sir has asked me to inform you that dinner has arrived.”

“Yes—food!” Pietro sat up, pulling at Wanda’s arm. “Wanda, there is already more food.”

“I don’t want any more salty American food.” Wanda wrinkled her nose and laid there like a sack of potatoes, refusing to allow Pietro to pull her up.

“Sir instructed me to find a Sokovian restaurant capable of delivering to the tower, in the hope that the food might agree with you better.”

“Sokovian food? I was hoping there would be pizza,” complained Pietro. But food was food, and he wasn’t going to let Wanda’s apathetic mood get in between him and food. Ever since he had come into his powers, he had been hungry all the time; he had heard the Hydra scientists say it was because of his increased metabolism. 

Even though he knew she would be angry with him, he picked his sister up and slung her over his shoulder. Before she could protest, they were back in the Avengers’ living room. Wanda shrieked at him and pounding his back with her fists. “Kretén, you can’t just pick me up and move me without asking! I am not your doll!”

“Ooh, she said a bad word,” sang the voice of an angel. “She should have to put a dollar in the swear jar.” Pietro looked in the direction of the voice, and there she was: the girl from the photos Stark had shown them. She wore jeans and a white t-shirt with Iron Man’s helmet on it. Her hair was a mess and there were dark circles under her eyes, but somehow those things only added to her allure.

Stark sat next to her on the couch. “Did she? Oh, right. I forgot you sprechen sie AllSpeak. You don’t have the same problem with sarcasm that Thor does, so sometimes I forget.”

Pietro dumped Wanda onto the floor, and a moment later he stood in front of his raven haired beauty. “Are you a humanitarian airdrop? Because you must have fallen from heaven.”

“My AllSpeak must be broken.” Pietro hadn’t understood the words, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the mouth that had spoken them. He had heard the English phrase “begging to be kissed” before but hadn’t truly understood what it meant until that moment.

“Your AllSpeak isn’t broken, he’s just speaking gibberish,” said Stark. He reached out and snapped his fingers in front of Pietro’s face. “Yoo-hoo; you there, with the dumb pick-up line. Those never work. Not on anyone with more than two brain cells to rub together, anyway.” He pointed in the direction of the kitchen that opened out onto the living room. “Food’s in there, Casanova. But before you eat, remember how I said it would be a good idea to apologize to Clint?” 

The man they had taken the plane from hovered between him and the kitchen, frozen as if he had spotted a ghost. Pietro still didn’t think it necessary to apologize to him, since they had given him an opportunity to comply with their demands and he had chosen not to; but if he had to say he was sorry in order to eat dinner, he would. “My sister and I are sorry.”

“Nah, it’s cool. I love getting beat up and mind controlled by teenagers.” His voice didn’t match his words, however, nor did his scowl, which he turned on Stark. “Tony, why the hell are they here? Do you have to adopt every kid that tries to play with my brain?”

“No one said I was adopting them,” said Stark. “But we can’t just throw them out on the street when they don’t have anywhere else to go.”

“I thought you and I were past that, Clint,” said his beautiful Lauren, reminding Pietro of her luminous presence.

Pietro felt torn in two. Hungry as he was, he couldn’t take his eyes off her. But—food. Coming to a compromise with himself, he began walking to the kitchen while keeping his eyes trained on her, turning around to walk backwards the last several feet. Before he reached the kitchen, he walked into what felt like a brick wall. The person he had walked into grabbed him by the shoulders and spun him around to face the table. “Eyes forward, soldier.” Pietro barely registered the voice as belonging to Captain America, distracted by the dreamlike vision of a table laden with food. 

Pietro grabbed a plate and piled it high with familiar foods like kurací paprikáš with spaetzle, kopytka, and veka bread, all from boxes marked “Chef Zemo’s” in both English and Cyrillic letters. He had never seen so much food in his entire life, though he knew that he could eat half of it by himself. He took two forks, and went back to his sister, who sat on the floor where he’d left her, her knees hugged to to her chest as she stared at the carpet in front of her.

Pietro sat down next to her and held out one of the forks to her. “It smells good,” he told her, speaking in Sokovian. “I don’t think it is poisoned.”

“I cannot imagine what American Sokovian food would be like,” Wanda griped, also in Sokovian.

“According to online reviews, Miss Wanda, the food served by Chef Zemo’s is reported to be authentic,” said JARVIS, intruding on their conversation. “The owner is a Sokovian political refugee.”

Wanda blinked up at the ceiling. “You speak Sokovian, JARVIS?”

“I took the liberty of downloading a Sokovian dictionary earlier, so that I might converse with you in your native language.”

“That was considerate of you, JARVIS,” said his Lauren, also in Sokovian. Pietro’s heart skipped what must have been several beats.

Wanda narrowed her eyes at her. “How is it you can speak Sokovian?” 

“I have always had a talent for languages.” Lauren didn’t speak like a native speaker of the language; she had some sort of accent that he couldn’t place and the words she used seemed overly formal, but she didn’t sound at all like she struggled to remember the right words or conjugate verbs in her head.

“Loki, do not lie to them,” said the big man with blond hair who sat on Lauren’s other side, surprising Pietro by also speaking in Sokovian. “You do not speak Sokovian, you are only conversing with them in AllSpeak.”

“I did not lie, Brother. I do have a talent for languages. I never said I spoke theirs.”

“Why does your brother call you Loki?” asked Pietro, switching back to English.

She glared at him, and Pietro basked in her attention. “Because it’s my name.”

“Oh, right,” said Stark. “I told them your name was Lauren. You know, like what it says on your birth certificate? Guess it doesn’t matter if they know your real name though, since they’re going to be staying here.”

Lauren, or Loki—a rose by any name, thought Pietro—turned her glare at the man. “You didn’t tell them my supposed middle name, did you?”

“Nah. I know you hate that, Kiki.” 

“Kiki,” Pietro repeated. Yes, he liked that. It had a good mouth feel.

“Don’t call me that,” Kiki snapped at Pietro. Having finished her own food, she grabbed a rogaliki from the plate in Stark’s lap, stuffing it in her mouth. “I swear I’m really going to dislocate your other shoulder this time,” she told him, her mouth still full of pastry.

“Loki,” said a tired looking man with glasses and short, wavy brown hair that had begun to turn silver. He sat on the shorter couch across from them, next to the doctor they had met earlier. “If you’re finished eating, I think you should go to bed.”

“Tony,” Kiki whined adorably. 

“Seriously? You’re going to ask me to get in the middle of whatever’s going on with you and Bruce after you just threatened me again?”

“I wasn’t serious, and it’s your fault for calling me that awful name. Why has everyone started picking on me?”

“No one’s picking on you,” said the man who must have been Bruce. “It’s just time for bed now. We spent this morning flying from Sokovia to Stockholm in the back of a cargo plane full of goats, then we had a nine-hour flight from Stockholm to New York in economy. I’m not sure which was worse, because even though the cargo plane smelled like goats and the goats bleated the entire time, at least I could move my legs. I know all I want to do right now is take a shower to wash off the goat smell and go to bed.”

“I’m not tired, though. All the things that made you tired just spun me up. I may not be able to sleep for days.”

“Sister, I too think you should get some rest, though you may want to bathe first.” The stern look Kiki’s brother had tried to give her softened. “If I’m honest, your smell makes me homesick. I wonder if anyone has thought to give Toothgnasher and Toothgrinder some grapes and apples for treats since I’ve been gone.”

“I could give you something to help you sleep,” offered Doctor Samson.

“So that’s the way it’s going to be now,” Kiki pouted. “I’m to be drugged into submission every time I have feelings that are inconvenient for the rest of you.”

“Loki, you know that isn’t—”

Pietro heard a low, animalistic growl, and for a moment, he wondered if the Avengers had a dog. Then he realized that the others in the room had turned to stare at Bruce, who had been the source of the sound. When he realized they were staring at him, he stood, and without saying anything or looking back at anyone, he strode towards the door that led to the stairwell Captain America had let Pietro run up and down earlier when he had been feeling restless.

“The hell?” said Stark. “What’s going on with Bruce?”

Doctor Samson got up. “I’ll find out.” When the others looked at him, he hesitated. “I mean, as staff psychiatrist, that’s my job, even if Bruce doesn’t normally see me professionally—or in any other capacity, obviously. You know what? I’m just going to go talk to him.”

Once he was gone, Stark looked around to the others in the room. “Am I the only one that thought that was a little weird?” No one answered him, so he turned his attention towards the red-haired woman who had been sitting at the bar in between the kitchen and the living room, picking at her food with one hand because her other was in a bright pink cast. “What happened to your arm, by the way?”

“Bruce broke it,” Kiki answered for her.

Stark’s voice went up about an octave. “What?”

“Bruce did not break it, Hulk broke it,” said Kiki’s brother.

“Shit, Natasha.” Instead of eating, the man Stark had made him apologize to earlier had been leaning against the bar next to her, nursing a can of beer. “When I asked, you told me you fell.”

“Clint has to put a dollar in the swear jar,” said Kiki.

“Hulk threw me into the air,” Natasha clarified. “Then I fell. I still say that if anyone’s at fault, it’s gravity.”

“Shit,” said Tony. Kiki opened her mouth, but he cut her off. “I already put a hundred bucks in. I prepaid, so you know what? I’m going to say it a few more times. Shit, shit, shit. Somehow, I always knew something like this could happen, because let’s face it, Big Green isn’t the most careful guy in the world. And I figured that Bruce would freak out when it happened, and then everything would be shitty for a while after that. But Hulk didn’t mean to hurt you, right?”

Natasha shrugged. “It’s hard to know what’s going on in Hulk’s head, but I’m pretty sure it was an accident.”

“Though Bruce had been annoyed with all of us,” said Kiki’s brother.

“Mostly with you. You were the one who felt it necessary to bring up the fact that I technically committed patricide in an argument.” Pietro would have to look up a couple of the bigger English words Kiki had used later.

“Okay, I’m starting to see it,” said Stark. “Bruce got protective of Loki, then Hulk got protective of Loki. You guys ought to know better than to poke baby bear when mama’s around.”

“I don’t recall poking any bears,” said Natasha, pushing the contents of her plate around with her fork.

Kiki stole another rogaliki from Stark’s plate. “You made fun of me for letting Tony tuck me in.”

“I wasn’t making fun of you. And I thought you said he didn’t tuck you in.”

Stark tried to swat Kiki’s hand away as she reached into his plate again, but with his own arm in a sling, he couldn’t stop her from taking a cherry filled kolachy. “So, what I’m hearing is that the three of you started acting like little kids in the back of a car on a road trip, and you managed to piss off Daddy.”

“Tony, whatever you do, do not put it that way to Bruce,” Natasha warned him.

( •_•)σ ʕ ㅇ ᴥ ㅇʔʕ•ᴥ•ʔ

“How come you’ve never told me any of this about your dad before?” asked Leonard, as he and Bruce sat on opposite ends of the couch in their suite. Bruce didn’t seem to want to get too close to him, and he was trying to respect that. He had poured them each a glass of wine, although Bruce hadn’t touched his. The scene made him think of the talk they’d had years before, late at night in the house he and Betty had shared.

“You’re not my therapist.”

“No, I’m your—boyfriend? That term always felt kind of juvenile, to be honest. The person you’re dating? Except we’ve never been out on a date, unless you count movie night in the tower or when we go out and Tony invites himself to tag along, which I don’t—”

“Significant other,” suggested Bruce.

“I guess that would work.” Something about the term felt ironically insignificant, but he couldn’t think of anything better. “Anyway, the point is that you’re supposed to tell me these things before you tell your therapist. We should go on a date, by the way.”

“Not right now; I’m too tired. I just want to go to sleep. Just for tonight, maybe you should sleep in your own—”

“If I have to, I’ll sleep on the couch, but I’m not letting you throw me out of our suite. Bruce, you need to try to stop ruminating on something you can’t control.”

“But that’s the problem, I can’t control it. I thought I could, but I can’t, and next time I might end up hurting you.”

“That’s a risk I’m willing to take.” 

“You shouldn’t be, Leonard!”  Leonard was a little taken aback, but Bruce seemed even more shaken by the sharpness of his own voice, which he lowered. “I’m sorry, but that’s the way my mother—”

“Breathe, okay? I’m not your mother, Bruce. If you hurt me intentionally, I wouldn’t rationalize it away. But I know that if you did hurt me, it would be because you weren’t the one in control. When you lose your temper, you don’t just lose your temper, you completely disconnect from your core personality.”

Leonard reached for him, but Bruce leapt up from the couch and started pacing the room. “I don’t need you to explain my condition to me. And stop telling me to breathe all the time.”

“Fine. I won’t tell you to breathe.” He knew that Bruce was just on edge, and that he would probably apologize later for snapping at him. “Didn’t Doctor Sofen prescribe something for you to help with anxiety?”

“She did, but I never got it filled. It won’t work anyway. Even when I’m not the other guy, my body metabolizes medications too quickly for them to have any effect. Horse tranquilizers don’t have any effect on me.”

“And you know this, because—”

Bruce stopped pacing. “Because I might have tried horse tranquilizers?”

At first, Leonard thought Bruce had made a joke, but he wasn’t smiling. “Bruce, no. Please don’t tell me that. Horse tranquilizers are not meant for human consumption.”

“It was an experiment. And I’m not exactly—”

“Don’t say you’re not human. You’re probably one of the most human people I know, if that makes sense. I want you to promise me right now that you won’t experiment on yourself anymore. I would have thought you’d know better by now.”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Now Bruce did give him a small, self-deprecating smile, but it didn’t make Leonard feel better about his apparent lack of self-preservation instincts.

“I want you to take your medication. Just try it, okay? If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, and then you can go back to Doctor Sofen and let her decide whether to up your dosage or try something different. You’re a smart guy, Bruce, and you’re a good doctor, but you’re not a specialist in psychiatry. Don’t you think it’s possible that a specialist is going to come up with a solution that you wouldn’t have thought of, because you lack the experience?”

“It’s not about getting the combination of drugs right, Leonard. It’s about the fact that drugs don’t work on me, period. Even cocaine doesn’t have an effect on me anymore.”

“You tried cocaine too? Wait—anymore? Are you saying you used to do cocaine before the whole Hulk thing?” Betty used to talk about Bruce all the time, but she’d never mentioned him having a drug problem. “I guess that would explain why you thought exposing yourself to gamma radiation was a good idea.”

Bruce took his glasses off and massaged the bridge of his nose. “No, Leonard, I wasn’t on crack when I did that. I would love to say that was the case, but it was just a stupid decision that I made when I was completely sober because I was trying to impress my girlfriend’s dad. All I meant was that even cocaine doesn’t have an effect on me now.”

“That’s probably a good thing. You should know that one of the side effects of cocaine is an increased heart rate, so why? When? Was this recently, or—”

“It was years ago in Columbia, where it’s more or less sort-of legal. I honestly can’t tell you why; at the time I told myself it was an experiment, but maybe I was just on a self-destructive streak. Like I said, it didn’t have any effect on me. Can you just not ask any more questions about that?”

“I won’t ask any more questions about it for now.” Maybe Bruce wasn’t the type to abuse illicit substances, but the man obviously had few qualms about experimenting with them. “Come on, let’s just go to bed. Then tomorrow morning we can sneak out of the tower for a Tony-free breakfast and get your prescription filled on the way back.”

“So, our first date is going to be breakfast and waiting in line at the pharmacy?”

“It won’t be the most unusual date I’ve ever been on.”

“What was?”

“One time, I went on a blind date with this woman that couldn’t stop talking about an old boyfriend who had disappeared from the face of the Earth a couple of years earlier. I guess the weirdest thing about it was that I kept seeing her after that. What about you?”

“Does participating in an LSD trial count as a date?”

Chapter Text

Loki laid on his side, watching the colorful blobs of paraffin wax in the lava lamp by his bed sink to the base of the lamp, where the bulb inside the lamp heated them, causing them to expand and become less dense than the liquid they floated in, which made them float back to the top. When the lamp had first been delivered, he had gotten an entire science lesson on how it worked from Bruce. (“So, in other words, it works by means of your primitive mortal magic,” Loki had said when Bruce had finished, just because he knew it would drive the man insane.)

Perhaps he should have taken Doctor Samson up on his offer of the mortals’ version of a sleeping draught. It was an offer he rarely made; according to him, psychiatric medication ought to be a last resort when it came to “adolescents,” which was why Loki never took anything other than the occasional mild sedative and was not allowed to self-administer it. He had certainly never been forced to take any substance against his will. Accusing the man of wanting to “drug him into submission” when he had only been trying to help had been unfair, and he had only upset Bruce again.

Loki got out of bed, and JARVIS turned the lights in his room up for him without being asked. He took the little plastic Iron Man helmet piggy bank from his bedside table, pulled the plug out of it, and dumped the change inside onto his bed. He counted out a dollar in quarters, then counted out four more, just for good measure. Coins in hand, he padded through the darkened common room into the kitchen, where he deposited them into the jar on the kitchen counter, the label of which proclaimed it to be the “Avenger’s Swear Jar: Proceeds Go to the Maria Stark Foundation.” It wasn’t intended to prevent anyone from swearing; it was just an extremely effective way of raising funds for the portion of Manhattan that had been affected by the Chitauri invasion. The cause was a good one, so if anything, everyone swore a little more than they did before.

Loki dumped his coins into the jar. “Fiku min,” he said aloud, then repeated it three more times. Before he could say it a fifth time, he sensed that he was no longer in the room alone. He looked up and saw the two Sokovian children Tony had brought home on the way to the elevator. “Kien vi iras?” Loki called out to them. When they turned, blinking at him in confusion, he realized that they probably didn’t speak Esperanto, even though it was their realm’s most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. “Where are you going?” he called out to them in AllSpeak.

“We are leaving,” Wanda answered in English. “We do not have a reason to stay.”

“I thought you were here to exact revenge on my guardian, Miss Maximoff. Would that not be easier if you stayed?”

“He has a point,” said her brother. “I know—we could stay here, and I can eat all of his food. Eventually, he will starve to death.”

Wanda rolled her eyes at him. “You just want to stay so you can eat.”

“Having enough to eat for once is nice,” Pietro admitted. “Do we really have to leave now?”

“These people are not our friends, Pietro, and Tony Stark is not—” She stopped there, biting her lip, then reached out, her hand hovering in front of the call button for the elevator.

“If you’re going to run away, can I come?” asked Loki. 

Wanda narrowed her eyes at him. “Why would you want to come?”

“Because everyone around here has been taking me for granted lately. You saw how cruel everyone was to me at dinner.” Loki didn’t truly want to leave, but JARVIS wouldn’t let them out of the building anyway. Still, trying to escape would be more fun than staring at density-changing blobs of wax all night, and he doubted he’d be able to sleep if he went back to bed. 

The adventure was sure to end with a scolding from Tony, but it wasn’t as if he didn’t have one coming. He’d been a little disappointed when he hadn’t received so much as a good ticking off after he’d been horrible to Doctor Samson and upset Bruce. Instead, Tony had just told him to go to bed again, and this time he’d gone. Later, Tony had come by his room to check on him as he always did. But he hadn’t said anything about what had happened. He had only asked Loki if he were okay, to which he had lied and said yes. What was he supposed to say? “No, I’m not okay, Tony. I’m upset with myself for being horrible to Doctor Samson and upsetting Bruce again.” He couldn’t imagine coming out and saying something like that; and besides, that wouldn’t get him what he needed and deserved, which was for everyone else to be as upset with him as he was. 

Loki congratulated himself on how self-aware he had become.

In a flash, Pietro closed the space between himself and the kitchen. He stopped in front of Loki and took his hands in his own. “You are more than welcome to come with us, my little pierogi.” Then he dropped Loki’s hands, opened the refrigerator door, and began rummaging around in it.

“Pietro, what are you doing?” called an exasperated Wanda.

“Snacks for the road,” Pietro called back as he grabbed several containers of leftovers from dinner. That there had been anything left between Steve, Thor, and this new bottomless pit named Pietro surprised Loki, but then, JARVIS had ordered at least three family sized portions of everything on the menu. Balancing a stack of containers in his arms, Pietro returned to the elevator to wait with his sister, and Loki followed him.

Wanda looked Loki up and down. “I suppose we could bring you along as a hostage.”

Loki considered her in turn as he hit the button for the elevator for her. “I like the way you think, Miss Maximoff.”

The elevator door opened, and Wanda, Pietro, and Loki found themselves standing face to face with a still exhausted-looking Bruce. Bruce’s hair had started turning to silver recently, and it might have been his imagination, but there seemed to be more of it now than there had been before they’d left for Latveria. Well, this escape attempt has been foiled in record time, thought Loki. Then he noticed that he had the same duffel bag he had taken to Latveria with him.

Bruce blinked at each of them in turn. “What are you kids doing up?” 

Wanda and Pietro just stared at each other as if they weren’t sure what to say. Loki spoke for the three of them. “Wanda says she has no reason to stay here. Pietro is reluctantly following her, though clearly he would prefer to stay here and eat Tony out of tower and home. I’ve been invited along as their hostage, and I thought, ‘Why not? It’s been a while since I’ve attempted an escape.’ But perhaps we could all just join in yours?” 

“I uh, I was just—” Bruce stammered. Then the lights turned on, and all of them looked towards the door to the stairway, which had just opened. 

Tony strolled towards them casually, his hands in the pocket of his robe. “Alright, everyone take a seat in the living room. I’ve asked JARVIS not to move the elevator from this floor, and to lock down the stairwells for anyone who isn’t authorized to be on them, which includes anyone who was about to make a break for it. You’re included in that, Brucie.”

“Oh my, are we all in trouble?” Loki couldn’t keep himself from smiling. 

Tony arched an eyebrow at him. “How much more trouble do you need to be in? You’re already grounded.” 

Loki sat on the couch next to Pietro. Wanda slumped into the spot on Pietro’s other side, and Bruce perched on the edge of one of the chairs next to the couch.

Tony took the place across from Bruce. “Bruce, you might as well sit back and plan on being here for a while. Like I said, you’re not going anywhere.”

“You can’t prevent me from leaving,” Bruce told him. “I’m not one of the kids.”

“I know I can’t if that’s what you really want, but right now, I don’t think it is. You’re just tired and freaked out, which is understandable. But sneaking out in the middle of the night without telling us?” Tony shook his head. “Not cool, Bruce. That’s just super inconsiderate. If you were one of the kids, I’d do something about it myself, but since you’re not, I’ll just have to leave it to your boyfriend to punish you. JARVIS, could you wake up Doc and tell him to come down here?”

Bruce made a sound that was something between a strangled cat and a wheezing duck. “You knew about me and Leonard?”

“Of course I knew. First of all, I know no one’s been sleeping in Doc’s room since the middle of the summer, because it’s the one occupied room in the tower where the air conditioner didn’t get turned up at night. Then, when we were in Malibu, you guys made sure to pick rooms that were next to each other and had an adjoining balcony. Guess what? The air didn’t get turned up in Doc’s room all week. Earlier tonight, the guy ran up to you and had to stop himself from giving you a big smooch in front of everyone. Besides, do you really think Pepper wouldn’t have figured it out, or that she could have known a secret that big for that long without me wheedling it out of her?”

Bruce slumped into his chair, defeated. “I’m just surprised you didn’t say anything, if you knew.”

“Hey, I didn’t want to ruin your fun, sneaking around like a couple of teenagers. Onto the actual teenagers—” He turned to Wanda and Pietro. “As for you two, you’re not in too much trouble, since you haven’t even been here long enough for us to go over the rules. Loki, can you tell Wanda and Pietro what the rules here are?”

“Treat other people with respect, and also respect their privacy and possessions,” Loki recited. “No threats of violence, no actual violence, and no trying to run away. Which is pointless anyway, because JARVIS will tell on you, and if you manage to get to the lobby, all the doors will be locked.”

Wanda’s nostrils flared and something flashed behind her eyes. If looks could kill, Loki would have been paying his daughter a visit that night. Then again, Loki could sense the chaos magic roiling just below Wanda’s skin. Possibly, the girl could kill him with a twitch of her nose. He wondered what held her back.

“That’s about it,” said Tony. “Now, how many of those rules have you broken since dinner?”

“I was disrespectful to Bruce and to Doctor Samson, I threatened you with violence, and I just tried to run away—so three, at least.” Loki couldn’t stop himself from grinning. He just loved having the correct answers to Tony’s questions. Odin’s questions never seemed to have correct answers.

Tony tried to give him a stern look, but Loki could tell from the way the edge of his lips quirked up that he was at least somewhat amused by his behavior. “You understand that’s not something to be proud of, right?”

“I’m not proud of it. I’m just owning my actions.”

“Uh-huh. I’m not sure you understand what that means, but we’ll talk about it later.”

The door to the stairwell opened again, and Doctor Samson stepped out, wearing a robe and pajamas, his hair still mussed up from sleep. When Bruce saw him, he seemed to become fascinated with his own hands. A moment later, the man hovered over him, his arms crossed in front of his chest. “Bruce, I don’t think I even need to tell you how disappointed I am.”

Bruce cringed, and Loki felt such sympathy for him that he felt compelled to create a distraction. “Doctor Samson, I am sorry I accused you of trying to ‘drug me into submission.’ I did it because I was tired and in a foul mood, like everyone accused me of being. I know I’ve no right to ask, but could I have that ‘something to help me sleep’ now?”

As Loki had intended, Samson turned his attention to him, his brow furrowed in concern. “Loki, I would never punish you by withholding treatment. I just assumed you didn’t want it, and I wasn’t going to force it on you.”

“Kid, everyone knew you didn’t mean what you said to Doc,” Tony told him. “Is that what you’ve been stressing out about?”

“I suppose I found it unsettling when no one brought it up,” Loki said, biting his lip and sniffling a little for the effect. “Perhaps it is because when we were in the mountains, Thor suggested you hadn’t been strict enough with me lately. That made me think; you have been neglectful when it comes to correcting my behavior of late, and perhaps that is because you’ve stopped caring. Then, we return to the tower to find that you are in the process of replacing me.” He made his breaths shallow and tried not to blink. Usually, if you just stopped blinking for about thirty seconds, your eyes would tear up naturally. 

“Replacing you? What are you talking about?”

“Them,” he said, nodding towards Pietro and Wanda. “It is clear you intend to keep them here.”

“That doesn’t have anything to do with—I’m not—come on, you know I’m not ‘replacing you.’ You can’t be that insecure.”

“Can’t I? My biological parents left me as an infant to die from the elements, and the man I thought was my father cast me out. What reason have I to doubt that you might tire of me as well?” Loki screwed his eyes shut and bit his own tongue, hoping it would bring a few of the tears that eluded him.

“Come on, kid. I’ve told you every night since that trip to Malibu back in the summer that I love you.”

That was true, he had. Every night, including earlier that night, Tony had come to his room to check on him, and when he left, he always said something to the effect of, “Good night kid; I love you, okay?” He’d repeated it so many times now that Loki had stopped noticing it. Loki was so shocked by the revelation that he forgot to keep hyperventilating.

Tony noticed. “Kid, have you been trying to fake cry?”

Loki shook his head, nodded, and then shook his head again. He made himself sniffle again and bit the inside of his cheek, but all that did was make him wince. Perhaps he wasn’t hydrated enough.

Tony leaned back in his chair, running a hand through his hair. “You know kid, sometimes I think you might be more screwed up than me, and that’s saying something.”

“I think it would be a good idea for everyone here to go back to bed. Loki, I’m going to bring you a sleep aid, but I want you in my office at—” Doctor Samson looked down at his watch, then looked back at him, “—let’s say eleven AM tomorrow. Maybe we’ll try art therapy again.”

“Can’t we just play with the puppets instead?” Loki didn’t mind “art therapy;” drawing random things and watching Doctor Samson try to interpret the images he chose as if they were a window into his psyche never failed to amuse him. The last time, he had drawn a purple hippopotamus with green polka dots having a tea party with a blue flamingo just to see what he would make of it. But as a natural born storyteller, working with the puppets gave Loki a true creative outlet.

“We’ll see.” The man turned back to Bruce; of course, keeping him from fixating on him forever would have been impossible. “Bruce, tomorrow we’re getting your prescription filled, and as soon as possible, I want you to make another appointment with Doctor Sofen.” The look he gave his lover didn’t brook any argument.
     __
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—/__\ —

“You didn’t have any intention of running away again, did you?”

Loki moved over to make room for Tony to sit next to him. “I knew JARVIS wouldn’t let us leave the tower.”

Tony blew out the breath he must have been holding as he collapsed onto the edge of the bed. “Kid, what am I going to do with you? I get the feeling that a lot of the things you do are just for the sake of getting attention. And that kind of makes me think that the best thing I could do would be to ignore your attention seeking behaviors, but I’m a little worried that ignoring you might actually kill you.”

Loki nodded solemnly in agreement.

“Look, if it isn’t too big an ask, could you just try to set a good example for Helter and Skelter? When you think about it, it’s like you’re a big brother now.”

Loki wasn’t sure how he felt about that. He supposed it might be nice to not be the younger sibling this time around, but he had been enjoying life as an only child. He had never been good at sharing, and he definitely wasn’t sure how he felt about sharing Tony. “You are keeping them, then.”

“I can’t exactly throw them out on the street, can I?”

Loki resisted the urge to say yes, and to point out that as they spoke, there were approximately two and a half million children living on the streets in the United States alone. Tony couldn’t possibly adopt all of them. “Only you would want to adopt someone who tried to kill you,” he said instead.

“They keep saying they want to kill me, but so far, they haven’t tried anything.”

“I wasn’t necessarily talking about them.”

“You weren’t yourself.”

“Perhaps I was more myself than you think. I nearly broke your nose just the other day, remember?” They had never spoken about it afterward. Now that he thought of it, maybe that was why he had done everything he could since then to make everyone upset with him.

“You didn’t mean to,” said Tony, pulling him into a hug with his chin digging into the top of Loki’s head, which was a little awkward, both because of Tony’s sling and because Loki was a little tall to fit against him comfortably. Still, it was nice, and even though Loki didn’t feel like he deserved nice, he couldn’t bring himself to pull away. “You didn’t even mean to hit me in the nose so much as my nose hit your forehead.”

“Because I was trying to dislocate your arm.”

“I made you feel threatened,” Tony countered.

“That isn’t an excuse for my behavior.” Loki remembered what Bruce had said: "I’d apologize, but I’m not sure there’s a way I can apologize for something like this." If Bruce thought he couldn’t be forgiven for hurting Natasha when he hadn’t been himself, how could he expect to be forgiven for what he had done to Tony?

“Look, maybe you need to work on developing coping strategies that don’t involve violence, but I honestly don’t think you could hurt someone and mean it. You’re not a bad kid, Lokes. If you were, you wouldn’t be this worried about it.”

“If I’m not bad, why did Bruce ground me?”

“Because there’s a difference between being a bad person and doing things that you were told not to for safety reasons, dumbass.” Tony eased out of the hug but kept his good arm thrown around Loki’s shoulders as they both leaned back against his headboard. “So back to that, you have been breaking a lot of rules lately, and I wouldn’t want to make you feel insecure by not being strict enough. So tell me, Lokes, what do you think I should do?”

For a moment, Loki thought it had been a rhetorical question, but then he realized that Tony was waiting for an answer. “You aren’t going to make me choose my own punishment, are you? Because that’s always horrible. If you make me do that, I’ll pick something worse than you would.”

Tony smirked at him. “I’m pretty sure that’s the point of the whole ‘choose your own punishment’ scheme.” 

“Very well; in that case, I request that you beat me.”

That wiped the smug expression from the man’s face. “Kid, you know I’m not going to hit you for any reason—you do know that, right?” 

Loki did know that, otherwise he wouldn’t have suggested it. “I suppose you could trap me inside a tree until someone sheds a tear for me, or until the end of time, whichever comes first.”

“Not something I’m really capable of doing.” Tony’s eyebrows furrowed together. “Please tell me that’s not something Odin did to you.”

“He’s threatened it. I never wanted to find out if he was serious. But if you want to treat me as Odin would have, I suppose you could always lock me in the basement of the tower for several months and forbid my own mother from visiting me or sit back and watch as a couple of dwarves attempt to hold me down and sew my lips together.”

“Whoa, hold on. The thing with the dwarves actually happened?” Tony grabbed Loki’s chin with his good hand, tilting his face up towards him.

Loki wasn’t sure what he was doing at first, but then he realized that he was looking for scars he wouldn’t find. “Luckily, Thor was there, and he was having one of his rare moments of being a good elder brother. Or maybe he just felt like beating up a couple of dwarves and I happened to be under them. I can’t be entirely sure.”

Tony let go of him, but he still didn’t look happy. The idea that Odin would have allowed him to be mutilated must have disturbed him, even if it hadn’t happened. “Okay, you win. You don’t have to choose your own punishment, because obviously you lack a safe and sane reference point. How long did Bruce ground you for anyway?”

“He never said.”

“Let’s just make it a week then, which is probably less than you deserve for—what was it you did?”

“Provoked an insane dictator after Natasha told me not to.”

Tony’s eyebrows climbed towards his hairline. “Right, I should have asked that question first, because a week is definitely less than you deserve for that. You’re not leaving the tower for anything more fun than a dental appointment. And for all the other rules you’ve ignored lately, you’re going to go to bed every night at nine.”

Loki had always hated having a bedtime as a child in the palace nursery, and he didn’t want one now. “Are you sure you couldn’t just beat me?” 

Tony’s smirk returned. “I could have said eight-thirty. Also, we can negotiate the time after your punishment is over, but I’ve been thinking that you need a regular bedtime anyway.”

“Surely, you jest.”

“Jesteth I do not, oh ward of mine. I’ve already talked about it with Doc. He thinks going to bed at the same time every night might help you sleep better, and since you haven’t been able to do that on your own—”

Loki might have argued that point, but the door to his room opened and Doctor Samson stepped inside.

“I truly am sorry for how I behaved earlier,” said Loki, resisting the urge to call Samson out as a traitor instead. He couldn’t entirely suppress the urge to give him a dirty look, which might have been confusing for the man had he not seemed too distracted to notice.

“It’s okay,” said Samson, clearly forcing himself to smile as he handed Loki a small cup containing a single bright yellow tablet.

“You don’t seem okay. Do you want to talk about it, Leonard?”

“Thanks, but if I need to talk about anything, I’ll talk about it with my psychiatrist. Also, I’ve asked you before not to call me by my first name. I think it’s important that we maintain a professional relationship.”

“Even though everyone else calls you by your first name, and even though you’re dating one of my parental figures?”

“I’m sorry, Loki, I know it must be a little strange for you—”

“I’ve known.”

“Seriously? Did everyone know?”

Loki popped the yellow tablet under his tongue and settled into his pillows. 

Chapter Text

“So, can I trust you to go to breakfast, or are you still a flight risk? Tell me, how likely is it that you’ll say you’re going to the restroom, then run off to South America?”

Bruce blinked sleepily at Leonard, and immediately felt bad when he remembered the night before. He knew he’d panicked. “I’m sorry, Leonard. When I told you that you could sleep in the bed and I’d take the couch, I wasn’t planning to do that, I swear. But then I couldn’t sleep, and I just laid there thinking—”

“Ruminating,” corrected Leonard.

Bruce nodded in agreement. “I didn’t plan it. And I still had my bag packed from the trip to Latveria sitting by the door, so it was easy to just pick it up and get in the elevator—”

“It was easy to just walk away from your entire life here.” The “to walk away from me” was left unspoken, but Bruce knew it was there.

“I’ve done it so many times before that I guess it’s become a bad habit. Like I said, I’m sorry. It was inconsiderate, like Tony said.” As soon as he’d said it, he knew how much of an understatement it was.

“The thing is, you don’t have to sneak out. If you really need to leave for a while, you can tell us you’re going, and you might even consider telling us where. If you need some space, we can give you that. No one’s going to stop you.”

“Tony would probably try.”

“I’m sure if you explained to him why you needed space, he would give it to you. If he didn’t respect your wishes, the rest of us would stop him.”

“Loki wouldn’t understand either.”

“Maybe not, but he would understand a lot better if you talked with him about it and didn’t just disappear in the middle of the night. There’s no one you need to hide from anymore. Even General Ross knows not to mess with you now.”

“I know. I wasn’t thinking straight. I’m sorry.”

“Apology accepted. Now get dressed, we’re going to breakfast.”

(ㆆ_ㆆ) ﾉ”( ･ั﹏･ั)

Leonard wasn’t worried about Bruce disappearing on him. He had a talent for knowing when people were lying and when they were telling the truth, which was what made it possible for him to work with someone like Loki, who at times spoke entirely in the fictions he had created for himself without even knowing he was doing it. Bruce hadn’t been lying when he promised he wouldn’t run off the moment they left the tower, but as they walked down the street, his eyes darted around as if he expected someone to jump out and attack them. He was probably trying to stay aware of his surroundings so that nothing could take him by surprise, but at this rate he would work himself up to a panic attack all on his own. Leonard squeezed his hand. “I know you don’t want me to tell you to breathe anymore, but—”

“No, it’s alright. I don’t know why I said that last night.”

“Because you were getting frustrated with yourself for having a panic attack, which is the worst thing you can do when you have one. Instead, you just need to breathe in and out slowly and think of anything but the fact that you’re having a panic attack. Try to go to your happy place instead.”

“Go to my ‘happy place?’ That might be more irritating advice than reminding me to breathe.”

“If it helps, don’t call it your ‘happy place.’ Just think of something that makes you calm.”

Silence fell between them for a few moments, and Bruce’s breathing became more even. “Okay, I think that worked.”

“Oh, yeah? Where were you?” 

“Five PM.”

Leonard gave Bruce a knowing smile. Five PM—the time every day when they pretended their lives were normal. Leonard would have wrapped up his own work by then, and he would return to the room they shared. More often than not, Bruce would already be waiting for him there, and even though he’d have his own work still spread out on the table in front of him, he’d leave it for an hour and they’d sit and talk about their days—well, as much as Leonard could talk about his day, since his work with his patients was confidential, and as much as Bruce could talk about his, given that Leonard had only the most basic understanding of his research. Sometimes, they would give up on conversation and make out like a couple of teenagers. “What do you know, your happy place is the same as mine.”

“I thought we weren’t calling it that.” Bruce had smiled back at him, though.

Leonard made sure to turn down a different street before they got to the block where the sidewalk café where Loki had been killed stood, now rebuilt. With the help of the Maria Stark foundation, the entire area that had been affected by the Wrecking Crew’s attack had been rebuilt, but it was still full of unpleasant memories for them both. While it might be good for them to face those memories at some point, this wasn’t the morning for that.

Leonard pulled his phone out to search Stark Maps for the nearest pharmacy, hoping there would be a place nearby where they could eat. Anything but another sidewalk café would do. “Huh, there’s actually a Latverian bakery a block away—”

Bruce arched an eyebrow at him. 

Scratch that. No sidewalk cafés, and no Latverian food. 

(^-^(．.*)🕔❤

“Alright, Loki, go choose the puppets you want to use.” Leonard sat behind his desk and watched as Loki practically skipped over to the box on the other side of the room where the puppets were kept. Technically, Loki should have been a little old for “play therapy,” but sometimes he still had difficulty expressing himself, and found it easier to explore his feelings when he could put a little distance between himself and whatever troubled him. He also had a flair for the dramatic and seemed to genuinely enjoy putting on a show. 

Loki returned with an armful of puppets, including a bunny, a spider, a goat, an alligator, and a monkey with green fur. “Do you want to introduce me to your friends?” asked Leonard.

Loki held up the bunny puppet. “This is Brutis the Bunny.”  He proceeded to do the same for the rest. “This is Natia the Spider, and this is Thorin the goat. I believe you know Loki the Alligator, and this—” Loki held up the green monkey, “is Bob.”

Leonard had a feeling that he knew where this was going. “Okay, Loki. Do you want to use the puppets to tell me a story?”

Loki disappeared behind Leonard’s desk, and a moment later, Natia the Spider and Alligator Loki peered over the top of his desk. Natia poked Alligator Loki in the chest with one of her legs. “Everything is your fault!” she shrieked. “You’re lazy and no good, and you almost got us all murdered by an insane dictator!”

Brutis the Bunny popped up on the other side of Natia. He wasn’t sure how Loki kept three puppets up at once, but he’d seen it enough times already that it didn’t bother him. “Natia, be nice to your sister,” said Brutis in a fairly spot-on imitation of Bruce. (It wasn’t his voice, however. Loki might be capable of using magic to mimic people exactly, but that wasn’t what he was doing.)

A fourth puppet popped up over the edge of the desk. “No-o-o,” Thorin the Goat bleated. “Mother was right, she’s nothing but a brat and doesn’t deserve our sympathy. You’ve been too-oo-oo lenient with her, and now you’re letting her manipulate you.”

“You’re right,” said Brutis. “I’m going to ground her, even though she’s done nothing wrong!”

Leonard knew that Bruce hadn’t grounded Loki for no reason, but he tried not to interrupt whenever Loki told a story with the puppets. They might not be accurate retellings, but that wasn’t the point. Loki used the puppets to relate events as they had felt to him, not the events as they happened. 

“Yes, let’s all gang up on Loki!” cried Natia gleefully.

“Yes, let’s all gang up on Loki!” cried Thorin.

“GRRRRR,” said Brutis. Brutis popped back down below the desk, and up popped Bob. Bob glomped onto Natia, and a second later, Natia had been thrown across the room. “Bob strongest there is,” declared Bob. Alligator Loki backed away and disappeared behind the table as Bob and Thorin the goat began to wrestle with one another.

Leonard looked over the notes he had taken as their fight continued. Loki had felt persecuted by the others at a time when he’d already been experiencing a good deal of emotional turmoil. He didn’t feel like the grounding had been fair. He had also been frightened when Bruce had transformed into the Hulk and had hurt Natasha. When he looked up, the puppets were still going at one another. “Loki, think we could wrap this up now?”

The puppets stopped fighting with one another, and Loki stood, one of them still on each hand. He sat in the chair on his side of the desk. 

“That was good,” said Leonard. “I’d just like you to clarify something for me. Do you really think Brutis the Bunny grounded Loki the Alligator for no reason?”

Loki rolled his eyes. “I feel like there’s a right and a wrong answer to this.”

“There isn’t. After all, we’re just talking about the puppets. This is just a story.”

“Fine. Loki the Alligator hadn’t done anything wrong. All she did was try to stop her mother from marrying someone that Antonius the Turtle had referred to as an ‘evil dictator,’ while the others cowered before said evil dictator. Alligator Loki couldn’t do that. I’ve had enough—I mean, Alligator Loki has had enough of cowering before dictators.”

“But Alligator Loki changed her mind, didn’t she? She realized that she couldn’t control her mother, and that maybe the man she was marrying wasn’t as bad as Antonius the Turtle had told her.” 

Loki arched an eyebrow at him. “You remember that we’re actually talking about Victor Von Doom?”

“You told Bruce that he might not be so bad.”

“So, you’ve already heard this entire story from your boyfriend.”

“I’ve heard it from his perspective.” And this was where they were going to start getting into conflict-of-interest issues. Everyone now knew that he and Bruce were dating, and it was going to make it awkward for them to talk about anything concerning Bruce. In Loki’s case, it was as if his Leonard were dating one of his parents. “Loki, I promise that when we’re in a session, everything you say is confidential. I would never share anything you told me with Bruce without your permission, unless it was something I felt necessary to tell him as your guardian.” Loki already knew what that meant. They had talked about how there were certain things that he couldn’t keep confidential for the sake of Loki’s wellbeing; for example, if Loki ever told him he was having thoughts about hurting himself, he would have to inform the others. “I’ll also try to leave any personal biases I have at the door.”

Loki nodded, but he still seemed a little uncertain. 

“That being said, I admit that it’s impossible for me to be completely impartial. You do know that Bruce loves you, even if he has trouble expressing it?”

“Bruce tried to leave last night.”

“He thought he needed to leave in order to protect the rest of us. What Hulk did to Natasha scared him.”

“It scared me too,” Loki admitted. “I’m not scared of Bruce, though.”

“It might help Bruce if you told him that. And if you feel that it wasn’t fair for him to ground you, you should talk to him about that too. Do you want to practice with the puppets?”

Loki picked up Brutis the Bunny from the pile next to him and tossed it to Leonard. He put it on, and Loki put on the alligator puppet. 

“Brutis, may I speak to you about something?” asked Alligator Loki.

“Of course—you can always talk to me about anything, Alligator Loki!”

“That is not what Brutis sounds like,” Loki informed Leonard.

“Okay, fine—why don’t you be Brutis, and I’ll be Alligator Loki?”

They traded puppets.

“Brutis, may I speak to you about something?” asked Alligator Loki.

“What is it now, Loki? I’m working on boring science things and I’m not good enough at multitasking to keep up a conversation without setting my lab on fire, so make it quick.”

Leonard tried not to smile. He hated to admit it, but that probably did sound more like Bruce than his version did. “Brutis, I don’t think it was fair that you grounded me.”

“GRRR,” said Brutis, and popped down below the desk. Bob popped up in his place. “ALLIGATOR BAD!”

“Okay, time out,” said Leonard. “Loki, you aren’t actually afraid that Bruce would turn into Hulk if you brought this up with him, are you?”

“He has been a little growly lately,” said Loki, “but no, I don’t suppose he would.”

“All right, let’s try again.” Leonard held up the alligator puppet. “I don’t think it was fair that you grounded me,” the puppet repeated.

“Too bad,” said Brutis, “because once I’ve made a decision, I stick to it no matter what, even when I know I’m wrong.”

Leonard wondered for a moment if Loki was right. Bruce could be stubborn at times, and he did have a tendency towards black and white thinking. Because Hulk had hurt Natasha, it meant that he had lost all of the control he had worked so hard to achieve. If there was the slightest chance that he might hurt someone again, that meant he had to leave. But then again, Loki might just be confusing Bruce with Odin. Bruce wasn’t an unreasonable person when it came to other people, and Leonard doubted he agreed with Loki that he didn’t deserve to be punished but was sticking to his guns anyway. “Loki, are you sure that’s Brutis?”

Loki narrowed his eyes at the bunny suspiciously. “Perhaps not. Can we try again?”

Leonard held up his puppet. “Brutis, I don’t think it was fair that you grounded me.”

Loki took a moment to think this time. “Why don’t you think it was fair? I’m actually quite fair-minded and analytical, so please explain your position.”

Leonard would have to do some quick guesswork here in order to play Loki’s part right, though if he got it wrong, Loki was sure to call him out on it. “I didn’t mean to be a bad alligator,” said Alligator Loki, hanging his head. “I was just doing what I thought was right. I was trying to be a good alligator, but I got it wrong.”

Leonard knew he must have gotten close to the truth there, because Loki didn’t correct him. “I know,” Brutis said. “I didn’t ground you because you were a bad alligator, Loki.”

Alligator Loki tilted his head. “Then why did you ground me?”

Loki sighed defeatedly. “Because you acted without thinking of the consequences it would have for everyone else, and with disregard for the danger you were putting yourself in. I didn’t ground you just because I want you to suffer, I grounded you because even though I have trouble expressing it, I love you, and I want you to consider your actions more carefully in the future.” Loki scowled at the bunny puppet as it said this, and when it was done, he tossed it aside. “Damn. If that’s how that conversation is going to go, there’s no point to having it.”

“If your goal was to get Bruce to un-ground you, you’re probably right,” agreed Leonard.

  🐊            🐇
    \（✧o✧）/

“Thanks for seeing me on such short notice.”

“Not a problem, Doctor Banner. I can always make space in my schedule for clients who are experiencing mental health emergencies.”

“It was more of an emergency last night, to be honest. I’m feeling a little better about things now.”

“Are you certain? You seemed quite distressed when you called me earlier.”

“Did I?”

Doctor Sofen scribbled something on the notepad in front of her. “Bruce, have you been taking the medication I prescribed for you?”

Bruce tried to keep himself from fidgeting. There was no reason for him to be nervous around someone who was trying to help him, even if he felt a little like he was back in school and had forgotten to study for an exam. “I only got the prescription filled earlier today,” he admitted. “The truth is, Leonard insisted, otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered. I should have mentioned this before, but I doubt any kind of medication can work for me. My body tends to metabolize pharmaceuticals at a rate that means I get little or no benefit from them.”

Sofen frowned at him. “I see. I wish you had shared your concern with me before.” She tapped her chin with her pen, then pointed the pen at him. “How would you feel about taking an experimental drug? It just so happens that there’s a new SSRI under development that’s aimed specifically at individuals with enhanced metabolisms. I’m certain we could get you into the clinical trial.”

A pharmaceutical company was developing psychiatric drugs specifically targeted at enhanced individuals? Bruce wondered why he hadn’t heard about it, but then again, between his own research and missions with the Avengers, he didn’t have that much time to keep up with all the developments coming out of Big Pharma. He remembered the look Leonard had given him when he had admitted to experimenting on himself, but then, Leonard had wanted him to put his trust in Doctor Sofen’s expertise. Participating in a legitimate drug trial was different from trying horse tranquilizers or cocaine to see what affect they had on him. “I guess it wouldn’t hurt to try it, if I do qualify for the trial.”

“I’m certain you will. In the meantime, I want you to start the medication I already prescribed. We’ll just up the dosage to the maximum that’s generally considered safe for a normal human being, since we know you’re anything but that.” Again, Sofen scribbled something in her notes. Then she looked up at him, smiling in a way that didn’t seem entirely authentic, but was likely meant to put him at ease. “Now, can you tell me if there was anything that triggered your recent distress?”

“I, uh—” Before Bruce could put his thoughts in order, a siren-like sound interrupted him. He bolted upwards, sure that it was the new emergency alert system the city had installed after the Chitauri invasion.

Doctor Sofen took her phone out of her pocket. “Sorry, that’s just an alarm I set to let me know how much time we had left. I thought I had it on vibrate. We have plenty of time left, though, so please take your time.”

Bruce settled back into his chair and took a deep breath to steady himself. “I thought I was in control of the other guy—” 

“Your alter,” Sofen interrupted. Another siren-like sound issued from her phone, and Bruce jumped again, even though he should have known what it was now. “I’m sorry, I thought I turned that off. It’s a new phone, so I’m still trying to figure out how it works.”

“Anyway,” Bruce began again, “I was on a mission, and I transformed, but not when I wanted to. In fact, there weren’t any enemies around, I was just with my teammates.” He had to be careful about how much he told her. Loki’s presence on Earth was still a secret. She had been seen going in and out of the tower, but for anyone who might be curious, the answer was either that she was an SI intern, or the relative of an SI employee. “There was some infighting. I got agitated, then I transformed. The other guy picked a fight with Thor and threw Natasha about fifty yards through the air. When she landed, she broke her arm.”

“And how did that make you feel?” Bruce noticed that Doctor Sofen had started fidgeting with her pen, and her breathing had become shallower. Of course, he was making her nervous. He’d just admitted that he might not have control over his transformation into a violent monster who had injured his own teammate. 

“Horrible doesn’t even begin to describe it. What the other guy did was unforgivable.” Bruce felt his own heart beat faster. “I’m sorry. Maybe I should just go.”

“No, don’t go.” Doctor Sofen looked up and smiled at him weakly. “You’re not agitated right now, are you Bruce?” Her phone alarm started again, and this time it was Sofen who jumped. “Sorry,” she said, turning it off again.

“No, you’re right. I’m fine.” At least, he should have been fine. There was nothing in this room that should have been agitating him, but he was still on edge.

“What do you think has brought on this sudden lack of control?” asked Sofen.

“I don’t know. Maybe I never had as much control as I thought, or maybe I’ve just gotten too relaxed. Then again, maybe it’s stress.”

“Being an Avenger must be extremely stressful. Have you thought about taking a leave of absence?”

“I couldn’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“The others need me—well, not me. It’s the other guy they need.”

“But is it even safe to let him out anymore? Bruce, have you considered—” Doctor Sofen bit her lip. She seemed reluctant to finish her statement, but Bruce waited patiently. “Have you considered that one of these days, you won’t be able to go back?”

“You think there’s a chance that the other guy will take over?” 

“It’s entirely possible for an alter to become the host personality. In some cases, the original personality might still come out at times, but in other cases—I’m sorry, Bruce. The important thing to remember is that the personality you call ‘the other guy’ is also you. I know you don’t want to hear that, especially after he hurt your colleague.”

“Natasha and the other Avengers are more than colleagues. At this point, we’re like family.”

Doctor Sofen tapped her notepad with her pen. “You know, you haven’t told me much about your family—not your work family, but your real family. Your mother and your father.”

His response was automatic. “There’s not much to say about them. They’re both dead.” 

“Bruce,” said Doctor Sofen, turning his name into a quiet reprimand. “Ninety percent of patients with DID were victims of some form of childhood abuse or severe neglect.”

“We’ve been talking about this as if I have typical DID, but the other guy isn’t a personality I developed in order to cope with childhood trauma,” Bruce pointed out. “He’s the result of exposing myself to gamma radiation as an adult.”

“How sure are you that ‘the other guy’ didn’t exist before the experiment in some form?”

“Reasonably certain—”

“It is possible to have DID and not know it. Switches aren’t always dramatic, obvious, or detectable. At this point, there’s no way for us to know for sure. And if you do have a history of childhood abuse—Bruce, you still haven’t told me anything about either of your parents, and I’m starting to get the feeling that there’s a reason you’re avoiding the topic.”

Leonard had wanted him to tell Doctor Sofen about the domestic abuse he had witnessed when he was young. As he had pointed out, it was something he ought to have told her from the beginning, but somehow, Bruce hadn’t thought it relevant up until now. Initially he’d only agreed to see Doctor Sofen because he’d been a feeling a little stressed, and because as Leonard put it, “it never hurts to have a disinterested third party to talk to.” “The abuse was never directed at me,” Bruce told her.

Sofen nodded in understanding. “Thank you for sharing that with me, I know it was difficult for you. Witnessing intimate partner abuse can be as damaging for children as experiencing the abuse themselves. But have you considered that you might have experienced firsthand abuse as well and repressed those memories? We can’t know, unless—” Sofen leaned in closer to him, her manner almost conspiratorial. “Would you be open to trying hypnotherapy? I know it sounds like pseudoscience, but it’s really just a way of getting you into a highly relaxed state that makes it easier for you to access repressed memories.”

“I don’t know. I might talk it over with Leonard first.” Bruce doubted that there was anything he had repressed, but if there was, was it always a good idea to try to recover those kinds of memories? 

Doctor Sofen frowned at him. “Do you not trust my judgment? I’m your psychiatrist, not Leonard.”

“I’m sorry, I just need to think about it. That’s all I meant. It isn’t that I don’t trust you.”

“Think about it, then. I also want you to think seriously about taking a hiatus from the Avengers. You seem to be in a delicate, and possibly quite dangerous state of mind. I worry about what might happen the next time you become triggered. And please, whatever else you decide to do, take the medication I prescribed for you.”

(｀∇´)ノ><
             | | |
              웃 
  
Wanda shoved the food around her dinner plate. As far as Pepper knew, she hadn’t eaten anything since the night before, but she didn’t seem to have any plans to eat now either. Pietro was eating enough for them both. Loki snuck a large piece of his broccoli onto Thor’s plate, but his brother didn’t seem to notice; texting at the table seemed to take up every bit of his concentration, as he searched and pecked one letter at a time. For once, his food remained as untouched as Wanda’s.

Pepper cleared her throat. “Thor, would you mind putting your phone away? We all agreed we wouldn’t use our phones at the table.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Tony’s lips quirk upward. “And it gets Pep agitated when she sees anyone else with their phone, because then she starts thinking about all the texts and emails she could be replying to.”

Pepper resisted the urge to stab her fiancé in the hand with her fork. Instead, she leaned across the table and spooned more broccoli onto Loki’s plate. “I don’t have a problem.” 

“Spoken like a true addict,” said Tony.

Without acknowledging that Pepper had spoken to him, Thor scowled at his phone, then stood up and left the table.

Pepper watched him leave. “Okay, what was that about?” 

“He’s been texting Jane.” Loki dumped the broccoli she’d just served him onto his brother’s plate, this time without bothering to be sneaky about it. Then he grinned. “She’s breaking up with him.”

“Again?” Pepper scooped up the broccoli from Thor’s plate and transferred it back to Loki’s. 

The Cheshire grin Loki wore grew even wider. “She saw that photo of Thor and Natasha dancing together.”

Pepper groaned out loud. If they had only remembered to tell her that someone had gotten a picture of them, she could have tried to keep it out of the press. The problem wasn’t that it was of Thor and Natasha together. The problem was that they had been dancing at Victor Von Doom’s wedding. She’d been trying to decide how to spin this. Either she could say that they’d been on an undercover mission in Latveria, or she could point out that Thor’s mother had been the bride. She didn’t know which would be worse; to have the Avengers accused of going rogue and breaking international agreements, or for the public to know that Victor Von Doom’s new wife was Thor’s mother. There really wasn’t a good option, and now she was seriously thinking about having Tony do a press conference—in other words, blow everything up, then sit back and watch as both the Avengers and SI went up in flames. 

She looked down at the ring she’d started wearing just around the residential floors of the tower; the problem was that she could only use that fire extinguisher once. 

Tony noticed. “This can’t be that bad. Can’t we just claim the photo’s a deep fake?”

Pepper shook her head. “That wasn’t the only photo of them at the wedding. There are also photos of Bruce talking to a girl that’s rumored to be Von Doom’s protege. Plus, they’ve got drone photos of the SI jet sitting in the airport in Sokovia, with Clint standing outside it. They also have the testimony of firsthand witnesses who saw them walking through the airport in Sokovia, and somehow, they were able to get the passenger manifest from the commercial flight they took from Stockholm to New York.”

“These people really do their homework, don’t they? Man are we screwed. They didn’t get any pictures of Loki, though?”

“The photographer that took the photos at the wedding must not have realized she was with them.”

“So, on the bright side, this situation could have been a lot worse.”

Pepper gave him a tight-lipped smile. “Leave it to you to find the silver lining in all this.”

“What does ‘silver lining’ mean?” asked Pietro.

“It means she is being sarcastic,” Wanda told him. “We may have lucked out, Pietro. We do not have to destroy Stark and his Avengers ourselves, but we will have front row seats to their downfall anyway.”

“At least eat your fish,” Tony told her. “Omega-3 fatty acids are good for you. Also, if you’re going to gloat about our downfall, maybe you shouldn’t do it in English.”

“Loki and JARVIS would understand anyway, if we spoke in Sokovian.”

“You’re twins,” said Tony. “Don’t twins always have some sort of secret language only they understand?”

Wanda shrugged. “Anyway, it is not a secret that we hate you.”

Pepper stood and went to the refrigerator. There, she rummaged around in one of the drawers until she found one of the protein drinks they had supplemented Loki’s diet with back when he had difficulty eating enough to put on weight. Loki was back to a healthy weight now and didn’t need them anymore, but there were still a few floating around in the fridge.

She put the bottle in front of Wanda and tapped the lid with a manicured fingernail. “If you’re not going to eat, at least drink this.”

Wanda eyed it suspiciously. “Why is it that color?” 

“It’s strawberry flavored.” She supposed the bright pink color was a little off-putting, but if Wanda didn’t like it, she could still eat her dinner instead.

“In that case, I cannot drink this. I am allergic to strawberries.”

“Really? So am I,” Pepper told her, picking the bottle back up. “I’m not sure there’s even enough real strawberry in this kind of thing to trigger an allergic reaction, but I’ve never wanted to risk it. I think there might be some chocolate left—”

“I am allergic to chocolate as well.”

Pepper arched an eyebrow at her. “Really?”

“She is making it up,” Pietro told her, confirming her suspicion. “She is not allergic to anything.”

Wanda kicked her brother under the table.

“Alright, young lady.” Pepper put the strawberry protein shake back down in front of her. “Either you’re going to eat everything on your plate or you’re going to drink this. You aren’t leaving the table until you do.” Wanda didn’t have much on the plate in front of her—just a small piece of fish, a few pieces of broccoli, and barely a spoonful of rice. Eating all of it wasn’t likely to make her sick.

“You cannot make me eat.” Wanda crossed her arms in front of her. “I am not a small child, and you are not my matka.”

“Wanda, as long as you’re here, it’s our responsibility to take care of you. I haven’t seen you eat more than a few bites since you’ve been here.”

“Fine,” said Wanda, sitting back in her chair, her mouth drawn into a thin line and her arms crossed over her chest. “I’ll just sit here forever, then.”

“If that’s your choice,” said Pepper, feeling a small amount of relief—she wasn’t sure what she would have done if Wanda had questioned her authority to tell her she couldn’t leave the table.

;; •̀_•́)_且 ( ︶︿︶)

“She might still come to the conclusion that this isn’t worth it—”

“Pepper, this isn’t a normal power struggle between child and guardian. This is a hunger strike. In Wanda’s mind, she’s Ghandi protesting the British rule of India.”

Pepper knocked her head against the doorway to their bedroom, where both she and Tony hovered. They had left Wanda sitting at the table with JARVIS watching her and retreated back to the penthouse. That had been almost two hours ago. “I screwed up, didn’t I? She might have started eating on her own if I’d just waited a day or two, but now—”

“Now you’ve made it a thing,” said Tony. “If we don’t call this off, she might actually sit there until breakfast.”

Pepper let out a little whine as she covered her face with her hands. “If we ever have our own kids, I’m going to be a horrible mother, aren’t I?”

“Are you kidding? Pepper, you’re already a fantastic mother. Wanda’s been here one day, and you care this much. And you’re awesome with Loki—”

“Loki has a mother,” Pepper pointed out.

“I assume you’re referring to Bruce,” said Tony. “He can have more than one, you know. Also, if you’re not one of Loki’s moms, why did you keep serving him broccoli at dinner?”

“Usually, Thor would notice what he was doing and put more on his plate until he gave up and ate it. I was just filling in.”

Tony pulled her into his arms and gave her a peck on the cheek. “Pep, you are already well on your way to being the best mom in the world. Just let me try to de-escalate this situation with Wanda, okay? I’ll try to do it in a way that doesn’t undermine you.”

“You’re going to de-escalate a situation?” Tony Stark was going to de-escalate a situation that she had created. Had the world just turned upside down? She might as well let him try, though. “Just don’t get killed, Tony.”

◔ ⊂( ° ෴ °⊂ )  BONUS SCENE: PROJECT “INFORM THE UNIVERSE THAT LOKI IS TONY’S KID,” ATTEMPT #1

“JARVIS said you wanted to see me. I’m not in trouble again, am I?” This time, Loki didn’t seem happy about the prospect of being in trouble; maybe he’d finally gotten enough of that kind of attention.

“No, you’re not in trouble. Just go stand over there.” Tony pointed to the corner of the penthouse living room.

Loki went to the corner and stood with his nose in it.

“Kid, I just told you, you aren’t in trouble. I’m not putting you in time out, so you can turn around.”

Loki turned around slowly, his eyebrows furrowed together in confusion.

“Okay, look. This is what we’re going to do. See this?” Tony held up the frisbee so that Loki could see it. His first idea was that they should play catch—because that was something you did with your kid, right? He had never done anything like that with Howard, but that probably meant he was onto something. He’d dug around in the surplus merchandise closet for a ball, but there hadn’t been any; just a box full of frisbees with Captain America shields printed on them. Tony had been up until four that morning painting one of them to look like his arc reactor instead, since obviously, he couldn’t have used it as is. “I’m going to throw this, and you’re going to catch it, okay?”

“Should we really be doing this in your sitting room?”

“Hey, we could have done this outside, but someone had to go and get grounded.”

Loki arched an eyebrow at him. “Why are we doing this at all?”

Maybe he should have have told Loki why they were doing this, but obviously, neither Thor or Frigga had talked to him about it. For all he knew, magic worked the same as making a wish when you blew out birthday candles, and it wouldn’t work if you said the wish out loud. “It’s just something people do on Earth. Consider this part of your cultural education.”

“Midgardians are exceedingly strange creatures, if standing around throwing plastic discuses to one another is some sort of cultural tradition.”

Tony couldn’t disagree with that. “Okay, I’m going to throw it now. Ready?”

Loki didn’t answer, and Tony decided the kid was as ready as he would ever be. He threw the frisbee and watched as it curved to the right. Damn, Cap made that look easier than it was. Tony held his breath as it headed for one of the mid-century modern Murano glass floor lamps Pepper had picked up at an auction for the reasonable price of just under ten thousand dollars. 

It bounced off the shade, and Tony let out the breath he’d been holding. Then a large black dog sprang across the room to catch the disc on the rebound, knocking the delicate lamp over in the process.

Tony stood staring at the shattered pieces of the lamp as Loki brought him the frisbee, proudly wagging his tail.
 
“What the hell, Tony?” 

Tony turned around to see Pepper standing in the door of their bedroom, hands on her hips. “Oh, hey Pep. I thought you’d already left for your meeting.”

“Don’t ‘hey, Pep,’ me.”

Tony pointed to the dog. “He did it.”

Loki morphed back into the form he’d been in before and pinned him with an indignant look. “I only did what you told me to. I was under the impression that it was important to you that I catch the disc.”

Pepper narrowed her eyes at Tony, her mouth flattening out into a straight line, then pointed to the corner where Loki had been standing before. Tony wanted to argue, but in that moment, her expression reminded him so much of Anna Jarvis whenever she’d caught him doing something he wasn’t supposed to that when he opened his mouth, no sound came out of it. He went to the corner where Loki had been standing before and put his own nose in it. “And you can stay there until you’re ready to act at least a third of your age,” said Pepper. “Loki, have you had breakfast yet, sweetheart?”

“No, ma’am,” said Loki.

“Sit down in the kitchen and I’ll make you some waffles.” 

What the heck? Pepper had never made Tony waffles...

Chapter Text

Wanda eyed Tony suspiciously as he dug around in the refrigerator. “What are you doing?” 

“Whenever Pep cooks, she doesn’t make enough food, so I’m still a little hungry. Just going to make a snack.” Tony placed the eggs and the milk on the counter next to the stove. He took out a large mixing bowl from under the counter. Even with his back to her, he knew Wanda was still watching as he took the flour and the powdered sugar from another cabinet and set them out with the rest of his ingredients. What else did she have to do? She had been sitting at the table for almost an hour, staring at a plate of cold fish and broccoli. Once he had mixed the batter together, he took a large frying pan from under the counter and put it on the stove, turned the stove up to medium high, and waited for it to heat up. He poured just enough batter in to cover the bottom of the pan.

“Are you making palacinka?” 

Tony didn’t answer Wanda’s question, but he was pretty sure the answer was yes. Anna had called them palacsinta. Most native English speakers would call them crepes, although there was probably some subtle difference between the two that he didn’t fully appreciate. He made a humming noise. “Should I make these with cottage cheese or jam?”

“They are best with orange marmalade.”

“Sounds good. I know Bruce likes marmalade on toast, so if you look in the refrigerator, there might be some.”

“I thought I wasn’t allowed to leave the table until I ate this cold, overly salty fish.”

The fish hadn’t been cold an hour ago, nor was there any salt on Wanda’s fish. Pepper had made her portion without any seasoning, but he wasn’t going to call her on it. “I’ve got to watch this pan, so you’re allowed to get up and hand me stuff. Which is a special privilege, by the way, because I usually hate it when people hand me stuff.” 

Wanda got up and went to the refrigerator. It only took her a few moments to find the orange marmalade, possibly because Pepper had organized the common room refrigerator alphabetically, bless her poor little OCD heart. She placed the jar of marmalade on the counter next to Tony, then hovered there uncertainly. 

“Could you go get a plate?” Tony asked her. “This one’s almost done.” Wanda went straight to the cabinet where the plates were kept. She was an intelligent and observant girl, and Tony would have bet that she already knew the location of everything in the kitchen better than he did. She took out a large plate and brought it back to him. Tony slid the crepe onto it while it was still in her hands. “Why don’t you take that one?”

“I thought this was a snack for you.”

“It is, but there’s plenty of batter here.”

“You think you can trick me into eating? Do I look like a child?”

“Fine, if you don’t want it—”

Wanda pursed her lips together and stared down at the crepe. “I didn’t say I didn’t want it.” She looked back up at him with big eyes, as if begging him to tell her she had to eat it.

“Go ahead and eat it,” Tony told her. “I won’t tell anyone if you won’t.”

“If I eat it, do I still have to eat the fish?”

“Actually, I’m thinking you shouldn’t eat fish that’s been sitting out for over an hour. Why don’t we just toss that, okay?”

Wanda grabbed a spoon out of the drawer that she already knew contained the cutlery and spread a generous amount of marmalade over her palacsinta, or palacinka, or whatever you wanted to call it. She rolled it up and took it back to the table, pushing her dinner plate aside. Tony watched as she gobbled up half the marmalade filled crepe, but then she slowed down and began to quietly hyperventilate in that same way that Loki did before having a meltdown. A moment later, Wanda pushed her plate away and began sobbing into the sleeves of her sweatshirt.

“Whoa, whoa. What’s wrong? It can’t be that bad. I’m pretty sure this is the one of the few things I know how to make.”

“It’s good,” Wanda said through her tears. “It tastes just like the ones mama used to make, except maybe a little sweeter.”

“Oh, crap.” Tony was still prepaid on the swear jar, but at this rate he was going to have to put another hundred bucks in there. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you homesick.”

Wanda’s sobbing only grew louder. “That’s not it. I want to hate you, but it is too hard when you are nice! Why can’t you just be a terrible person so I can hate you?” 

Tony stood there feeling like a complete jerk, even though according to Wanda, the problem was that he hadn’t been one. Would it make him even more of a jerk if he tried to comfort her? Before he could come up with an answer, a speeding bullet train hit him, or at least that was what it felt like. He should have been laid out across the floor, but Pietro held him up by the collar of his shirt. “What have you done to my sister, Stark?”

Tony shook his head, trying to get his brain to reassemble itself enough so that he could talk.

“Pietro, stop,” cried Wanda. “All he did was make me palacinka. It tastes so good—like mama’s.”

Pietro looked from the bowl of batter to the pan on the stove. He let go of Tony’s collar, allowing him slink to his knees. “Oh. That is okay then.” Pietro sat down at the table, as if he hadn’t just been involved in a head-on collision. “I like mine with cheese curds and walnuts.”

“There's cottage cheese in the fridge, leftover from Pep’s last detox diet,” Tony told him. “And there must be walnuts around here somewhere because Thor was showing off, using that hammer of his to crack them, like a week or two ago. But you might need to make your own, because I think I might have a concussion.”

┗(*｀へ´*)┓三┗( ●-෴ ｀｡)づ-[二二]

Tony must have blacked out, because when he woke up, he was lying on a cot in med bay, and Bruce was looking down at him with that “this is your own fault” look again. “You know, you’re supposed to be taking it easy. You’re lucky you didn’t do any more damage to your shoulder when you hit the floor.”

“I was just making a snack,” Tony complained as he sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the cot. “How was I supposed to know it would be dangerous?”

Bruce shook his head, but the reproachful look he’d been giving him slid, turning into something tired and distraught. 

“Hey, you alright?”

“Not really, Tony. I saw my psychiatrist today. She thinks I should take a hiatus from the whole Avenger thing.”

“If that’s what you need, I’m sure we can do without you for a few weeks.”

“It might need to be more than a few weeks.”

“Take as much time as you need, then. Your health comes first. You are going to stay here, though? You’re not still thinking about leaving?”

Bruce’s expression became pained. “I don’t see how I can stay, Tony. I wouldn’t be earning my keep, for one thing.”

“That’s one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever heard. First of all, even if you weren’t Avengering with us, you’re still like our staff physician—”

“You really ought to get someone with a valid medical license.”

“Bruce, I couldn’t care less how out of date your credentials are. There’s no one else I’d rather have putting me back together after I’ve done something stupid, like flying into a helicopter while talking on the phone.”

“You could just stop doing things like that.”

“We both know I won’t. Anyway, like I said, you’re pretty much our staff physician, which I haven’t even been paying you for. You’re also my science bro, and you’ve made enough contributions to my projects that SI should be paying you too.”

“I’ve told you that’s unnecessary. As long as I get the resources to continue my own research, we’re more than even.”

“Whatever you say, Bruce. Just know that your name is on more than one patent, and you can expect to start getting royalty checks in the mail soon. If you don’t cash them, I’ll just have them converted into SI stock. Reason three that your whole ‘I wouldn’t be earning my keep’ thing is ridiculous: your boyfriend is our staff psychologist. If Leonard had had a wife, husband, or domestic partner when I brought him on, they’d be living here rent free too, and they’d be on his health insurance and everything.”

“Leonard and I aren’t married.”

“Hey, let’s not focus on minor details, alright? I’m still not going to throw you out of the tower for Leonard’s sake as much as anyone else’s. And even if you weren’t dating Leonard, you’d still be part of the family, so really, all the other arguments don’t even matter. I want you here, Leonard and Loki need you here. That’s that. You’re not going anywhere. You’re stuck with us for better or for worse, until death do us part. Got it?”

“Tony, the Avengers aren’t really—”

Before Bruce could finish that statement, the door to the examination room opened, and Loki wandered in, holding a plate of palacsinta. “Stark, I demand to know why you have not made these before. I was under the impression that the only thing you could make was chicken paprikash.”

“I might be able to make a few other things,” Tony admitted.

“Do you want to know what I think? I think you have been pretending to not know how to cook to get out of having to cook meals, when the truth is you are a better cook than anyone else here.”

“JARVIS, what time is it?” 

“It is after nine PM,” JARVIS announced.

Loki made a whining sound. “Tony, you can’t have been serious about that. Nine is much too early.”

Tony rolled his eyes at the kid’s dramatics. “Loki, I want you to go to bed without throwing a tantrum, or I swear I’m going to change my mind about beating your ass.” 

Bruce lurched towards him and made another one of those growling noises he’d been making lately. It might have been his own imagination running wild, but Tony could have sworn that his irises were tinged with green. 

“Whoa, whoa—it was a joke Bruce, you know I’d never hit him!”

Loki dropped his plate on the ground and sprinted out of the room like an antelope that had spotted a lion. Bruce covered his eyes with his hands and stepped backwards until he hit the wall. Tony just stood there, giving Bruce a few moments to collect himself before he said anything. “Okay, so you really weren’t kidding about needing some time off—”

“Don’t come near me.”

“I’m not. I’m staying right where I’ve been the whole time. JARVIS, could you call Doc up here—”

“NO.”

“Okay, cancel that, JARVIS. Definitely do not call Doc up to med bay.” 

“Understood, Sir.” Hopefully, what JARVIS had understood was that he meant for him to do the opposite.

“I need to get out of here before I hurt someone.”

“You’re not going to hurt anyone, Bruce, because no one’s being threatened. For a second there, you thought I was threatening Loki, or maybe Hulk did, but that was a joke. A joke that was in really bad taste now that I think about it.”

“You don’t know that I won’t hurt anyone. I’m not safe, Doctor Sofen said so.”

“Screw Doctor Sofen, Bruce. You’ve seen her what, twice? I mean, yeah, you’ve been a little off your game—”

“I broke Natasha’s arm.”

“Hulk broke Natasha’s arm.”

“Doctor Sofen says we’re the same person.”

“Again, screw Doctor Sofen. Even if that’s true, we have no proof that the other guy meant to hurt her. It might have just been an accident.  Hulk throws Nat into the air all the time when we’re in the middle of a fight, and she usually lands on her feet. I watched him throw her onto a moving helicopter once.”

“I also attacked Thor.”

“That wouldn’t be the first time that happened either. Hulk and Thor have kind of a friendly rivalry going on. Thor loves testing his strength against the big guy, and he’s pretty much immortal. I mean, you remember that when Loki was still immortal, you smashed him into floor repeatedly and he was perfectly—”

Bruce glared at him.

“Oh crap, sorry. I shouldn’t have brought that up.” Note to self, put five hundred dollars in the swear jar, just to play it safe. “He’s fine now though, and he’s not even scared of you anymore. I mean, until a couple minutes ago, anyway—” This was not going well. Where was Doc?

The elevator doors opened and when Bruce saw Doc walk out, he doubled down on glaring at Tony. The man approached carefully, as if Bruce were a small, wounded animal. “Hey, Bruce. Why don’t we go back to our room to talk, and you could take your medication?”

Tony held his own breath until Bruce nodded reluctantly and let Doc lead him out of the room. When they were gone, he took a few steps before catching himself on the edge of a countertop. He still felt a little woozy, and he’d forgotten to ask Bruce if he thought he had a concussion. Oh well, there would be time enough to have a concussion later. “JARVIS, find out everything you can about this psychiatrist Bruce is seeing. Something just doesn’t seem right there. Where’s Loki, by the way?”

“He went straight to bed, Sir.”

Tony sidestepped Loki’s spilled palacsinta on his way to the elevator. “While you’re at it, get Dummy or U to clean that up.”

“Dummy and U aren’t allowed in the med bay,” JARVIS told him. “There’s too much equipment in the med bay that would be a larger hassle to replace than a blender or coffee maker.”

“Fine. You clean it up, then.”

“Would that I could, Sir.”

ヽ(д`ヽ)｡｡ ⊂( ° ෴ °⊂ )  (๑‾᷆д‾᷇ ╬ )

Tony knocked on Loki’s door but didn’t wait for him to respond before entering. The lights were still on, but Loki was already in bed with the comforter pulled up over his head.

“I’m guessing you’re still awake, Rudolph.”

“No, I’m not. I’m asleep. I went to bed just like you told me, without making any more fuss.”

“You know I wasn’t serious about beating you, right?”

“I know you weren’t, but Bruce seemed rather more serious.”

Tony sat down on the edge of the bed. “Loki, he was getting growly with me, not you. I don’t think Hulk appreciated my sense of humor.” He tugged on the comforter. “Bruce would never hurt you, and neither would the other guy. Haven’t you noticed how protective Hulk has been of you ever since that time you died? He was the one that dug you out of the rubble, and you don’t know what it took for us to convince him to put you down. He carried you all the way back to the tower.”

Loki’s head emerged from the comforter. “Bruce didn’t transform just now, did he?”

“No, he managed to hold himself back. He’s scared he’s losing it, though.”

“I shouldn’t have run.”

“No, that was fine. If you’re ever in a situation where you don’t feel safe, feel free to remove yourself from it, so long as that doesn’t put you in more danger. To tell the truth, things might have been worse if you’d stayed, because Hulk might not have backed off if he thought you needed protecting.”’

“Wonderful. All I need is yet another overprotective guardian.”

“Personally, I think I’ve been just the right amount of protective, but let’s not start that argument up again now. Hey, you want me to make more palacsinta for you, since you dropped yours earlier?”

Loki shook his head. “I didn’t need it anyway. It would have gone straight to my thighs.”

“You’re not fat, Loki. You’ve been on Earth for what, eight months? And you’re already having body image issues. I blame Facebook.”

“It’s not like we don’t have ‘body image issues’ on Asgard. It’s just that instead of wanting to look like Beyonce or David Beckham, everyone wants to look like Thor.”

“Even the women?”

Loki rolled his eyes. “I suppose the women all want to look like Lady Kelda.”

“Kelda, huh? And what does she look like?”

“Like a Norse Kim Kardashian.”

Tony whistled. “Is this Kelda a fertility goddess or something?”

“Not that I know of. But you realize that Thor and my mother were both considered to be fertility deities by your ancient Norse people?”

“I can see that, I guess.”

“Unless you consider that Thor was a toddler in that era, and that Frigga seems to be barren.”

“Huh—”

“Don’t think about it too hard; you’ve already suffered a head injury. Didn’t you mean for me to be asleep by now? Not that I’ll even be able to sleep this early.”

“Loki, even before everything that’s been happening, I thought it would be a good idea to establish a regular bedtime for you. It really might help with your sleep issues.”

“You’re one to talk about my sleep issues.”

“I know, I keep weird hours and I don’t get as much sleep as I should. But I’m not still growing—and don’t say anything about how I must have stopped growing when I was twelve. I’m actually normal, it’s everyone else around here that’s freakishly tall.”

“Who has the body issues now?”

“For your information, I am Tony frickin’ Stark, and I am one hundred percent comfortable in my own skin. Anyway, you don’t have to go to sleep. You just have to lie in bed with your eyes closed and the lights off. That’s all I ask.”

“I don’t have to lie in bed with all the lights off, do I?”

Crap, he’d forgotten. Loki didn’t sleep with the lights off. He still couldn’t be in complete darkness without getting anxious, because it reminded him of the void he had fallen through that one time. “No, of course not. You can sleep with the lights dimmed like you normally do.” Now he wondered if Loki’s strong objection to having a bedtime had to do with his fear of being alone in the dark, and all the anxiety he already had around sleeping. The kid didn’t even sleep in his own bed half the time. Tony cursed himself for once again being a complete idiot. 

But he didn’t want to go back on his word now, because the kid needed consistency and for people to do what they said they were going to do, yada, yada, yada. Tony told himself it ought to be fine. Loki wasn’t freaking out yet, and like he’d already told him, there was no reason he had to turn the lights all the way off and lay there in the dark; or be alone, for that matter. “Hey JARVIS, go ahead and dim the lights. You, scootch over.”

“You’re going to sleep here?”

“I might have a concussion. I shouldn’t sleep alone.”

“When you do sleep at night, you sleep beside Lady Pepper,” Loki pointed out. “Also, if you might have a concussion, aren’t I supposed to wake you up every hour or so to check for confusion? That’s what you all did when you thought I might have one.”

“It’s not that kind of concussion,” he said, lying down in the space Loki had vacated for him. Just in case he did have a concussion, he wouldn’t go to sleep; he’d just wait until Loki fell asleep, then sneak out. After that, he could have JARVIS monitor the kid and let him know if he woke up.

“But it’s the kind of concussion that means you can’t sleep on your own.” Loki didn’t seem to be buying it, but he wasn’t telling him to get out of his bed either.

“Don’t think about it too hard.”

[(≚෴≚)] [(-,  – )] ƶƵz

“Sir,” said JARVIS.

Tony couldn’t remember where he was for a moment, until he looked around Loki’s dimly lit room and heard the young god snoring next to him. “Did I fall asleep?” 

“Yes, Sir. I took it upon myself to wake you just in case you do have a concussion. I suppose I should ask you something to make sure you are not suffering from confusion. If you would Sir, answer the following? If x is the average of m and 9, y is the average of 2m and 15, and z is the average of 3m and 18, what is the average of x, y, and z in terms of m?”

“Uh—am I allowed to use a calculator? And maybe a dry erase board?”

“Oh dear. If you can’t answer a simple question like that, perhaps I should summon an ambulance.”

“No, don’t do that JARVIS. I’m pretty sure the answer is C. The answer is usually C.”

“This isn’t a multiple-choice exam, Sir. Are you certain you aren’t experiencing confusion?”

“JARVIS, sometimes I can’t tell if you’re the one who can’t tell I’m joking, or if I’m the one who can’t tell you’re joking.”

“I suppose we’re at an impasse then.”

Tony threw his hands up in the air. “See, I still can’t tell. Can I go back to sleep, by the way?”

“Actually, Sir, I thought you might be interested in the information I found on Doctor Karla Sofen.”

Tony forced himself out of Loki’s bed, stretching the muscles in his back as he did. “Already dug up some dirt, huh? Just a second, J. I’m going into the kitchen, and you can tell me in there. Let’s try to avoid disturbing the kid.”

Tony wandered out into the kitchen and grabbed the coffee beans from the cabinet over the coffee maker.

“It is still the middle of the night, Sir. Are you sure you shouldn’t have a glass of water instead?”

“Now I know you have a sense of humor, J. Just tell me what you found on Sofen.”

“According to the website for Doctor Sofen’s practice, she graduated from the Stanford University School of Medicine and completed her residency at Metro-General Hospital in New York. She is board certified and licensed by the State of New York to practice psychiatry.”

“And—?”

“That information seems to check out.”

“I’m sensing a ‘but,’ here.”

“I find her Yelp reviews a bit troubling, Sir.”

“So she’s got bad reviews on Yelp. So does Leonard. SI gets a lot of online complaints, for that matter. People will complain about anything when they can hide behind a screen name. And it’s more likely that someone who’s unhappy is going to take the time to write a review than someone who’s a satisfied customer, which can really skew the ratings.”

“That’s the problem. Karla Sofen has no negative reviews on Yelp, or on any other similar website.”

“Okay. So maybe her patients just really like her?”

“I suppose it’s a possibility, but her reviews seem so glowing as to seem suspicious. This is where I did a little bit of digging—and hacking into Karla Sofen’s own files.”

“JARVIS Just a Rather Very Intelligent System Stark! I did not tell you to hack into a psychiatrist’s case files. That is illegal, immoral, unconscionable, and a violation of those people’s privacy.” Tony paused. “Did you get all that, JARVIS?”

“Yes, Sir. I have your objection on record just in case there is a police investigation into our activities. However, I doubt we’ll be caught. The files were kept on a personal laptop and lacked even the most basic encryption.”

“Better safe than sorry. Hubris can be a bitch, you know?”

“My, but Sir has become wise in his old age.”

“And you’ve become a comedian in yours. Anyway, I’m guessing you found an interesting pattern or two when you examined those files?”

“I certainly did. To begin with, I found that Doctor Sofen does not see much turnover of her clientele.”

“So that’s a good thing, right?”

“In the case of a psychiatrist, it might mean that her clients tend not to experience much improvement in their conditions.”

“But if she’s the kind of psychiatrist that takes on really challenging cases, wouldn’t it be normal for those kinds of patients to see her long term? It’s not like you can just see a psychiatrist for a few months and be cured of schizophrenia. And why would her clients stick with her, if they weren’t getting any better at all? They could always find another psychiatrist.”

“Actually, Sir, after having looked over Doctor Sofen’s case files, I found that most of her patients begin seeing her for what might be considered all too common complaints: relatively mild anxiety and mood disorders, stress, relationship issues, etcetera. However, with Doctor Sofen’s help, the majority discover that their issues run much deeper than they thought.”

“So, either these people were all a lot sicker than they thought, and she’s actually just a fantastic psychiatrist for helping them to realize that, or she’s a quack—”

“Again, her credentials all seem to be valid. She isn’t a fraud in that sense.”

“Right, she’s actually a highly skilled psychiatrist who gaslights her own patients. But why would she do that?”

“I could only speculate. However, it seems Doctor Sofen’s first patient was a childhood friend of hers, a Deanna Stockbridge.”

“A childhood friend? Isn’t that a conflict of interest—wait, Deanna Stockbridge? As in, the daughter of Charles Stockbridge, the Hollywood producer?”

“The very same.”

“Isn’t she the one that drove her car onto the Hollywood hiking trail and ended up in a police chase that ended with her driving off the side of the mountain, taking out the second ‘o’ in the Hollywood sign—oh, shit.”

“Indeed, Sir, and it seems she left quite a few of her assets to Karla Sofen in her will. I should add that many of Doctor Sofen’s current patients are similarly well off or high profile.”

“Okay, I’m beginning to see how this scheme could work out for her. Hold on, though. Leonard’s been going to her too, and he seems to be a lot better off than he was back in the summer.”

“I believe that her goal with Doctor Samson might have been to encourage him to refer Doctor Banner to her.”

“Right, because what’s the point of screwing with the head of the Avenger’s staff psychiatrist when you could play mind games with the guy who turns into the Hulk? Does this woman even understand what a dangerous game she’s playing?”

“Perhaps that is the crux of it. Karla Sofen herself is quite well off financially at this point in her career. If she wanted to, she could comfortably retire.”

“But she enjoys her work. She gets a thrill out of it.”

“I would surmise so, Sir.”

Tony tapped his fingers on the kitchen countertop as he concocted a plan. “JARVIS, I want you to make me an appointment with Doctor Sofen.”

“Sir, I’m not certain you would be the best person to go undercover to investigate Doctor Sofen’s methods.”

“Why not? I would think she’d love to get her claws into Tony Stark.”

“Even if you are high profile enough to fit Karla Sofen’s modus operandi—”

“JARVIS, are you saying I wouldn’t be enough of a challenge for her, because I’m already too screwed up?”

“I was going to say that having another Avenger fall into her lap might arouse her suspicion, but now that you mention it—”

“So, we need someone high-profile, but not quite as high-profile as me, and they need to be relatively sane. Now obviously, I know plenty of high-profile people. The question is, do I know anyone sane?”

([9 +m   +2m+15  + 3m+18] /2   )/3  = ( (6m + 42)/2) / 3 = (3m+21)/3  = m+7_φ(◎◎|||)

“Pep, wake up.”

Pepper groaned and rolled in the direction of the alarm clock on her bedside table. “Tony, it’s three o’clock in the morning. Is this something that can’t wait a few more hours?”

Tony winced. “Now that I think of it, it probably could have. Sorry, I just got a little overexcited. I need you to make an appointment with a psychiatrist.”

“I’m not your personal assistant anymore. Besides, Leonard is your psychiatrist, and he lives with us.”

“The appointment isn’t for me, it’s for you. And I don’t want you to make it with Leonard, I want you to make it with the psychiatrist Leonard and Bruce have been going to.”

Pepper just looked at him like he was out of his mind, which might be fair enough. 

( ๑•෴•๑ ) [3AM] [(≖_≖ *)]

Pepper held her phone out so that Tony could see the screen. “So, this is the woman you think is manipulating Bruce?” 

Tony squinted at Doctor Sofen’s profile photo. A mousy woman with dirty blonde hair in a messy bun, wearing a chunky cable knit sweater and coke bottle glasses squinted back at him. Pepper wasn’t wrong that she fit the image of an archetypal cat lady more than she did a dangerous criminal. He shrugged. “They say you can’t judge a book by its cover. Besides, she isn’t plain so much as she looks like the supposedly plain girl in every teen movie who’s actually one makeover away from being a supermodel. Take off the glasses, put her in something a little slinkier, and she could totally be a femme fatale.”

Pepper tossed her phone back onto the nightstand. “Tony, I’m going back to sleep. We can talk about this tomorrow.”

＿٤〆⊂( ° ෴ ° )  BONUS: PROJECT “INFORM THE UNIVERSE THAT LOKI IS TONY’S KID,” ATTEMPT #2

The door to the stairwell opened and Loki poked her head into Tony’s lab. “Am I in trouble?”

“Why do you always ask that?”

“Because I usually am in trouble.”

“That’s true enough, but if you haven’t done anything—wait, what did you do?”

Loki batted her eyelashes at him and flashed him a saccharine smile. “Nothing you need to worry your pretty little mortal head about.”

That was less than reassuring, but Tony didn’t want to get sidetracked. “Just come over here.”

“Why?”

Tony had given a lot of thought as to just where he had gone wrong in his first attempt and decided that his mistake had been in choosing something to bond with Loki over that wasn’t one of his strengths. He wouldn’t make that mistake this time. “I’m going to teach you how to solder components to a circuit board.”

“Why?” 

“Because as my kid, you should know how to do this kind of thing.”

“In case you fly into another helicopter and I have to put you back together?”

Tony arched an eyebrow at her. “I’m not a robot.”

“But do you not qualify as a cyborg?” Loki came forward to poke the spot where the arc reactor glowed softly through his Black Sabbath t-shirt with her finger.

Tony caught her wrist. Loki might be his kid, but he still wasn’t entirely comfortable with anyone other than Pepper touching the arc reactor. “No touchy the glowy thing, got it? As for your question, cyborgs aren’t robots either, and whether or not I’m considered one depends on your definition of ‘cyborg.’ If your definition of a cyborg is any person whose body combines organic and mechanical parts, not only am I a cyborg, so is anyone with a pacemaker. Stretch it even further, and Clint’s a cyborg because he uses hearing aids, and Bruce is one because he wears glasses. I mean, where do you draw the line? Originally, the term was coined to apply to a theoretical human modified for life in a hostile alien environment by the substitution of artificial organs and other body parts—”

“Wow, you are such a nerd.”

“You’re the one that asked.” 

Loki still seemed less than excited about it, but she now hovered directly behind Tony’s shoulder, eying the circuit board in front of them as if it were a snake ready to strike; of course, if it had been a snake, she probably would have turned herself into a snake and made friends with it.

“Look, it’s easy. I’ve already got this LED in place. First you just clean off the tip of the soldering iron on this sponge here, then you want to use the soldering iron to heat up the resister lead and the copper pad at the same time. Then you just melt a little solder into the joint, got it? Now you try.”

“Must I? If you insist on teaching me something, I would prefer to learn how to drive.”

“We’ve talked about this before, Loki. You don’t need to learn how to drive, and there is no way in hell I’m going to teach you in the middle of Manhattan. Now here, take the soldering iron—NOT BY THAT END!”

Tony had been too afraid to look to see how severe the burn to Loki’s hand was, but it had to be bad, considering that she had just wrapped her hand around a soldering iron that had been heated to somewhere around four hundred degrees Celsius. Instead, he had picked her up in a fireman’s hold and rushed her to the elevator. It seemed to him that she was a lot heavier than she looked, maybe heavy enough that he shouldn’t have been able to pick her up without his suit, but his adrenaline was running high enough in that moment that he might have been able to pick up a small sports utility vehicle if he had to. “Seriously, Loki, what the hell were you thinking? You had to know it was going to be hot!” 

He hadn’t had to tell JARVIS what floor to take them to. “Bruuuce,” Loki called as soon as the doors opened out onto Bruce’s laboratory. “Tony tried to force me to learn how to use his dangerous, primitive tools. He handed me something that nearly burned my hand off, and now he’s yelling at me like it’s my fault.” 

“Tattletale,” Tony hissed at her.

“Okay, everyone just calm down. Tony, put her down on that stool. JARVIS already let me know what happened. I’ve got the first aid kit right here.” At least Bruce seemed to be having one of his good days. It really ought to have occurred to Tony that he was risking having the Hulk take his head off, bringing an injured Loki to him, especially an injured Loki whose injuries he was responsible for; but the moment he’d seen Loki wrap her hand around the wrong end of the soldering iron, he hadn’t thought at all so much as he had acted. Tony set Loki down on the stool and Loki held her hand out for Bruce to examine. “From what I can see, it’s just a first-degree burn, or maybe a mild second-degree burn,” he said, after giving her hand a cursory glance. “There’s nothing to get worked up over. Loki, go to the sink and run your hand under cold water, then we’ll put some antibiotic gel and a bandage on it.”

As soon as Loki was gone Bruce turned to Tony and scowled at him. 

“What? I was just trying to teach my daughter to solder, like any good father would.”

“Maybe next time, turn the soldering iron around before handing it to her, and warn her that it’s hot. She’s from an alien planet with technology so advanced that it looks like magic to us. If they have anything like soldering irons, they’re probably ‘magical’ soldering irons that are only hot when they touch metal, and not when they touch organic matter.”

Holy shit, why hadn’t he invented a soldering iron that worked like that? As many times as he’d absentmindedly grabbed the wrong end of one himself— 

Bruce snapped his fingers in front of Tony’s face. “Hey, are you listening?” 

He swatted Bruce’s hand away. “Yeah, I hear you. I should have been more careful. Anyway, I doubt there’s going to be a next time.” After this, Loki likely wouldn’t want to come near his workshop and his “primitive tools” anytime soon, which was sure to be an obstacle in his quest to convince the universe that Loki was his…

Chapter Text

Things were moving a lot slower on the Doctor Sofen front than Tony had hoped. The earliest appointment Pepper could book with her was in January. Who would have known that November and December was the busy season for psychiatrists? Tony had begun to wonder if he shouldn’t just warn Bruce and Leonard that she was a fraud, but his only evidence had been obtained from hacking into the woman’s case files. He doubted that would win him any points with the two doctors, one of whom had given him a lecture on the importance of doctor-patient confidentiality a few months ago before insisting that he remove JARVIS’s cameras and microphone from his office. The man had then watched him do it, as if he didn’t trust Tony enough to believe he would do it if he didn’t. (Then again, Doc might have been right not to trust him. At one time, his office had been two rooms, which meant there had been two sets of microphones and two cameras in there. Tony had only removed one set. But he hadn’t watched or listened to any of the recordings from Doc’s office since then; he’d left the other microphone and camera for honest-to-God security purposes and had instructed JARVIS to delete the recordings on a bi-weekly basis.) At least Bruce hadn’t had any more growly episodes. If anything, he seemed a little lethargic. He wasn’t going on calls as an Avenger for the time being, but that was fine. Tony’s shoulder had healed, and he hadn’t had a concussion after all, which meant that he could go on missions again. It was probably a good thing there was an extra person to stay home with the kids when the rest of them were out. At least Doc and Pep wouldn’t be outnumbered.

Loki wasn’t grounded anymore, which meant he wasn’t as mopey as he had been. Not that the kid had ever had much reason to be mopey. Even though he’d told the kid he wasn’t leaving the tower for anything fun, they’d found a few loopholes that let him get out of the tower enough so that he didn’t get cabin fever. He’d been jogging with Cap (exercise, especially trying to keep up with Capsicle, was not something Tony considered fun), walking in the park with Doc (psychiatry sessions were definitely not an extracurricular activity), he’d been to the library to help Natasha research some spy thing (again, an afternoon of helping Natasha meticulously examine microfilm records wasn’t his definition of fun), and he’d been to an archery range with Clint (training was necessary, and while there was an archery range in the tower’s basement, Clint had explained that it was a good idea to switch things up and go to an outdoor range once in a while, so you didn’t get used to shooting under the same conditions every time). Loki had also been job shadowing Pepper in the guise of Lauren the intern, and Pep had taken her out for a couple of “business lunches,” which had never been Tony’s favorite kind of lunch. The only one who hadn’t taken Loki out was Bruce, but that was because Bruce didn’t leave the tower at all unless his boyfriend cajoled him into it. He had allowed him to assist him in his lab, however, with the caveat that he was to run for the safe room Tony had built for Pepper in the penthouse if it even looked like he might lose his temper. Of course, it had never happened; even when Loki had pulled the chain on the emergency wash station and flooded the floor of his lab with fifty gallons of water, Bruce had kept his cool.

After everything he’d said about Loki’s bad behavior being an attention-seeking thing, Loki had gotten more attention than usual. But there was one part of the punishment that Loki had hated, and that had been the nine o’clock bedtime. She hadn’t put up too much resistance after that first night, but she had still grumbled about it. The word “infantilizing” had been bandied about. Tony hadn’t slept next to Loki after the first night, because she hadn’t needed him to. Having a regular bedtime had been good for her after all, and in a relatively short amount of time, she’d started sleeping better. Loki must have realized that, but being ordered to bed still stung for her, and what probably stung most was that the Maximoff twins, who were younger than she was both technically and in the relative sense, had been allowed to stay up until nine-thirty. Doc had thought it might be a good idea to write that into the rules early on for them, since he and Tony were pretty much on the same page when it came to Loki’s bedtime becoming a permanent fixture. After the punishment was over, and after a little negotiation, Loki’s bedtime it had been pushed out to nine forty-five; she was a little older than the twins, after all. For their part, neither Wanda nor Pietro seemed to have thought to protest having a bedtime. But then, the twins still kept to themselves and seemed reluctant to make waves. Also, by nine-thirty, Pietro had usually expended enough energy that he was pretty well sacked out, and Wanda had to drag him along behind her and put him to bed. 

Thanksgiving had passed quietly. Clint and Natasha had gone off to some undisclosed location together; as often as that happened around holidays, at least one of them had to have a secret family somewhere. Thor and Loki had gone out to try to see the parade in person; an excursion he had said an exuberant “hell no” to while the rest had politely declined. Pietro had seemed interested, but Wanda didn’t like crowds or something. The two might as well have been conjoined twins as little as Tony saw them apart, and Pietro certainly wasn’t going to leave his sister alone in the home of their “enemies.” Which suited Tony just fine, because he wouldn’t have trusted Thor to keep an eye on Loki and two other potential flight-risks on his own. The rest of them had watched the parade on TV, Tony hoping against hope the entire time that he wouldn’t see Thor and Loki on TV doing something he’d have to ground them both for, like picking a fight with one of the giant balloons. Luckily, the broadcast had been blissfully Asgardian-free, and Thor and Loki had come back grumbling about how they hadn’t seen anything, because Thor kept getting mobbed by crowds of tourists everywhere he went, despite his brilliant disguise as a big blonde guy who looked exactly like Thor wearing sunglasses. Then they’d all enjoyed a Thanksgiving dinner that had come mostly preprepared from SI’s corporate cafeteria, which was the only corporate cafeteria in the world with a Michelin 3-star rating. All they’d had to do was put everything in the oven and heat it up; it was almost too easy. 

Tony had gone to bed that night with the sense that something horribly wrong had occurred—a holiday with the Avengers where there’d been exactly zero shenanigans, hijinks, or super villains showing up to ruin the day? And seriously, Thor and Loki had left the tower together and nothing had happened? In fact, nothing much had happened for the last two months. It was almost like they were in one of those awful fanfics people wrote about them, and the author had resorted to reducing that time to a few paragraphs of exposition, just so that the Christmas chapter could be published at Christmas instead of sometime in February. 

And maybe that was why he’d completely forgotten that Thor’s dad’s wedding was coming up until they had all been sitting around the Christmas tree that the kids had just finished decorating, drinking hot cocoa, and Thor had casually dropped that he and Loki would need to leave for Asgard early the next morning. Tony had spilled hot cocoa on his own lap, and subsequently made a good dent in his swear jar credit. The others in the room had cleared out after that. Even Loki must have sensed that he and Thor needed space to have a chat, because he had disappeared too. “You don’t normally take your sibling to a wedding as your plus one. Also, are you saying that you’re planning on taking Loki, who’s banished from Asgard under pain of death, but you’re not going to take anyone else?”

“I might have taken Jane.”

“Point Break, Jane broke up with you two months ago. You need to try to get over it.” 

“Were it Lady Pepper who had spurned you over a simple misunderstanding—”

“Yeah, I get it.” Luckily, the scandal surrounding the photographs of half the Avengers team at Doctor Doom’s wedding had been resolved. The official explanation had been that the people in the pictures were lifelike robots created by Doom, and that explanation seemed to make more sense to the public than Avengers actually showing up to his wedding. Victor had even done them a solid by issuing a press statement confirming the story. Maybe Frigga had convinced him to do it, or maybe he just wanted the world to think he was capable of creating lifelike robot clones of the Avengers. Tony tried not to think about it too much. He and Pepper hadn’t even had to announce their engagement as a distraction, which had been kind of a disappointment. But Doctor Foster hadn’t bought the official explanation, probably because Thor had already admitted to her that he’d been at Frigga and Doom’s wedding when he’d called her to explain to her that Natasha had only been his pretend date. “That doesn’t have anything to do with this. There’s no good reason for you to take Loki to your dad’s wedding.”

“That is where you’re wrong. It is my intention to steal the bride away and bring her back to Midgard should she be agreeable. In all likelihood, I will not be able to use the Bifrost to return to Midgard. I will require Loki’s knowledge of the ‘back ways’ between realms to get us home. Do not worry, friend. I shall not allow Loki to come to harm. No one will even know she is there.”

“And how is that going to work?”

On that cue, Jane Foster sauntered into the room wearing a sly expression that Tony was sure the scatterbrained astronomer had never worn in her life. “Doctor Foster” stood with her hip jutted out seductively and her arms crossed over her chest. “What do you think? Convincing?” Even the voice sounded like Jane, but it still wouldn’t have fooled him. The real Jane didn’t have Loki’s swagger. 

“I guess to a bunch of Asgardians that think Midgardians all look alike, it might be; which doesn’t matter because I still don’t like this.” Tony stabbed his finger into Thor’s chest, and immediately regretted it, because it had felt like stabbing his finger into a brick wall. His finger might actually be broken, but he’d have to get Bruce to look at it later. “You’re going to get your little sister killed. Is that what you want?”

“Of course that is not what I want. Friend, I swear to you that I will keep Loki safe. Were my father’s spear, Gungnir, here, I would swear to you an oath upon it.”

Tony wanted to put his foot down and say absolutely not, but if Thor decided to run off with Loki to Asgard anyway, there wouldn’t be much he could do to stop him short of hiring Doctor Foster to build him his own Bifrost so that he could chase after them. “Wait, that’s it—I’ll just hire Jane to build us our own Bifrost! Then you won’t have to bring Loki with you.”

“There are two problems with that plan,” Loki the Jane said. “The first is that Doctor Foster still has exactly zero clues as to create a stable Bifrost, and she’s not going to figure it out anytime soon, because it’s impossible unless you have something similar to the Tesseract, or, well, the Tesseract. The second is that Jane has already stated that she wouldn’t work for you in a billion years, which is quite an impressive amount of time—roughly two hundred thousand Asgardian life spans.”

“She said that?”

“Yes,” Thor confirmed. “She told you herself at the charity gala back in the spring, the one that Natasha wore a dress full of bullet holes to. Jane was there as my date, and you offered her a job.”

“So how come she didn’t accept? Most people would love to work for SI.”

“I believe it is the way in which you made the offer,” Loki told him in Jane Foster’s voice. Then Tony heard his own voice coming out of Jane’s mouth, which was more than a little disconcerting. ‘Hey, since you’re Thor’s girlfriend and all, I could always find you a place at SI. You’re what was it, an astrologer or something? I’m not really sure we have any positions available for fortune tellers, but that’s okay, maybe we can just start you out as a receptionist in accounting.”

“Obviously, I was joking.” Or he’d had too much to drink. He didn’t drink to excess as much as he used to, but he still had a few oopsie-daisies here and there, and there wasn’t much to do at those charity galas but drink too much and say things he’d regret when he found out about them six months later. “If the woman can’t take a joke, maybe I shouldn’t hire her after all.”

“It is true that Jane has no sense of humor,” said Loki. “Really Thor, you could do so much better. In fact, I am certain I could go out on the street, choose a woman at random, and she would be a better fit for you than Jane, provided that woman does not turn out to be a lesbian or aro.”

Thor’s eyebrows knit together. “Midgardians have so many terms to do with relationships that do not translate into the Aesir language. I know that a lesbian is a woman who is attracted only to other women, but what is ‘aro?’”

“It is short for aromantic,” Loki told him. “Someone who is aromantic does not experience romantic attraction.”

“Like Sif, then.”

Loki’s—er, Jane’s eyebrows shot upward. “Sif?”

“Yes, she confided in me years ago that—now that I think of it, I shouldn’t be telling you this.”

“And yet you already have. It makes sense enough, though I had been under the impression that she still loved you, and that was why she never responded to any of the men or women who pursued her after the two of you ended things.”

 “Don’t be ridiculous, Loki. Sif and I were never more than children playing at romance. It wasn’t a real relationship.”

“I always thought it might have been more real to her than to you.”

“It wasn’t. As I accidentally told you, Sif has never felt romantic attraction. When she told me, she asked if I thought there was something wrong with her.”

 Loki examined Doctor Foster’s fingernails. “And what did you tell her?”

“That there was nothing wrong with her, of course. Why should such a thing matter? But this is why I know that Sif cannot wish to marry Father. She told me then that she didn’t want to marry anyone. She couldn’t see herself marrying for a reason other than the kind of love she doubted she would ever feel.”

Loki nodded. “Then we can’t let the All-Father force her into something she doesn’t want.”

“Really, Loki? I didn’t think you cared about Sif. You said before that she deserved this.”

“It isn’t about Sif anymore. It’s an injustice, plain and simple. No one should be forced to marry if they don’t want to.”

“And you care about righting injustices, now?”

“I always have, Thor. We just haven’t always agreed on what constituted one.”

ϞϞ(๑◕ ․̫ ◕๑)    █▬▬ ◟(`-´ ◟ )ㄣㄣ
  | |   | |  | |

Pepper paced back and forth in front of the penthouse window. “This is crazy. We shouldn’t be letting Loki go.” 

Tony couldn’t agree more, especially when he had never figured out how to prove to the universe that Loki was his and therefore protect her from Odin’s psychic influence, but he’d already come to terms with the fact that there was nothing he could do about it. A couple of glasses of whiskey had helped. “We can’t stop her. I mean, we could try, but it would only end in tears, probably ours. Loki’s determined to go, and Thor’s determined to take her. Threatening him with the Amber Alert system isn’t going to do any good this time, because no one has phones in Asgard.”

“Couldn’t we get a message to Frigga? She could stop this.”

“Even if we could get a message to her in time, I don’t think she would. If you haven’t noticed, Frigga’s pretty hands off when it comes to parenting.”

“What if we just told Loki she wasn’t allowed to go?”

“Then she’d probably disobey us, and when she came back we’d have to punish her for doing something that she’d been convinced was the right thing to do, which would suck for everyone involved. All we can do now is tell both her and Thor how concerned we are about this, and hope that maybe they’ll come to their senses. Thor promised they would wait to leave until everyone was up tomorrow and had a chance to see them off.”

“No, I refuse to just stand back and watch Thor take Loki back to Asgard when Odin threatened to have her killed if she went back there.” Pepper headed for the stairs, Tony following at her heels.

Before he could think of a way to stop her, or a way to convince himself that he should, Pepper had made her way across the common room and down the corridor that led to Loki’s room. threw Loki’s door open without knocking. “We need to talk, now. Under no circumstances are you to—” Pepper got that far before she realized she was talking to herself. “JARVIS, where is Loki?”

“Thor and Loki left the tower thirty minutes ago, Ms. Potts. If you meant to stop them from returning to Asgard, you’re too late.”

✲ﾟ*｡⋆  (  •̀_•́)◡ɞ◡(〃’-’)_中✲ﾟ*｡⋆ 

“You’ve never insisted on holding my hand before when we’ve traveled this way.”

“Loki, you are going to hold my hand until we get all the way across the Rainbow Bridge.”

“What do you think I’m going to do, jump? I’m not particularly suicidal at the moment, and besides, we have already established that jumping from that particular bridge is not an effective means of ending one’s own life. Believe me, I’m not planning on getting anywhere near the edge.”

Thor only stared at her for several moments in silence before stretching his hand towards her, pinning her with a look that she knew meant he wasn’t going to back down. “You’re meant to be Jane. Jane would hold my hand, perhaps until we got all the way to the palace.”

Reluctantly, Loki took his hand. “You’re being every bit as bad as Tony right now, you understand that, right?” But when Thor called for Heimdall, Loki closed her eyes and tightened her grip. With any luck, Thor would assume she was trying to break his fingers, and never guess that she was nervous about traveling this way again when she had been traveling via Bifrost for centuries. 

Until recently, she had never thought about what might happen if one was somehow thrown from the Bifrost. Norns knew where you would end up. 

_━━___━__*      [|   ___━_*___ 
 ━*━___━━   `-o-'  ____━━*___━
                          |:|
                          \/

“My prince.” Loki opened her eyes in time to see Heimdall cross his fist over his heart and bow to his brother, and when the man looked at Loki, she had the eerie feeling he could see through her with those creepy golden eyes of his. Heimdall probably knew she wasn’t Jane. “Princess,” Heimdall said, giving Loki a bow that was only slightly smaller—which was not at all what Loki had expected if she had been recognized.

“Not yet, my friend, but perhaps someday.” Thor chuckled heartily and leaned in to give Loki a kiss on the cheek. It took all the will she had not to wipe her cheek with the back of her hand.

Heimdall said nothing, but the corners of his lips quirked upward. The bastard definitely knew. “I assume you and your lady are here for my sister’s wedding to the All-Father.” Somehow, Loki always forgot that Heimdall and Sif were siblings. After all, Heimdall was much older than Sif; though now that he thought of it, they didn’t look much alike either. Sif was—Loki wanted to say shorter? They did share a hair color, but before she had cut Sif’s hair and replaced it with what turned out to be a substandard magical Dwarven wig, the girl had been blonde.

“So we are,” said Thor. “Though I cannot imagine this is what Sif wants.”

“What lady would not wish to be Queen of Asgard?” Heimdall, of course, was well practiced at giving non-answers to any question.

Thor led Loki out onto the bridge, and once again, she found herself glad Thor had insisted on holding her hand. She had been on the Rainbow Bridge once since her fall, but that time she had been in chains and surrounded by so many Einherjar that she hadn’t been able to see over the edge. “Thor,” she whispered.

“Yes, my darling Jane?”

“This is scarier than I thought it would be. Why in Hel don’t they put guardrails on bridges in Asgard? I’m not sure I’m going to make it.”

“What do you mean, you’re not going to make it?”

“My legs feel as if they were made of orange marmalade.” As Loki took another step, her knees buckled beneath her, and she sunk down to the ground. “That’s it; I can’t feel my legs at all now. I’m paralyzed from the waist down.”

Thor bent down and scooped her up in his arms, bridal style. “I’m sure it’s only temporary paralysis,” he told her. Loki buried her face in Thor’s neck as he carried her down the bridge. 

“It is okay to open your eyes now,” said Thor, after what seemed an interminable amount of time. Loki opened her eyes and saw that they were at the entrance to the city. A crowd of onlookers had gathered there at the foot of the bridge, just as they used to do when she, Thor, Sif, and the Warriors Three had returned home from a journey. Of course, this time, she couldn’t even pretend that they were there for her, unless they had come to gawk at Thor’s mortal woman. The people, though keeping a respectful distance, began following them throughout the city as if Thor were the sun who had returned from the land of the dead, the light birthed out of the darkness. And maybe to them that was what he was; Asgard’s shining son returned to them. 

It was all enough to make Loki feel sick to her stomach; otherwise, she would have insisted that Thor put her down. This entire trip had been a mistake. What did he care if Sif was forced into a marriage she didn’t want? Yes, it was wrong. But there were plenty of other ‘wrong’ things going on at that moment. Midgard’s polar ice caps were melting. There were ongoing droughts in Africa. In the Caribbean, the Anguilla Bank skink was being driven to extinction by feral mongeese. Of course, she wasn’t sure what she could do about any of those things, short of turning herself into something that ate feral mongeese so that she might hunt them all down herself. Not only could she do something to help Sif, she and Thor might be the only ones who could.

“You know, you are quite a bit heavier than the real Jane,” said Thor, breaking her from her reverie. 

That was it. Loki was going to kill him. “I am not fat, Thor! Stop trying to fat shame me.”

“I wasn’t trying to fat shame you.”

“Then why do you keep making these comments about my weight?”

“Well, at the moment, I’m carrying you, and I am beginning to wonder why I am still carrying you.”

“That doesn’t give you leave to harass me!”

“I wasn’t trying to harass you. I was only—” Thor’s eyebrows knit together, and a moment later, he was the one who looked like he was going to be sick. “Being careless with my words again and hurting you, I suppose? I’m sorry. Most times I only mean to tease you, but I forget that you have these self-esteem issues.”

“It’s my fault then, for being too sensitive?”

“No, that isn’t what I meant. I take full responsibility for my words. And I know that I have probably contributed to your self-esteem issues. Every time I thought I was teasing you, it was actually bullying. Perhaps I even believed I was doing you a favor by motivating you to change, to be more—”

“More what?”

“Normal, I suppose.”

“So I’m abnormal.”

“Loki, you must admit that by Asgard’s standards you have always been exceedingly abnormal.”

“Thank you, Thor. I’m so glad we had this little chat.”

Thor gave her a sheepish smile. “Did I say abnormal? I believe what I meant to say was ‘exceptional.’ You know I am not as talented with words as you are.”

“Flattery will get you nowhere, Brother, but please go on.”

“Sister, you are the most intelligent person I know.”

“More intelligent than Tony or Bruce?”

“If I’m to be honest, I meant that you were the most intelligent person I know who hails from Asgard. It is difficult to draw comparisons between you and those of our Midgardian friends who are also so well-learned. But you have never flown into the side of a building while talking on the phone or taken horse tranquilizers to see what effect they would have on you, so I’m going to say it’s a possibility.”

“Am I more intelligent than Jane?”

“Jane cannot be so smart as everyone thinks, if she cannot see that we are meant for one another,” Thor grumbled.

“Sure,” said Loki. “Anyway, feel free to keep extolling my virtues.”

“Mother always said that you have the potential to become the greatest mage in the nine realms, perhaps better than Father.”

“She always told me that I could be anything I wished, but she never told me that.”

“I think she might have been afraid it would go to your head, or perhaps that saying so might put too much pressure on you.”

Loki remembered something. “The other me, the one we met during the summer—he told me that I was more powerful than Odin.”

“Loki, please don’t get any ideas. I am certain you have the potential to become a more powerful mage than the All-Father someday, but Odin has four thousand years more experience as a magician than you have. Whatever you do, you are not to reveal yourself, nor are you to challenge Odin directly. We are here to get Sif and get out. Remember what happened in Latveria? I would hate to have to ground you myself.”

“We are likely both going to be grounded when we get back to New York, for slipping out of the tower without waiting for everyone to see us off.”

“They would only have tried to convince me to leave you behind.” Thor snorted. “Stark cannot ground me. I am not a child.”

Loki wasn’t so sure that would matter to Tony. Natasha was older than Thor in a relative sense, and when they’d been on vacation in Malibu, he had sentenced her, along with Loki, to a week of after-meal clean up duty after the wine cooler incident. “I promise I won’t confront Odin if it isn’t necessary, but do you suppose he will simply allow us to spirit his bride away?” 

“He may send the Einherjar to pursue us, but all we have to do is outrun them.”

“Even if we get Sif all the way to Midgard, do you expect that Odin will not pursue her there?”

“The All-Father would not risk starting a conflict with Midgard in order to take her back.”

“How certain are you of that? Besides, he would hardly need to wage war with the entire realm. Perhaps your brothers and sister in arms might be willing to stand in Odin’s way, but I doubt all of Midgard would rise up to defend her.”

“The Avengers alone were enough to stand up to the Chitauri forces.”

“Outside the nine realms, the Chituari have a reputation as the ‘suckiest army in the universe.’ Quite frankly, you were lucky I managed to convince the Other that Midgardians are so weak that it would not be worth wasting other resources.”

“They did not present much of a challenge,” Thor admitted.

“And yet you still fought them for nearly three hours.”

==_()<ˆᴥˆ_ ==🌞︎
                                          
When they got to the palace gates, Thor put Loki down, but he made sure to keep hold of her hand. He had begun to suspect that Tony had been right, and that bringing Loki back to Asgard had been a terrible mistake. His sister had allowed him to carry her all the way to the palace, when she had never before let him carry her more than a few feet without complaint. He could only assume that meant she was feeling a little insecure. If Tony did ground him when they got back to New York, perhaps it would be well deserved.

They were met inside by a small squadron of Einherjar. Their leader stepped towards them, placing a fist over his heart and bowing to Thor in the traditional manner. “Your Father will meet with you immediately in his study.”

Loki whispered to him. “He knows.”

“How would he?” Thor whispered back.

“Heimdall, or those blasted ravens.”

“But Heimdall didn’t know, or he’d have said something, or at least hinted that he knew.”

“He called me ‘Princess,’ Thor. As talented as Heimdall is at double-speak, I thought he made himself pretty clear this time.”

Loki was right, he had called her that. But still, he couldn’t believe that Heimdall would betray them. As much reason as the man might have to be upset with Loki (she had, after all, unleashed the power of the Casket of Ancient Winters on him that time), Heimdall had always been a loyal friend, and Thor had done nothing he knew of to offend him. “There’s no guarantee he’ll have told Father his suspicions. I think it is best to keep up our rouse until we’re certain we’ve been found out, dearest Jane.”

“And then what?”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

Loki looked a little like she might throw up on him like she had in the Latverian airport, but even if she did, he wasn’t prepared to let go of her hand until he had to. “No more talk of bridges, please.”

Thor took a deep breath and pushed open the door to his father’s study with his free hand. Inside, Odin sat behind his desk, a thick stack of paperwork in front of him. It had never failed to amaze Thor how much paperwork a king had to do. Perhaps he ought to be grateful to Loki for interrupting his coronation, because if he had taken his father’s place as king, it would be him stuck behind that desk for half the day pouring over trade agreements and such. When his father looked up at him, it struck Thor that the man seemed a lot smaller than he had once looked to him. Had he shrunk? Or had Thor grown? But he had stopped growing decades ago, so perhaps it was Loki who had grown. No, that couldn’t be it, because she was currently in the guise of Jane, and Jane was shorter than Loki had been in two centuries.

“Thor, my son, you have come.” Odin stood, lifting his arms expectantly. “I worried that you would not. I am happy to see that you have come to your senses and returned to us.”

Feeling as if he had little choice in the matter, he let go of Loki’s hand and stepped towards Odin. The two embraced in a manly, warrior-like hug that didn’t last for more than two seconds. “I am only here for the wedding, and to be honest, I am here more for Sif than for you. We have been friends for centuries, and I would be remiss if I did not attend her nuptials, especially when I thought Sif would never settle down.”

“It took a bit of persuasion, but I managed to convince her that such a thing was the only option.”

“I see.” He really didn’t, though.

“And I see that you’ve brought your mortal pet along with you.” 

“Jane is not a pet, Father.”

“My apologies, Thor. I meant no offense to Jane.”
 
 “Jane” pulled on Thor’s sleeve. “Thor, I’m tired. Do you think we could go back to your room now, so I can lie down for a bit?”

When he turned around, he saw Jane chewing her lip again in the way that Loki tended to do when nervous. Though he could appreciate how the situation might make his sister uncomfortable, he and Odin still had important business to discuss. “You can’t be that tired when I carried you all the way here.”

Loki glared at him, and Odin smiled at her in a way that seemed almost fond. “It’s alright, Thor. I’ll have one of the Einherjar escort her to a place where she can rest, and then we can continue our discussion.”

Before Thor could object, Odin had gone to the door and summoned one of the Einherjar standing watch there. “Please escort the lady to the room I ordered prepared for her.”

Thor wondered how Odin had known to have a room prepared for Jane, when he could not have known Thor would be bringing her. Still, it didn’t matter, because he wanted Loki where he could keep watch over her. “Father, the lady will be staying in my room.”

“Nonsense, Thor. She shall do nothing of the sort.”

“Why not?”

“Because she is not yet your wife. It would be inappropriate.”

“You have never minded if women stayed in my room before.”

Odin waved him off. “Those women did not matter. None of them would have made suitable wives for you.”

Thor couldn’t stop his jaw from dropping. “You think that Jane would be a proper wife for me? I thought you didn’t like her.”

“I never said that I disliked Jane.”

“The last time I brought her to Asgard, you said that what I had done was akin to bringing a goat to a feasting table.”

Odin stroked his beard. “How I do miss my children’s gentler antics. Not that you have my permission to dress up Toothgnasher as the Yule Goat and bring him to the feast this year, mind you.”

“Jane and I won’t be staying for it. After the wedding, we will return to Midgard.”

“We shall see,” said Odin.

Loki glared at Thor again as the Einherjar took her away. He didn’t like being separated from her any more than Loki must have liked it, but he would just have to trust that she would be more than comfortable until Thor could go to her. After all, Odin seemed to hold Jane in much higher regard than he had thought. Surely, if Odin thought her worthy of someday becoming his bride, she would be given the best of the guest suites and treated to every luxury.

When Loki had gone, he rounded on the old man. “Where is Sif?”

“I believe she is preparing herself for the ceremony,” said Odin, “which isn’t until this evening, but women always do take hours to dress themselves for this sort of thing.” 

Thor had never known Sif to take hours dressing herself for anything. Whenever they’d gone on journeys together, she had seldom failed to take the least time in the inn’s bathroom of a morning. Fandral had always taken the most time, followed by Loki. “Father, I wish to speak with her.”

“I see no reason why you should not. You should find her in the dressing room that once belonged to your mother.”

Thor’s teeth gnashed together involuntarily. “You say she is in my mother’s dressing room, but which mother are you referring to, exactly? You shall have to be more specific, I’m afraid.”

Odin frowned at him. “Thor, what are you—”

“Frigga is not my mother. At least, she isn’t the mother who birthed me. When she married Victor Von Doom, her geas was broken, and she told me.”

Odin collapsed back into the chair behind his desk. “I’m sorry, my son, you should have been told sooner.”

“Did you plan to ever tell me? Or to tell Loki about his heritage? Or were you going to let us believe your lies our entire lives?”

“What you didn’t know could never hurt you, and I never wanted you to be hurt. You saw how your brother reacted when he found out.”

“He would never have reacted that way if he hadn’t found out the way he did.”

“You might be right. Perhaps it was a mistake to let that child believe he was one of us—”

Thor slammed his fist down on his father’s desk. “That was not your mistake! Loki always was one of us, and you should have assured him that was the case, even though he was not Aesir by birth.”

“You are absolutely right, Thor, and I intend to make things right with Loki.”

That hadn’t been the response he had expected. “And how are you going to do that, Father?”

“Why don’t you go see Sif now?” Odin had sidestepped his question, which now that Thor thought of it, was all too typical of him. “There are still wedding preparations I need to see to, as well as preparations for the feast afterward.”

“This discussion is not over, but I will go see Sif. I would like to hear from her that this wedding is what she wishes, because if I am honest, I have difficulty imagining that any woman would have you willingly.” 

“You think I am forcing her?” His father smiled as if amused at the accusation.

“I did not wish to spell it out so, but yes.”

Odin dismissed him with a nod. “Go talk to her then, and let her put your mind at ease.”

༼ つ ҂▼ -*༽つ ⊂(-︵-;;⊂) (ò_óˇ) 

How could Thor be so oblivious to his father’s double-talk, when he had been more blatantly obvious about it than Heimdall had been? “I never said I disliked Jane,” he had said, but he had also never acknowledged that Jane was in the room, because he knew she was not. He had called her Thor’s “mortal pet.” Had Thor forgotten that Loki was currently as mortal as Jane? Just like Heimdall, Odin had looked right through her disguise. And now, Loki was likely following these Einherjar to the prison cell Odin had ordered prepared for her. 

She thought about stopping in her tracks and running the other way, but then she realized that they weren’t going in the direction of the prison. Perhaps they were taking her to a guest room after all, and Odin meant to play with her a little while longer. In that case, attempting to run would only put an early end to the game. It was a game she ultimately had no chance of winning; Thor had been right, Odin had four thousand years more experience as a magician than she had, and she had no hope of besting him when she didn’t even have access to all the magic she had until a few months ago. Still, she might as well play, and enjoy a few more moments of relative freedom before spending the rest of her life in a cell—a life that wasn’t likely to be too long, come to think of it, since Odin had promised she would be put to death if she returned. 

Perhaps she would be allowed to end her life as a ritual sacrifice to the Yuletide spirits. Asgard didn’t have a tradition of ritual sacrifice, but they could always make a new one. They could burn her with the Yule log, or they could bake her into mince pies; then everyone could literally get their piece of her. Loki attempted to shake the dark thoughts from her head. She really shouldn’t have watched Sweeney Todd with Natasha last weekend, even if the woman had claimed it to be a “Midgardian holiday tradition.” 

They made their way through winding corridors that she hardly recognized, even though she’d lived in the palace for 1,048 years of her nearly 1,051 years of existence. Clearly, Odin meant to separate her from Thor by keeping her far from the royal chambers.  Finally, they came upon an ornate door that felt somehow familiar. Instead of opening it, her escort knocked on it. The door opened, and Loki came nose to nose with a familiar face. Before she had time to regret her earlier decision not to try to run, a large woman with auburn hair and a ruddy complexion pulled her into the room and shut the door, then threw her arms around her and pulled her headfirst into the overabundance of her chest. “Loki, you naughty girl! How could you stay away so long? And up to your tricks again, I see. Whose skin is this, then?” she asked, patting Jane’s backside with nearly enough force to bring tears to Loki’s eyes.

With her face still buried in Sofjin’s chest, Loki’s voice came out muffled. “Thor’s ex-girlfriend’s. I demand you let me go! I’m mortal now, which means I bruise easily.”

“Mortal?” Sofjn pulled back but kept a grip on Loki’s upper arms. “Young lady, this is why Nanny should never let you out of her sight. Now, why don’t you let that glamor slip so I can see your adorable face?”

Loki released her glamor; there wasn’t much point in wearing it inside a room where she was trapped with yet another person who had seen right through it. “You aren’t my nanny anymore. I am an adult, you know.” At least she was an adult by Asgard’s standards anyway. She certainly didn’t need a nanny.

“Nonsense, girl. Young ladies do not become adults until they marry and start making their own babies.”

“But you don’t have any babies,” Loki pointed out.

“You are my baby as surely as you are Frigga’s. As one of your Mother’s handmaidens, I am as good as Frigga’s wife.”

Loki changed tactics. “But I’m not always a young lady. I can be a man, if I so choose—” She attempted to shift genders, but nothing happened.

Sjofn gave her a pitying smile. “Sorry sweetling, but I’m afraid I’ve slipped a little something around your wrist when you weren’t looking.”

Loki looked down and blanched when she saw a copper bracelet that had been inscribed with runes. She knew what it was immediately, and what it did. When she had been very young, she had often been required to wear one just like it; for a time, it had been the only way to keep her from turning herself into a baby squirrel and scurrying away from Nanny and the other nursemaids in an attempt to avoid nap time. “Take it off,” she growled.

“I won’t be taking it off anytime soon if that’s the way you’re going to speak to me. Do I need to put you in the naughty corner?”

Loki looked around herself and realized why the door to the room had seemed familiar; she had been taken to the old royal nursery. “You’re insane! You can’t just start treating me like I’m a toddler again,” she complained, even though Bruce had given her a time out not that long ago for flooding his lab. (To be fair, Bruce had to have known that pointing to a chain and saying, “Whatever you do, don’t pull that,” was essentially the same as saying, “I beseech thee, god of mischief, to pull this chain the next time I’m not paying attention.”)

Sjofn pointed to the corner. Loki, deciding it would be easier to just play along for the time being, crossed the room and stood with her nose in it. After all, Thor would surely come looking for her after he had finished speaking to Odin, and then he could talk some sense into the woman.

“There’s a good girl,” said Sjofen.  As much as Loki had once believed her nanny to have eyes as all-seeing as Heimdall’s, she obviously hadn’t seen Loki roll hers.

\ō͡≡o˞̶  BONUS: PROJECT “INFORM THE UNIVERSE THAT LOKI IS TONY’S KID,” ATTEMPT #3

With JARVIS technically driving the car, Tony didn’t need to keep his eyes on the road, but ever since they had left the garage at Avenger’s tower, Loki had been glaring at him in a way that made him not want to make eye contact. “I don’t like surprises,” Loki told him. “In my experience, surprises are never anything good.”

“Yeah well, we’ll have to work on that. Anyway, I promise this is a good surprise.”

“Is the surprise that you’re going to drive me out into the middle of nowhere and leave me by the side of the highway like a sack of cats?”

“First of all, I just said it was a good surprise. Second, do I look like someone who would abandon little furry animals by the side of the road? Never mind, don’t answer that. I promise I would never abandon you anywhere, and please don’t start up again about how you’ve already been rejected by two dads. I’m not going to do that to you.” Sometimes Tony wished Odin would drop by again so that he could punch him in the face.

“Maybe you won’t mean to.”

For a few moments, Tony wandered what Loki had meant by that, but then he put it together. Damn, how had she already figured something out that had taken him forty years? “I know, I’m not immortal. I’m going to die someday, and I’m sorry about that. But hopefully that day’s still a long way off, and when it happens, I’m going to make sure you’re taken care of.”

Loki gave him a tight-lipped smile. “Well, this has been a cheery conversation.”

“You’re the one that took it in that direction.”

“So where are we going?”  Again, she eyed him as if she still thought they might be going to the post office so that Tony could stuff her into a box and ship her to Abu Dhabi.

“To an abandoned airfield in New Jersey that I happen to own.”

“The one you had JARVIS land the jet at after the twins stole it?” 

Maybe admitting that they were indeed headed out to the middle of nowhere hadn’t been the best way to reassure her.  “Like I told you, there’s no way I’m going to teach you to drive in the middle of Manhattan.”

“Really?” And just like that, Loki seemed to brighten, her abandonment issues seemingly forgotten, or at least put on hold.  “Is that why we’re in Pepper’s car?” 

“Obviously, I’m not letting you drive any of mine. But this one? Feel free to crash it. I’ll just get Pep a nicer car for Christmas.”

“Can I have my own car for Christmas?”

“Nope.” Just because he was giving in and teaching Loki to drive (which he wouldn’t be if he’d gotten any kind of sign from the universe that it considered Loki his kid yet) didn’t mean he wanted her driving all over the city on her own.

“How about a puppy, then?”

Tony should have seen that coming. Loki had been bothering him about getting a puppy ever since she had watched the televised broadcast of the National Dog Show on Thanksgiving. “I keep telling you, we can’t have a Scottish Deerhound in the tower.”

“A Newfoundland then?”

“No.”

“How about a Tibetan Mastiff?”

“Still no. What do you want with a dog, anyway?”

“Oh, I don’t know, why would anyone want a creature that was entirely and utterly devoted to them and would follow their every command?”

And that, along with the fact that Loki didn’t seem to be interested in dogs that weighed under seventy pounds when full grown, was why he wasn’t sure she was ready to be responsible for the life of another living creature. “I’m already teaching you how to drive. You can’t expect me to cave on more than one thing at a time.” 

Loki heaved a sigh. “Very well. If I did have a dog, with my luck it would bond with Thor instead of me.”

໒ ˶′ﻌ ‵˶ ა 

“Okay, put the key fob in that slot, then put your foot on the brake and press the start engine button—” 

Loki did exactly what Tony told him to, but before he could give her any more instructions, she stepped on the gas. By the time he had time to process what had happened, they were on their third lap around the empty tarmac, and their speed had topped out at 155 mph. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he shouted.

“Driving,” Loki shouted back. Tony could barely hear her over the screech of the tires as she made a sharp turn to the right.

“STOP THE CAR!” 

Loki turned the steering wheel all the way to the left and slammed her foot on the gas pedal causing the car to spin into a donut. She then let go of the steering wheel and slammed her foot on the brake again to stop.

“What the—” A string of obscenities, some of which might have been in languages he hadn’t been aware he knew, streamed forth from Tony’s mouth.

“I believe that comes to ninety-six dollars,” said Loki, when he had finished.
 
Tony took a deep breath to steady himself. “Get out of the car, now.”  As he unbuckled his own seatbelt and pushed open the passenger side door, he tried to remind himself that he had promised Loki he would never hit her. Though he had never said anything about not strangling her with his bare hands—but no, he couldn’t do that either. He leaned against the side of the car as Loki stepped out of it. He pointed at her. “Kid, you are so lucky that Bruce would Hulk out and murder me back if I killed you.”

“Were you to kill me, Hela would only send me back,” Loki pointed out.

“Where did you even learn how to drive like that? I thought I was supposed to be teaching you.”

“You would be amazed what you can learn on YouTube. Anyway, I thought that was quite exhilarating, didn’t you? Can we do it again?”

As much as Tony was an adrenaline junky, that had nearly caused his arc reactor to have a meltdown. “Hell no! You’re not driving again until after I’m dead. You can also consider yourself banned from YouTube for the foreseeable future. Now get in the passenger seat, we’re going home.”

Tony got into the driver’s seat of the car and waited for Loki to get in on the other side. As soon as Loki had settled herself in the passenger seat, she turned to him with a huge grin. “If I can’t drive, does that mean I can get a dog?”

Chapter Text

Loki had no idea how long she had been staring at the corner, but it felt like a few days must have passed. When Tony or Bruce gave her a time out, it never lasted for more than a few minutes, and they weren’t even punishments, just opportunities for Loki to calm herself before they spoke to her about her behavior. “Nanny, can’t I come out of the corner now? I’ve learned my lesson, I swear.”

“There is no talking in the naughty corner, Princess.”

|（-◝ ） (*´-｀☚)

Thor nodded to the guards outside the door of what had once been Frigga’s dressing room. He poked his head inside, and saw Sif stood in front of the full-length mirror, wearing a simple but elegant gown of white, a golden crown of laurels sitting atop her intricately braided dark hair. She made a beautiful bride, but her expression was all too serious, which made the scene feel wrong. 

“Thor?” Sif’s eyes widened when she saw his reflection in the mirror. “Is that you?” 

“Who else would I be?” 

Sif turned around, still looking at him as if he had returned from the dead. “The All-Father told us you had decided to join Loki in his banishment and forbid us from traveling to Midgard to try to talk sense into you, though I could not understand why. I was half convinced that Loki had secretly overthrown your father and was masquerading in his form, until Heimdall confirmed the story.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Sif. Loki’s not capable of something like that.”

“Well, I’m glad to see you’ve come to sense on your own.”

“I haven’t. Sif, I have only come to take you away with me—”

Sif’s expression darkened. “Take me away?”

“You cannot wish to marry my father.”

“And why is that, Thor?”

So far, this was not going as expected. “Because he’s old. And you’re—you.”

“I’m me? Whatever does that mean?”

“You told me once that you would never marry, because you would never feel that way about anyone.”

Sif rolled her eyes. “I was a child when I said that, with silly ideas about how romance could be the only basis for a marriage. But I’m not a little girl anymore, Thor.”

“You have not changed your mind then, about your ability to feel that kind of love for another?”

“Norns, no. I would be hard pressed to believe that sort of love existed, if I didn’t know it was what you felt for your Jane.”

“Right? We were made for one another, and Jane is a fool not to see it.”

Sif looked at him pityingly. “I never said that. If Jane does not reciprocate your feelings, it may be for the best, and you should try to move on.” 

One time, the Avengers had confronted a villain who called himself the Ringmaster. He had attempted to escape from them in a hot air balloon, which Clint had shot with one of his arrows. They had all stood watching as it lost air and drifted to the ground. Thor felt like that balloon. “So, you are going to marry my Father, knowing that you do not and will never love him. Then why—” 

“So that I can become Queen of Asgard, you dolt.”

Thor blinked at her. “Since when have you lusted over the throne?”

“I have never lusted over it. I don’t even want it, but your father convinced me that I was the best candidate. You do realize that when you ran off to Midgard to goof around with a bunch of mortals, you left your father with no heir, did you not?”

“And my father has convinced you to produce another.” Feeling lightheaded, Thor collapsed onto what had once been his mother’s settee.

“Don’t be disgusting, Thor. I’m not doing that with your five-thousand-year-old father.”

Hearing that made Thor feel better, if only marginally so. “If you do not plan to bear him a child, then—”

“Don’t you understand? Your Father is old—very, very old.” She made a face, as if thinking again about reproducing with Odin. “After he is gone, I will rule alone as Asgard’s warrior queen.”

“Oh,” said Thor. “That’s—better, I suppose? Though wouldn’t you need to produce an heir?”

“I thought that eventually you would return—”

“You want to produce an heir with me?” 

“—to take your rightful place on the throne. Then you can take your own queen—not me—and the two of you can have as many little heirs as you like.”

“Oh.”

“So let me get this straight. You’ve come to rescue me as if I were some damsel in distress, have you?”

“I suppose I should have known better.” After all, he had not been able to best Sif on the practice grounds in over two centuries; the woman had spent her life doing all she could do to prove herself as a warrior. Perhaps there truly was no one more fit to be Asgard’s queen than she. “Still, perhaps I am here to rescue you from yourself. It sounds like you do not truly wish to be queen, and are simply taking it on out of a sense of duty.”

“I think it best that whoever becomes ruler of Asgard does it out of a sense of duty, don’t you? Only someone as mad as Loki would lust after that kind of power.”

“Loki is not mad, Sif. That is a derogatory term to begin with. But he isn’t a sociopath, or a psychopath, and I doubt he has ever lusted after anything.”

“Thor, I know you still think of Loki as your younger sibling—”

“Because he still is, Sif. You should know that blood is not the only thing that makes a family.”

“I do know that, Thor. I only meant that your brother is not a child anymore, and he must be held responsible for his crimes. Remember when he tried to kill us all?”

“I am aware Loki has a lot of issues, some of which we contributed to.”

“We are the cause of Loki’s problems? He’s convinced you of that, has he?”

“That isn’t what I said. But Sif, you are the one who knocked out most of Loki’s baby teeth.”

“It can’t have been most of them. Not at one time, anyway. Besides, they were only baby teeth, and he deserved it for cutting my hair.”

“He was only a child. Perhaps what Loki needed was for someone to explain to him that we do not cut someone’s hair when we’re upset with them, instead of showing him that if we are upset with someone, it is okay to knock their teeth out.”

Sif’s eyebrows knit together. “I suppose I have never thought of it that way.”

“Living among the Midgardians, I have learned to think of many things differently.”

ζ (,Ծ_Ծ,)   (￣-￣*)ゞ 

“Alright, Princess. I think perhaps you’ve learned your lesson now. You may come out of the naughty corner. It is time for your bath.”

Loki turned around slowly, her fists clenched defiantly. “I don’t want a bath.”

Nanny pursed her lips in that way of hers that said she would stand for none of Loki’s nonsense. “Well, that is too bad young lady, because your father instructed me to give you one before I put you down for a nap.” 

“I don’t want a nap, either—wait, you’re doing this on the All-Father’s orders?”

“Who else’s orders would I be following?”

“Then I have him to blame for this insanity. Obviously, he means to humiliate me.”

“Or he just wants you to be clean and well rested before the wedding,” Sjofn suggested.

“He expects me to attend?”

“Why of course, sweetling.” Sjofn reached out and tweaked her nose. “You can’t have a wedding without—”

“Sorry, what did you just say?” Loki must have spazzed out there, because she had completely missed what Sjofn had said just then.

Sjofn ignored the question and clapped her hands together. “Into the bath with you, then.”

Feeling a little disoriented, Loki wandered into the bathing room that adjoined the nursery. Without any sense of shame, she began to strip (it was nothing Sjofn had not seen before, after all). Sjofn shook her head as she took her things from her. “I think we’ll burn these,” she said, as Loki handed her her jeans. “It isn’t proper for a young lady to wear such things.”

That snapped Loki out of her stupor. “Don’t you dare burn my clothes, you cow!”

“Such language, and to your elder! Young ladies should not speak so; it must be the influence of those Midgardians you’ve been living with. I had heard Midgardians were crude.”

Loki decided it was time to take a stand. “I shall be as crude as I wish.” 

“Princess Loki, do you wish to go back to the naughty corner?”

Loki’s mouth worked, but nothing came out of it. She really didn’t want to go back to the naughty corner. She hung her head and pretended to study her hands as she contemplated the bracelet, and how she might get it off. “I’m sorry, Nanny. You’re right, it’s those awful Midgardians’ influence. I promise to be a good girl from now on.”

“You had better be,” Sjofn told her. “Now get in the bath, sweetling. The water isn’t too hot, just like you like. I’ve filled it with your favorite scented oils, and look, bubbles.”

“I do like bubbles,” Loki mumbled.

˳˚ₒ ๐ (◞ ᴗ  ᴗ)◞ ˚॰° ๐

\______________/

Sif sat next to Thor on the settee, cradling her head in her hands. “Your father convinced me that I would make a good queen, but now I’m questioning my judgment. What kind of monster brutalizes a child in response to a prank, then continues to hold a grudge against them for five hundred years?”

“To be fair, you were a child as well,” said Thor, taking pity on her. “I was also guilty of bullying Loki; he made an easy target, being so little and, well—”

“Odd?”

“Aye. But where were our parents in all this? No one taught us any better.”

Sif shook her head. “It isn’t any excuse. Now that I think of it, you’re right. If Loki is a monster, it’s because we’re monsters too, and we initiated him into it.”

“Now you’re taking too much responsibility, Sif. You aren’t his mother, after all. And none of us are monsters—we’re just little bunnies.”

“Bunnies?”

“Yes, Sif. We are all little bunnies, working through our issues.”

Sif shook her head. “I can’t go through with this wedding. I’m not fit to be Queen of Asgard.”

“You shouldn’t have to be. Ruling Asgard is a responsibility that has only fallen to you because I thought I could run away from it.” Now that Thor thought about it, perhaps he had little reason to return to Midgard. Loki would return, of course, and Tony and Bruce would take care of her. She needed parental figures more than she needed a big brother. And he could admit to himself now that Jane would not be awaiting his return.

The door opened, and Odin came in. Thor scowled at him. “It is my understanding, Father, that it is bad luck to see your bride on their wedding day.”

“I admit I have been listening at the door. And I have a proposal for you, Thor.”

₍ᐢ ̥ ̞ ̥ᐢ₎ ₍ᐢ ̥ ̞ ̥ᐢ₎ ₍ᐢ ̥ ̞ ̥ᐢ₎

The bath was the perfect temperature, and the oils her nanny had added to it smelled of summer flowers and caramelized sugar. Loki blew a mound of tiny pink bubbles across the surface of the water.

Nanny sat on a stool next to the side of the bath, holding a bottle of shampoo. “Lean forward, sweetling, and let Nanny wash your hair for you.”

“I don’t need you to wash my hair,” whined Loki. “I can do it myself.”

“Of course you can, sweetling, but it will be done quicker, and likely more thoroughly, if you let Nanny help.”

“Do as you must,” Loki said with a sigh. She leaned forward as Nanny had asked. Sjofen lathered the soap in her hands and began scratching and massaging her fingers over Loki’s scalp. It felt far from horrible, and Loki had to admit she enjoyed being pampered. Sjofen sang as she washed Loki’s hair, a tune that she remembered her singing her to sleep with in her youth. There must have been some magic in that tune, because it still worked on her now. 

“Princess, try not to fall asleep in the bath. We wouldn’t want you to drown.”

“It’s your fault for singing that song, Nanny. It makes me sleepy.” She wondered if somehow, she could get a recording of her singing it, and use it to fall asleep to once she’d returned to New York. It worked better than Doctor Samson’s pills.

“Nanny is almost finished with your hair, sweetling, and then we can get you out of the bath and ready for your nap.”

“Don’t want a nap,” Loki grumped, rubbing away the suds that had gotten into her eyes with her fist. 

“Nonsense. You need your beauty sleep before the wedding.” 

Nanny tipped a pitcher of warm water over her head, and Loki felt her insides melt.

She let Nanny help her out of the bath and dry her off with a cloth fluffier than any of the towels Tony had provided her with, like drying herself with a cloud. “Arms up,” Nanny told her, and Loki obeyed. When she opened her eyes, she wore a soft linen nightgown that went down to the floor. 

Nanny steered her to the bed, and Loki wanted to tell her that she was too old to be ordered into bed for a nap, but she was much too tired. “Fine. I’ll take a nap, but only because I want to,” she grumbled, and fell into the bed.

“That’s a good girl,” said Nanny.

[ (´・｀*)]ᐝ.∗̥✩(´▽ `ʃƪ) 

The warm light of late afternoon streamed through the curtains, and Loki awoke with the strangest thought; Nanny had said that they couldn’t have the wedding without the—what was it she’d said, “the sacrificial lamb?” Yes, that had to be it; she was to end as a sacrifice. Sif would cut her into lamb chops, char them atop a ceremonial altar, and serve her at her wedding feast.

No, wait; that hadn’t been it at all. But it had been something similar—

Loki fell asleep again for a brief time, and when she opened her eyes, a familiar face hovered over her. It wasn’t Nanny’s. “Sigyn? What are you doing here? I haven’t hallucinated you for months.”

“I’m not a hallucination.” A mischievous smile played at Sigyn’s lips. “I’m here to help you dress for the wedding.”

Loki sat up without any trouble. If she could move and speak, she wasn’t having a sleep paralysis episode. Either this was a dream, or the Sigyn before her was the real one. She reached out and pinched her arm. 

“Ow! Why did you do that?”

“This isn’t a dream, then.”

Sigyn smacked her on the shoulder in retaliation. “You’re supposed to pinch yourself. Besides, I just told you I wasn’t a hallucination.”

“Dreams and hallucinations aren’t the same. What are you doing here, anyway? I was under the impression that neither of us ever wanted to see each other again. I thought you’d gone back to Vanaheim.”

“I couldn’t miss my closest friend’s wedding.”

“Sif is your closest friend?”

“No, silly,” she said, tweaking Loki’s nose just as Nanny had done earlier. “That honor would belong to you.”

“If I’m your closest friend, I feel sorry for you.”

“The All-Father appointed me to be your handmaiden. Neither of us has much choice in the matter, so I decided it would be best to at least pretend we were friends again. Do you think you could do that for me? Otherwise, I’m afraid we’re going to be in for a rather awkward and uncomfortable rest of our lives.”

“The All-Father has appointed you as my handmaiden?”

“Yes. Had you not been informed, Loki?”

“No, I had not been. Going back, did you insinuate that this was my wedding day?”

“Oh dear. Were you not informed of that either?”

“I thought Sif and Odin were getting married.” Sigyn didn’t answer her, and Loki watched in horror as she threw open the wardrobe, revealing a fluffy white dress. Had that been in there all along? This was all starting to feel like a horrible, surreal dream. “I’m not putting that on.”

“You will put it on, Loki, or I will inform your nanny that you are being a very bad, willful girl. Do you want to go back in the naughty corner?”

Loki scowled at her. How did she know about the naughty corner? “Do you really think there’s anything you could do to make me put that dress on? I do not threaten, Sigyn.”

“Sjofen,” shouted Sigyn. “Loki is refusing to get dressed!”

“Tattletale,” Loki hissed. “Fine. I’ll put it on, but I’m definitely not marrying anyone. Wait, who am I supposed to be marrying anyway? Surely not you—”

“Of course not. You can’t marry your own handmaiden. In a sense the relationship between a lady and her handmaiden is like a marriage, but you still have to actually get married.”

“To whom, though?”

“Why, to a prince of course. You are a princess, after all. And someday, you will be a queen, and I shall be handmaiden to a queen. That’s better than being the wife of a useless second prince, so I suppose everything turned out alright after all.”

“Bully for you.” Of course, Odin would try to marry Loki off to someone she’d never even met and ship her off to some far corner of the nine realms to rein as queen over some backwater just to rid himself of her for good. Frigga had likely been the only one standing between her and that fate before now.

“Look at it this way, Loki. We are becoming women today, taking our places in society. Or would you prefer to stay a little girl and let Nanny bathe you and put you down for naps your entire life?”

Loki stared at the bracelet on her wrist. “Wait; am I meant to stay a woman for the rest of my life? I’m not allowed to go back and forth anymore?”

Sigyn shrugged. “Perhaps if your husband allows it, you’ll be allowed to switch back and forth. I imagine that might make for an interesting wedding night.”

“Wedding night?”

Sigyn grinned at him. It wasn’t at all a nice grin. “Yes, Loki. You’re going to have to have one of those. You should try to enjoy it, but if you can’t, I suggest you lie back and think of Asgard.”

Loki sank to the floor and hugged her knees to her chest. If she screwed her eyes shut tight enough, this all might go away.

_ :(˃̣̣̥᷄-˂̣̣̥᷅  」 ∠):_

Dressed in his best armor, Thor stood upon the dais below his father’s throne, trying to convince himself that the course of action he had agreed to was truly the only way. If Sif could find herself willing to marry out of duty to the Asgardian people and not for love, he should be willing to do the same. His life had never belonged to himself alone, and it was time for him to grow up and accept it. Besides, Jane had made it very clear that they were not going to get back together this time.

“You will become King of Asgard, as we had always planned. As you should have been by now had Loki not seen fit to stop it. But perhaps Loki was right to think you were not ready to rule then, and now—I believe you could rule, but it would be better if you did not rule alone. A king is always more effective with a queen by their side.” At first, he thought his father meant for him to marry Sif. Would it not have made sense, since she had already been set to become Asgard’s warrior queen? 

But Sif did not wish to bear children, and such a union would not produce an heir. Instead, she had shed the wedding gown she had warn before, dressed in her own best armor, and stood behind him on the dais as his second, or what Midgardians might refer to as his “best woman.”

“Do not worry, my son. I have already selected the ideal bride for you. It is someone known to you—a familiar face from your childhood. Someone whom you already love.” Thor had exhausted himself trying to guess who his father meant. Perhaps it would be Lady Kelda? He wouldn’t mind too much being married to Kelda “the Sexy” Stormbreaker. Yes, she could break Thor’s storm anytime. The only reason Thor had never wooed Kelda before was that even as a prince of Asgard, he found her a little intimidating. 

Yes, perhaps it would be Kelda. That wouldn’t be so bad.

The doors to the hall opened, and the same squadron of Einherjar who had met Thor and Loki at the gates escorted in a young woman, dressed in white. A maiden with hair covered by a serpent-like headdress and a face that seemed somewhat familiar walked behind her, carrying her train. 

The procession proceeded silently to the dais, and the guards herded the young woman in front of him. Something about her seemed familiar as well, though he was yet to see her face.

Thor lifted his bride’s veil, which oddly seemed to have been made from tightly woven muslin instead of the usual see-through material. 

Unamused, he turned towards the throne to confront Odin.

ζ ( ˃̥̥̥ ˑ̫ ˂̥̥̥ )ζ  Y-(≖‿≖ԅ)   10 minutes earlier…

Loki stood before the door of the throne room, drowning in a wedding dress that took up more of the corridor than the squadron of Einherjar surrounding her. She wished that she had remembered to bring her “emergency phone” with her to Asgard. What had happened to Thor? He was the only one who could help her now, but at this point, she could only assume he had forgotten about her entirely. Then again, perhaps he had been in on this scheme from the beginning. For all Loki knew, he had lured her back to Asgard on false pretenses so that his father could marry her off. “This is insane. Odin can’t force me to marry someone I’ve never even met!”

“I think you’ll find he can,” said Sigyn gleefully, “but who said anything about you marrying someone you’ve never met?”

“Wait; what?”  Loki racked her brain trying to think of who it might be; of course, Sigyn must have known, but there was no point in asking her when she so clearly enjoyed having the upper hand. Earlier, Sigyn had said she would marry a prince, but she didn’t know many princes other than Thor. She certainly didn’t know any she would want to marry, not that she wanted to marry anyone. There was Prince Freyr of the Vanir, who was of an age with Odin and happened to be Thor’s great uncle. Odin couldn’t possibly expect her to marry someone five times her age, let alone someone she had grown up believing to be family. There were a few dwarvin princes, but Loki just couldn’t see herself marrying anyone shorter than Tony. All the elven princes she knew were tedious, insufferable pricks, as elves tended to be.

Sigyn disappeared behind her. Loki attempted to turn to watch what she was doing but found that she could barely move in the oversized dress. A moment later, Sigyn returned with a large goblet. “Here, have some wine. A drink might make you feel better about things.”

“I’m not allowed to drink.” Loki’s response had been automatic, and she regretted it as soon as it came out of her mouth and Sigyn looked at her as if she had just grown an extra head. “I mean, obviously, no one has forbidden me from drinking because I’m not a child. It’s a personal choice; alcohol can wreak hell on mortal livers, after all.”

“One little drink on your wedding day can’t hurt. Go ahead, drink up.”

Loki took the goblet from her and sniffed its contents; Frigga had taught her better than to accept a drink from a fellow sorceress without checking it. It would have been imperceptible to the untrained nose, but buried beneath the earthy smell of the wine, she could smell Vanir rose petals and honey. “I should have known. You’re trying to make me fall in love with you again.”

Sigyn scowled at her. “Don’t flatter yourself. I know it might be impossible for you to comprehend, but I’ve been over you for decades.”

“I know what a love potion smells like, Sigyn.”

“Then you should also know that a love potion will make you fall madly in love with the first person of the opposite sex that you see. At the moment, we are both women.”

“And there, dear Sigyn, is where you are incorrect.”

Sigyn’s eyes traveled over Loki, lingering on her chest.

“I meant that you are incorrect about how love potions work. A potion cannot differentiate between male and female. Instead, the person taking the love potion will be hopelessly attracted to whatever person they see first, so long as they have any chance of feeling a romantic attraction for that person naturally. Personally, I have found that I have the capacity to feel attraction to members of either sex, no matter the form I happen to be in.”

“I thought you didn’t feel that kind of attraction at all.”

“Oh, of course, since I’m not attracted to you, I must not be attracted to anyone.”

“I also thought that the very idea of physical intimacy repulsed you, which was why you sent your mommy and all twelve of her handmaidens to escort me out of your room that time. Do you understand how humiliating that was, by the way?”

“I never asked you to turn up in my bed wearing nothing but that wicked smirk of yours. If you’d given me some sort of warning, I might not have panicked.” Loki also hadn’t been aware of what Frigga had done to get Sigyn to vacate her room; her mother had only said she would “take care of it.” If she had done something to humiliate Sigyn, Loki could hardly be held accountable. “Anyway, I don’t find it repulsive. It just isn’t something I think about that much, and I certainly wouldn’t want to be intimate with anyone I didn’t feel some sort of affection for.”

“Then perhaps you ought to consider taking that potion. It might make things easier for you.”

Loki hated to admit it, but Sigyn might be right. “But how could I even be sure that the next person I saw was the person I’m being forced to marry?”

Sigyn sighed as if the answer should have been obvious. “Drink it, then put your veil on. I’ve made sure it’s opaque enough that you won’t be able to see anyone until your intended lifts it.”

Loki still doubted that Sigyn’s intentions had been benevolent when she had tried to slip the potion to her, but she supposed it didn’t matter. She would be married off one way or the other, but maybe it didn’t have to be terrible, if she could just feel the tiniest bit of affection for whoever she was to be married to. She closed her eyes, downed the potion, and pulled the veil over her eyes.

“Oh, Norns! I can’t believe you really just drank that, knowing what it was.” Sigyn giggled maniacally, making Loki regret that she was currently too encumbered by her dress to punch her in the mouth.

“Do shut up and remember that you are my handmaid now,” Loki said through her veil. “You do realize that pretty much makes you my bitch, right? If I wanted to send you on an errand to collect snow from the surface of Jotunheim, I could. If I were you, I might try to stay on my good side from now on.”

Sigyn made an “harrumph” sound, and Loki wished she could have seen her face. She didn’t think it within the realm of possibility that the potion would make her fall in love with Sigyn; after all, it should only be able to make her fall in love with someone she had at least the capacity to feel an attraction to, and that ship had sailed long ago. But if there was even a .001% chance she was wrong, she wasn’t willing to risk it.

Sigyn took the goblet from her and pushed a bouquet of oversized lilies into her hands. They had been picked from her mother’s garden, and the familiar fragrance calmed her somewhat. The doors of the throne room were thrown open and Sigyn pushed her forward, causing her to stumble through them. Through some miracle, she didn’t trip over her dress and fall on her face. She moved down the aisle carefully, hoping that when she got to the dais at the front of the room, someone would think to stop her before she ran into Odin’s throne. Instead, when she reached the front, Sigyn, who had been carrying her train, caught her dress by the strings on the back of her bodice as if it were a leash and pulled hard enough for her ribs to be bruised.

Loki had barely enough time to decide that Sigyn would pay for it later when the person standing across from her lifted her veil, and she found herself face to face with Thor. 

Her first thought was that she would kill Sigyn, who had clearly known who would be waiting for her. Then she would find a way to kill Odin, and then Thor, for allowing whatever this was to happen, however it had happened. Perhaps she would make it relatively painless, given that he looked every bit as surprised as she was—wait, the potion! She couldn’t fall in love with Thor, could she? Frantically, Loki searched herself for any budding feelings of romantic attraction towards her adoptive brother and was relieved when she found nothing. Of course, that meant that she would still fall for the next person she saw that she was capable of feeling attraction to. Thor turned towards his father’s throne, while Loki looked down at the floor in an attempt to avoid the eyes of everyone surrounding them.  “Have you gone mad, Father? You cannot seriously expect me to marry my sister. It would be incest!” 

“It would not be incest,” said Odin, “because you are not blood siblings.”

“We were raised as siblings, and that is what matters.”

“But think, Thor. This solves all of our problems, does it not? I once told both of you that you were born to rule—”

“You said we were both born to be kings,” Loki pointed out, daring to look up at Odin. After all, there was zero chance she could fall in love with him. “Not a king and a queen. And if you expect me to stay in this form all the time, you have another thing coming to you.”

“But this is what I should have done from the beginning, I see that now. I should have raised you as my daughter—”

“Still incestuous,” Loki pointed out.

“Very well, I should have raised you as a female and my ward, with the clear understanding that you were not my daughter.”

“Better. Still delusional, but better.”

“I could even have told you your true origins. Yes, I see it now. I would have announced your betrothal when you were still young, to give you time to properly fall in love with one another. Then when you were old enough, you would have married, and it would have been a true joining of Jotunheim and Asgard. There would have been frost giants at Thor’s coronation, but they’d have been sitting in the front row, not skulking about in the treasure room.”

“Well, this has all been a nice little fantasy, but as Thor already put it, have you gone mad? It’s too late for any of that! You raised us as siblings, and we love one another as siblings. That can’t be undone. Plus, if you force us to go through with this, a pair of my time traveling other selves will come here and reset our timeline, which I’m certain is a nice way of saying they’ll blow us all to smithereens.” *

“But you wished for a throne, Loki, and now you will have one.”

“I never wanted a throne. All I wanted was for you to love me as much as you love Thor.”

“I always did, Loki. That is why I’m trying to fix things. I—” Odin took a step towards her, staggered, and sank towards the floor.

“Oh, Hel no, not this again. Don’t you dare go into the Odinsleep now, you old coward!”

Thor rushed forward to catch his father. The wedding guests behind them had begun murmuring to one another excitedly. Loki allowed the muscles in her face to relax, since there was no point in scowling at someone who was unconscious. “What do we do now?” Loki whispered to Thor, but her brother seemed to have been struck mute by the “shock” of his father’s collapse.

The next thing Loki knew, Sif had come up to the dais to kneel by Thor. “Thor, you should take your father to his room. Then we should call a meeting of your father’s advisors to discuss our options.”

Thor nodded reluctantly. “Yes, that does sound like the right thing to do. Loki, stay with Sif.”

“With Sif? Sif, who volunteered to put me to death?”

“I did no such thing.” Sif spoke through lips as red as the sweetest cherries. Had she painted them? She couldn’t recall having ever seen Sif wearing makeup before, but it suited her. She had worn her best armor to the wedding, and her hair had been styled in intricate braids, which Loki found herself wanting to touch. “Wherever did you hear such a thing? I suppose I might have told a few people that if you dared to return, there would be no need to execute you because I would kill you myself, but I wasn’t altogether serious.”

Loki exchanged a look with Thor, then both glanced down at the unconscious All-Father before looking back to one another. “And people call me the god of stretching the truth.”

“You will be safe enough with Sif,” Thor assured him. “She even told me that she was sorry for knocking your baby teeth out.”

“She did?”

Sif sighed, a sound like the gentle wind blowing through the grass in high summer. “Yes Loki, I apologize. I was a child myself and did not know better, but that is no excuse.”

“In that case, I accept your apology, and I am sorry that I cut your hair, if I have never said so.”

Sif’s perfectly shaped eyebrows rose towards her hairline. “You’re actually sorry for something? I have never heard you apologize to anyone.”

“To be fair, I’ve never heard you apologize for anything either. Not to me, anyway.” And yet, for a reason she couldn’t explain, Loki felt inclined to accept Sif’s apology.

Sif frowned. “Just to make things clear, I still do not like you. You allowed frost giants into the palace, tricked us into going to Jotunheim, and sent the Destroyer to Midgard to try to murder us.”

“I was having a bit of a mental health crisis at the time, but you know what? Fine. I accept that some people just aren’t going to like me because you can’t please everyone. I don’t like you either.” Though Loki wasn’t sure who she was trying to convince, Sif or herself. “You used to challenge me to fights because you wanted to prove yourself, and you were bigger than me and knew you’d win. When I was king, you couldn’t wait to commit treason at the first opportunity. You didn’t even think to ask if I was okay, even though you knew my brother had been banished and my father had fallen into the Odinsleep—”

“Thor had been banished because you wanted him banished.”

Loki had never cared before what Sif thought of her, but at that moment it felt important she not think ill of her. “I couldn’t have known Odin would banish him. All I wanted was for his coronation to be postponed indefinitely.” 

“Because you wanted the throne for yourself,” said Sif.

“Why does everyone think that? Sif, you have to know what a disaster Thor would have been if he’d become king then.”

“I’m to believe that you had the good of Asgard at heart, then?”

“What reason do you have to believe that I didn’t?”

“I suppose I find it difficult to believe that you care about anyone else, when you have always thought yourself better than them.”

“I only acted that way to hide my deep insecurities.”

“I see; and what has caused this sudden self-awareness?”

“It wasn’t sudden. It took several months of therapy. Perhaps you should try it sometime.” 

ヽ(҂▼_x)￣ _￣)_中

 “Thor? Where is your mother?” 

Thor felt like he could breathe again, he was so relieved for his father to have awoken. If he were honest with himself, he wasn’t ready to be king of Asgard yet. “Mother is in Midgard, Father. Do you not remember?” 

Odin’s face screwed up in consternation. “What is she doing in Midgard?”

“Enjoying married life with a Latverian dictator I believe, though we have not heard from her in over a month.”

“Gaea married a mortal? I suppose it makes sense. She is of Midgard herself.”

Thor felt his chest constrict, the sensation of being unable to pull air into his lungs returning. Now that he thought of it, he’d never thought to ask Frigga who his mother was. Perhaps deep down, he had worried that if he knew, it would put even more distance between himself and the woman he had been raised to believe was his mother. “Gaea is my birth mother?” 

Odin blinked up at him, and it was as if his mind turned over. He reached up and patted Thor’s cheek in a way he hadn’t since Thor had been younger than Loki was now. “Thor, there you are, my boy. Why do you look so troubled? Has your brother played another prank on you? He hasn’t dressed Toothgnasher in one of your mother’s dresses again, has he?”

“No Father, Loki has been good lately.” It wasn’t too terrible a lie; she had been relatively well behaved since their return from Latveria. She had flooded Bruce’s lab once, but she had sworn that she hadn’t meant any harm; she had just “spazzed,” as mortals would have put it.

Smiling fondly, Odin shook his head. “Don’t let him fool you, Thor. Whenever Loki behaves himself too long, it means he’s plotting something. Oh well, tell him if he’s naughty the Yule Goat won’t bring him—what was it he wanted this year?”

Dear Norns, when did their father think it was?  “I don’t know, Father; I shall have to ask. Likely some foolish book of spells or magical artifact—”

“Never call your brother’s magic foolish, Thor. Someday, he is going to be more powerful than your mother. And do you want to know a secret? Frigga is a better magician than I am.”

“Mother says that you are the better mage.”

“She is much too modest. Where is your mother, by the way? Did she go to Vanaheim to see her sisters?”

“Yes, I think that was it.” Thor felt bad lying to him, but he had a feeling the man might not even remember their conversation later. “I am certain she will be back soon, but she wanted me to make sure you got some rest. You’ve been overworking yourself again. But don’t worry, Father. Until you feel up to it again, I am more than capable of attending to your duties.”

Chapter Text

“How does this woman not realize the man she works with is perfect for her?” asked Wanda. 

Pietro asked what to Tony, seemed the more obvious question: “How does this woman not realize man she is dating is store mannequin?” 

“What I’m wondering is how these women don’t have anything better to do at work than talk about men, and how this woman has time to go to a Christmas party and on a bunch of dates, when this movie started off with her boss telling her that her career was riding on her ability to put together a pitch for an ad campaign in a few days—Tony, put that down. You promised you wouldn’t.”

Tony froze, and for not the first time, he wondered if the woman he intended to marry actually had eyes in the back of her head. Then he put down the spiced rum that he had been about to spike his eggnog with; after all, he had promised her that he wouldn’t start drinking in case Thor and Loki got back and he had to go pick them up from that Walgreens in New Jersey. Happy had the night off; he wasn’t Ebenezer Scrooge, after all. 

Tony took a sip of his virgin eggnog, wishing it was something stiffer. “Pep, what if they’re gone for months? Point Break was gone for six months one time, and when he came back, he told us that only a week had passed on Asgard. No one’s ever explained how the whole super weird, inconsistent Asgard to Midgard time difference thing works.”

That pulled Pietro’s attention away from the television. “Kiki might not be back for months? But if there is anything I have learned from binge-watching made for TV holiday movies, it is that holidays are the most romantic time of year, and only losers are not in love at Christmas. That is why I am going to take Loki to the top of the Empire State Building on Christmas Eve.”

“Yeah, that’s not happening for so many reasons. First of all, even if they do get back before Christmas, both Rudolph and Blitzen are going to be grounded until next Christmas for slipping out without saying goodbye. Second, you’re fourteen. You’re not old enough to date anyone unless it’s some awkward high school dance situation. Third, if you haven’t noticed, Loki doesn’t seem to be that into you, which might be because you call them Kiki, or it might be because you’re fourteen, which automatically makes you lame to any girl and-or androsexual person older than thirteen.”

“That is not true. Wanda, you are a girl older than thirteen—”

“He’s right, I think you are lame.”

“There you go,” said Tony.

“She is my sister. She does not count.”

“Sir,”interrupted JARVIS. “I thought you might want to know that there have been numerous reports on social media of a strange flash of rainbow-colored lights thought to have emanated from the Central Park area.”

“Seriously?” The whole reason Thor had taken Loki with him was so that he could sneak them back out of Asgard using the “back ways” again. Which was why hours after they’d left, Tony had gone back to that Walgreens in Hoboken, snuck into their stockroom, and hidden sensors in there. 

Pepper shook her head. “You know, eventually people are going to figure out what that light is.”

“Those of a scientific mind believe that what has been termed the ‘Central Park aurora’ to be a natural phenomenon caused by a combination of air pollution and lighting conditions,” JARVIS told her. “However, some conspiracy theorists believe that it is caused by the opening of a wormhole to another world, possibly Asgard.”

“Is it a conspiracy theory if they’re right?” 

“I believe a conspiracy theory would be any theory pertaining to a conspiracy, whether or not said conspiracy is real.”

“Wait, how does the public not know what it is anyway?” asked Tony. “I mean, it’s a good thing they don’t, or Thor would get mobbed every time he traveled between Ass-guard and New York, but Nat dumped all of SHIELD’s files onto the Internet.”

“It seems that the only members of the general public who have meticulously combed through those terabytes upon terabytes of SHIELD data were those who had already been dubbed conspiracy theorists, Sir.”

“Alright, whatever. Just start up the heater and warm the seats in Pep’s station wagon, J, because I’m going to pick them up.”

Pepper arched an eyebrow at him, which he was pretty sure was in response to the station wagon comment. “If they’re just coming from Central Park, they’re probably half way here already.”

“Yeah, but it’s freezing out there. Lokes is mortal, and we don’t know if they dressed for the weather. I’ll just drive along the most obvious route they would take and see if I run into them.”

“Can I go with you?” asked Pietro.

“There’s no reason for you to go, kid. Just stay here and keep rotting your brain on corny Christmas movies.”

“You never let Wanda or I go anywhere.”

He really didn’t have time for this kind of argument. “Fine; if you can be in the car by the time I—”

Tony was nearly knocked off his feet when Pietro sped by him in a blur on his way to the elevator. “Hey, what have I said about running in the house? And you can come right back here and get your coat. As far as I know, your superpowers do not include insusceptibility to hypothermia—hey, what are you laughing at?”

Pepper hadn’t laughed out loud, but she was hiding her face behind her wine glass, which really didn’t cover up the grin she was wearing. “You sound like my mom.”

Tony pointed at her as he backed into the elevator. “You take that back. I do not, nor will I ever sound like anyone’s parent. Even if we end up with ten more kids, never will I ever sound like anyone but Tony Stark, billionaire playboy, philanthropist, and superhero. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go pick up Thor and Loki so I can give Loki a big hug and then ground both of them until they’re three thousand years old.”

·͙⁺˚*•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙*˚⁺‧͙⁺˚*•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙*˚⁺‧͙⁺˚*•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙*˚⁺‧͙

Pietro blew his breath onto the window of the car, and then traced a heart into the resulting condensation. Then he drew inside the heart, in English letters: P + L. A second later, his face was hit by a rush of cold air as Tony used the button on his side of the car to roll the window down. 

A moment later, the window rolled back up, clean of his doodle. “Stop vandalizing the windows and keep a lookout for Thor and Loki,” said Tony.

Pietro rested his forehead on the cold glass. He watched the store windows as they drove past them, all decorated for the holidays with sparkling electric lights and fake snow. Everything was so clean and brightly colored, just like on American TV. New York City was just as he had imagined it to be when he was younger, if only a little more life-sized. Not that it was by any means small, but the TV always made things look bigger than they were somehow.

Tony Stark also seemed smaller than Pietro had once imagined him to be. After the deaths of their parents, he and Wanda had built up the man to be a monster, but he was just a man, who had done nothing but treat them well, even after they had stolen his plane and threatened him. They’d been treated better than they had been treated at the orphanage, and certainly better than they’d been treated by those Hydra scientists. Also, there was always plenty to eat, which had been a challenge ever since he’d gotten his powers. The Avenger’s refrigerator was always full; they had groceries brought in daily, and on one floor of the tower, they even grew their own vegetables. He had been banned from that floor after his first visit, however, because according to Ms. Potts letting him loose on it had been like inviting a plague of locusts.

Pietro liked Ms. Potts. She was always asking them if they had everything they needed, even though she knew they did. He also liked Steve, who took him out running every morning. He could do fifty laps around the tower to every one of Steve’s, but Steve had at least as much stamina as he did. Afterwards he’d cook breakfast, and they had a bit of a rivalry going on as to who could eat the most eggs. (Ms. Potts had said something about getting chickens, but then she had figured out that it would take an entire floor of the tower to keep a flock large enough to keep up with the Avengers’ egg consumption. Stark had bought a chicken farm in upstate New York instead.)

Clint and Natasha were okay. They spent most of their time training or out of the tower, so they mostly saw them at meals. (Both had gone somewhere else for Christmas, just like they had at Thanksgiving.) Doctor Banner kept to himself. Thor spent most of his time moping about some woman who had dumped him, which was a little pathetic.

The only person who lived in the tower who he didn’t like was Doctor Samson, mostly because he kept making him and Wanda come to his office, where he’d ask them about things they didn’t want to talk about. He would tell them they didn’t have to tell him anything they didn’t want to, but then he’d ask them the same questions in different ways. He also made them draw pictures, which Pietro didn’t like because he wasn’t good at drawing, and because he wasn’t a little kid. Wanda had said she didn’t mind it, because at least then Doctor Samson didn’t talk to them. (Also she liked playing head games with the doctor; whatever she drew, she told him that it was another picture of her dancing on Stark’s grave.) The last time they’d been in Samson’s office, he had tried to get them to play with puppets, which definitely sounded like an activity for little children. He and Wanda had refused to play along.

Wanda still claimed to hate everyone, Tony most of all, but he knew that was a lie. She had been shy around most of them and had spent most of her time watching television, but she didn’t seem to mind it when Ms. Potts or one of the others sat down to watch the television with her. She also seemed to have given up on her plans for revenge on Tony after the man had made palacinky for her. He couldn’t criticize her for that; Pietro had given up on revenge after the man had bought them hamburgers. 

Still, Wanda had been quiet. The only one she spoke more than a few words to at a time, other than Pietro, was JARVIS. At times, Pietro found the bond Wanda had formed with JARVIS odd, considering that he wasn’t really a person, but an artificial intelligence created by a man she still claimed to hate. 

As lost in his thoughts as he had become, Pietro almost failed to spot his Kiki. Though she would truly have been difficult to miss entirely, considering that she was dressed in what he could only guess was the costume of her homeland. A costume he strongly approved of considering that the lower half seemed to consist of—what would one call those? For some reason, the words “battle panties” came to mind.

“Stark!” Pietro called. “Look! It is Kiki!”

“You don’t have to shout. I’m sitting next to you. Now, where do you see her?”

“Up ahead of us. She is wearing some sort of battle-panties, and there is someone with her, but it isn’t her brother.”

༝﹡˖˟ ⸜₍⁽ˊ꒳ˋ⁾₎⸝ ༝﹡˖˟

The traffic had scrawled to a standstill. Tony peered into the crowd of last-minute shoppers ahead of them, and picked out Loki, who was indeed wearing what might be described as “battle panties.” Ever since Frigga had threatened her with them, he’d been wondering what battle panties were. It seemed they were some sort of bloomers that were worn with thigh high boots, an armored corset, and a short cape that couldn’t be blocking out much of the cold. 

The woman with her wore leggings under a miniskirt made from strips of leather. He felt like he’d seen her somewhere, even though she was obviously Asgardian. Maybe she’d been to Earth before, and he’d seen a photo of her in a SHIELD archive?

Tony rolled down Pietro’s window and leaned across him to shout at Loki. “Rudolph! Get your ass over here!” Someone wearing a reindeer costume—one of those actors who wandered around Time Square to take pictures with tourists, probably—stopped and turned to look. Tony waved them off. “Not you.”

Loki saw them and tapped the shoulder of the woman walking with her. She pointed to Tony, and they both hurried towards the car, which luckily was still stuck in a traffic jam. 

The passenger-side back door opened, and they both slid in.

“Who’s your friend?” asked Tony.

“This is Sif,” Loki told him.

“The same Sif that punched your baby teeth out, and who was going to marry your brother’s dad?”

“Yes. Thor has sent her with me as my—”

“Babysitter,” the woman said, her voice sour.

“I was going to say my bodyguard, but essentially, yes. Neither of us is happy about it, but All-Father Thor has spoken.”

“Wait. All-Father Thor? Holy shit. You guys didn’t off your dad, did you?”

“No, that didn’t prove necessary. Odin is still alive, but an emergency council of Odin’s advisors and several prominent nobles decreed him unfit to rule, after it became apparent that he had finally ‘lost his marbles,’ as the Midgardian saying goes.”

“What did he do?”

“The wedding turned out to be a bit of a bait-and-switch. Once we were there, he tried to force Thor and I to marry one another. It was then revealed that nearly all of Odin’s advisors had suspected something to be off about him for a while but had been too afraid to speak up.”

“He’s not mad,” said Sif. “He’s just entered his dotage.”

“What Sif means is that by all appearances, he seems to be suffering from what your people would term dementia. Thor told us that when he was alone with him after the ill-fated ceremony, he spoke to him as if it were several centuries ago, and he was unaware that Mother had left him.”

“Ah, Jeez. I’m sorry, Loki. That has to be rough—but at least it might shed some light on the past few years.”

“No, I don’t think it does. He has made some questionable judgments, which in my opinion begin with the idea that Thor had been ready to take the throne. But there’s no reason to believe that he started experiencing a true decline in his faculties until recently.”

“I’m still sorry.”

“Save your sympathy for Thor. Odin isn’t my father.”

“He’s still the guy who screwed you up, and isn’t that the same thing?” Loki didn’t say anything to that. “Anyway, care to explain why you’re wearing battle panties in twenty-seven-degree weather?”

“Nanny burned my Midgardian clothing, so I had to borrow one of Sif’s old outfits. Obviously, I couldn’t wear my own clothes, because they all look like what I wore during the invasion.”

“Are you saying that the only color you ever wore was green and all of your hats have cow horns?”

“In Asgard, when you find a look, you stick with it.”

“Wait, go back. Who did you say burned your clothes?”

“Her nanny,” Sif answered for him.

“You’re over a thousand years old and you’ve still got a nanny in Asgard? Hey, that means my record has been broken. I only had one until I was Pietro’s age.”

Tony looked at Loki in the rear-view mirror. The lighting in the car was too dim to see it, but he was pretty sure she was blushing. “She hasn’t truly been my nursemaid since I was seven centuries old.”

“But you did let her give you a bath and put you down for a nap,” Sif said, and Tony could hear the smirk in her voice, even if he couldn’t see it.

“She was helping me prepare for my wedding.”

“Sygn told everyone that you let her send you to the naughty corner, as well.”

Clearly, Loki didn’t think that was nearly as funny as Sif did. “I’ve had just about enough of Sigyn’s gossiping. If I ever see her again, I’m going to put a hex on her that will make her tongue fall out.”

Sif’s tone changed. She wasn’t teasing anymore. “No you won’t, Loki. I know Sigyn’s a mean-spirited little witch, but you’re not to do anything in retaliation. Am I clear, or am I going to have to make you stand in the corner myself once we arrive at our destination?”

“You can’t put me in time out, Sif. You’re not my mother, nor are you my sister.”

“Thor instructed me to watch over you, and I plan to take my duty seriously.”

“Hold on,” Tony said. “Are you going to be staying with us from now on?”

“I am sorry for the imposition. Our princess was quite insistent on returning to Midgard, but understandably her brother the king would not allow her to return without a guardian.”

“Princess—so Loki got reinstated, huh?”

“Tony and the others at the tower are my guardians,”said Loki, ignoring his question. “Your presence here isn’t needed.”

“Don’t be absurd, Loki. A princess of Asgard is not going to be allowed to reside on another realm without so much as an Asgardian governess.”

“Now you’re my governess? Sif, we need to get something straight. At most, you are here as my bodyguard. I do not require another nanny.”

“I don’t know,” said Tony. “I’m starting to think my parents had the right idea. You having a nanny to keep you from sneaking off when the rest of us aren’t looking might not be the worst idea. You’re grounded until New Years, by the way. I was going to tell Thor that he was grounded, too, but obviously he isn’t here.”

“What does this mean, she is ‘grounded?’” Sif asked.

“Not translating, huh? It means she’s not allowed to leave the tower, at least not for anything fun or without an escort.”

“You have been allowing her to leave your abode on her own?”

Honestly, Tony had been reluctant to let Loki loose on her own at first, but the others had convinced him that Loki needed to have at least a little independence. “She has to tell us where she’s going—which has to be within like, a one-mile radius of the tower. Her phone has to be on, and she has to be home before dinner. We don’t let her walk around the city by herself at night.” Also, Tony had hidden GPS tracking chips inside her cell phone, in the lining of her coat, and in all her shoes, but Loki didn’t know that. She also didn’t know about the tiny drone he had programmed to follow her and send footage back to JARVIS.

“Insanity! Do you not realize that the princess may still be in danger from the ones that coerced her into attacking your realm?” Tony guessed that now that Thor was king, one of his first acts would have been to set everyone straight on the whole ‘Loki’s Humiliation in Midgard’ story, so he wasn’t too surprised that Sif knew about Thanos and his gang. “From now on, I will have the final say on whether Princess Loki is allowed to travel outside your abode, and she will not be leaving it without me.”

“That is going to put a hamper on our love life,” complained Pietro, who had been listening quietly up until then. Everyone ignored him.

“Tony,” whined Loki.

“Look, we’ll all sit down and talk about this later, but if this is what Thor, King of Ass-guard wants, I’m not sure I have a right to say no.” Also, the woman had been brandishing a sword in the open while walking down Park Avenue. He wasn’t sure it would be good for his health to try to keep her from her “duty.”

“But Mother left me with you, not with Thor.”

“Yeah, and then you decided to take an unauthorized field trip which ended in Thor getting sworn in as king and you reinstated as Princess. You really don’t have anyone to blame but yourself for that—and Thor, actually. If he was here, he’d be grounded too. King or not, the next time I see him, he’s getting a piece of my mind.”

“You won’t make me go back to Asgard, will you?”

And there were Loki’s insecurities, rearing their ugly head. “Why would I do that?”

“Because I can go back now. Thor would have let me stay if I’d wanted to. He wanted me to stay, but I begged him to let me go back—”

“It is only until you all die,” said Sif.

“Just shut up, Sif."

“What? It is the truth, Loki. This man sitting in front of us is going to be dead in what, a decade or so?”

“Personally, I’d like to think I’ve got more time than that left,” said Tony. “But the way I live, you could be right.”

Loki made a whining noise that he was pretty sure was the precursor to a crying fit.

“Oh, shit. Loki, I was joking, okay? I’m probably going to live, like, another half century at least.”

Loki started bawling hard. Of course, half a century was no time at all to someone who’d already been alive for that and a thousand years.

“Real smooth.” Pietro dropped his voice half an octave. “Like butter—”

“Hey, you almost used that phrase right! Good job, buddy. But don’t add ‘like butter,’ and especially not in that tone of voice. Has Pepper been letting you watch soft porn?”

“Stop this crying at once,” snapped Sif, but there was something that sounded distinctly like terror in her voice—the terror of someone who, despite having practically declared herself Loki’s adult now, probably had less clues than Tony when it came to dealing with kids.

Of course, Loki only cried louder. People on the street were probably hearing her now, taking down their license plate number and calling the police. At least he was in Pepper’s car, so as long as they made it home without being pulled over by the cops, she would be the one getting a visit from Child Protective Services. “Hey, Sif? Just don’t. Leave her alone, because you obviously don’t know how to handle this situation.” 

“And you think you can make her stop?”

“Ah—” Now that was going to be a little difficult. The traffic had just started moving again.

“Imperious princess of the night,” Pietro declared suddenly. “But no, I do not like those lines. Can I say what I always say? I love you, I love you, I love you.”

Loki stopped crying, and there was about three full seconds of silence before Sif said, “Is there something wrong with that child, or is my AllSpeak scrambled?” 

“There’s something wrong with him,” Loki and Tony both said together. “Jinx,” said Loki, before he could. “Tony, can we watch Singin’ In the Rain when we get back the tower?” 

Now he was glad he’d brought Pietro along for comic relief. “Not really a Christmas movie, but if you can convince Wanda and Pepper to take a break from their holiday garbage marathon, sure.” 

He had a feeling that he was going to eventually have to have a talk with Loki about the whole “mortal lives only last so long” business. Or maybe he didn’t. Maybe they could never bring it up again, at least until someone was dead or dying. Yeah, that sounded good. Obviously, Loki knew they were all going to die long before her own lifespan was up. If she didn’t dwell on it too much, she would be fine, right?

P ❤ L
 
Pepper met them downstairs in the lobby, and before Loki could get five feet inside, she had her in her arms, and seemed to be attempting to squeeze her to death. “Don’t you ever disappear like that again. Where’s your brother? I swear, I could just kill him.”

Tony wasn’t sure if it was in response to Pepper’s death threat to Asgard’s king, or if she just objected to Pep’s apparent assault on the princess she was sworn to protect, but in a single movement, she had unsheathed her sword.

Tony threw himself between Pepper and Sif. “Whoa there, Xena. You can put that thing away, okay? Pep doesn’t mean any harm.”

Sif bared her teeth and snarled. “She needs to step away from the Princess.”

“A little possessive, are we? Down, girl.” Tony had gotten used to Asgardians snarling at each other, or at him for that matter. It was just how they showed dominance. But he wasn’t going to roll over and show her his belly, even though she did have a pointy sharp thing, and looked like she was just waiting for an excuse to stick it through his chest.

The arc reactor had stopped Loki from using the glow stick of destiny on him, but he wasn’t sure how well it would hold up to whatever material Asgardian swords were made out of. Come to think of it, how had he never asked what material Asgardians usually used for weaponry? He knew that Thor’s hammer was made of something called “uru,” an extremely rare metal forged from the heart of a dying star or something like that. He doubted Sif’s sword was made entirely of the same thing, but the fine piece of workmanship in front of him was perfectly smooth, and probably a hell of a lot sharper than a Ginzu knife. “Hey, what’s that made of anyway? Think it could cut through an aluminum can?”

“It is an alloy of uru, silver, and some other metal the dwarf who made it refused to identify. I’ve never tried it, but I’m fairly certain it could cut through the very fabric of the universe.”

“If the secret ingredient is an element found on Earth, I could probably figure it out for you.” And if it wasn’t, he’d have discovered another element, which could possibly be synthesized and used in his suits. He’d also love to get a better look at anything that contained even trace amounts of the same metal as Thor’s hammer, because Thor had refused—repeatedly—to let him take a sample from Mjolnir. 

“Get your hands away from my sword, mortal, before I use it to chop them off.”

“Sif, do you need to be put in the naughty corner?” asked Loki, her head still resting on Pepper’s shoulder.

Sif winced, and then lowered her sword. “I apologize. Loki is right, I should not scold her for making threats and then make them myself when there is truly no call for it.” She snorted. “Obviously, as a mortal, you present no threat to me.”

“I thought I just heard you say ‘Loki is right.’ Could you repeat yourself a little more loudly?”

“You heard what I said, Loki. Like they say, even a blind bilgesnipe finds a squirrel once in a while.”

Pepper scowled at her. “I’m sorry, who are you? Tony, where’s Thor?”

“Apparently, he’s been recast,” Tony told her.

o( ͡ ° ~ ͡ °)o(==> ( 0෴0)

Mortals were strange creatures. Instead of sitting around a fire and telling stories of the great battles they had fought with one another on a feast day’s eve, they sat around together, watching recordings of plays with such insipid plots that Loki could have written them. “I suppose it’s interesting, how they record them in different locations, instead of having the players stand on a stage.”

“Is this the first time you’ve seen television?” The little red-haired girl named Wanda sat on the floor, her nose inches from the screen, and didn’t take her eyes off it even as she asked her question. Sif was reminded of Thor and Loki as children, whenever their father told them tales of the battles he had fought.

“I have only been to your realm once in the last century, and I was a little too busy then, hunting down Thor and fighting an epic battle.”

An Asgardian child would have begged to hear more of the battle, but Wanda still seemed to be enthralled by the screen. Sif wondered if she had even heard her answer her question.

“Can I put on Singin’ in the Rain now?” Loki asked when the show they had been watching was over. Sif’s princess had turned back into a prince and had changed into one of the oddest garments she had ever seen. It was a sort of green jumpsuit with a hood that looked like an alligator’s head, which when pulled over the top of Loki’s head, made it look like an alligator had swallowed him, or like he was wearing an alligator’s skin. At first, she had been worried that Loki meant to put on a pantomime for them, but it seemed that this was meant to be sleepwear, not a costume.

“Howard the Duck’s ‘Very Ducky’ Christmas Special is coming on,” said Wanda.

“Wanda, why don’t you let Loki put the movie on, and we can record Howard?” Stark’s lady suggested.

To Sif’s surprise, Wanda nodded meekly in agreement, then got up and disappeared into the kitchen. When Sif had been a child, if ever there had been a dispute about what story to hear next, there would have been a brawl over it. She would have won, of course, and then listened to whatever story she wanted to hear while stringing the baby teeth of her opponents onto a friendship bracelet.

Wanda came back with a bowl of red and green pellets, which she offered to Loki. Loki took a handful. Then, Wanda held the bowl out to Sif. Her confusion must have shown in her expression. “M&M’s,” Wanda explained. “Chocolates with a candy coating.”

None of the words Wanda had just said made sense to her, but Sif took a handful anyway. She took one of the little pellets and held it to her lips tentatively. Then she realized that the entire room was staring at her. Sif wondered if this ‘chocolate’ was something of an acquired taste, and if they were waiting for her to gag on it. If that was the case, she might as well get it over with. 

She popped a pellet in her mouth. It was sweet, and the tiniest bit bitter. “This is the most wonderful thing I’ve ever tasted.” She hadn’t meant to speak aloud, but she couldn’t help herself—it was that good.

“Wait until you taste the good chocolate,” Loki said, his mouth still full of what Sif supposed must be the “bad” chocolate.

“How can anything be better than this?” 

“Oh, trust me, it can be much better,” said Lady Pepper. “Somewhere around here, we’ve got some dark chocolate truffles—”

“Pietro ate the rest of them.” Wanda glared at her brother, the boy who had called Loki his “imperious princess.”

“We’ll have to ask Steve to make hot chocolate,” said Loki.

“That’s a good idea,” Lady Pepper agreed. “JARVIS, can you see if the others want to come watch the movie with us?”

✶✧╟╢öωαЯD ε(⊙ )✧✶

“Singin’ in the Rain isn’t a Christmas movie, is it?” asked Leonard.

“Master Loki requested it,” JARVIS told him.

“I’m going to stay here, but you go down if you want,” said Bruce, from the same spot on their couch that he had occupied since that morning. “I know I’m not much fun to be around right now.”

“If you really don’t feel up to it, I’ll stay up here with you,” Leonard told him. “I’m not going to leave you alone when you’re like this. Did you take your medication today?”

Bruce nodded. “I don’t think it really does anything. At first, I thought it might be working, but it was probably just the placebo effect. If anything, I feel worse now. I mean, before I wasn’t—”

“Clinically depressed? That could be a side effect of the medication. You have another appointment scheduled with Doctor Sofen for next week, right? Maybe you should call and see if you can move the appointment up.”

“I tried to call this morning, but her office is closed for the holidays.”

“She gave you her cell number for emergencies, right?”

“Yes, but this isn’t an emergency. I’ll just stop the medication and call her after the holidays are over.”

“If you stop taking it altogether, it could make things worse. I’m not familiar with the experimental drug you’re taking, so you need to call her and ask her if it’s okay to stop taking it or lower the dosage.”

“Maybe it’s just seasonal affective disorder.”

“Have you ever had seasonal affective disorder before?”

Bruce shrugged. 

“If you don’t feel up to making the call, I’ll do it.”

“I don’t need you to call for me. I just don’t think we should bother her on Christmas Eve, when she’s probably with her own family. If you’re worried about it, I can just keep taking the medication for another week.”

“Fine, as long as you promise to make an appointment with her as soon as she’s back. Bruce, why don’t we go downstairs and watch the movie with everyone else? Just getting out of this room might make you feel better.”

“I don’t want the others to know there’s something wrong, and I don’t know if I can pretend right now.”

“They’re going to know something is wrong if you don’t go downstairs,” Leonard pointed out. “It isn’t necessary for you to pretend everything’s okay, anyway.”

“I just don’t want to ruin Christmas for everyone.”

 “Everyone here thinks of you as family. They love you, and they’re going to understand if you’re not feeling well. If you had the flu, would you try to hide it?”

“Maybe not, but I also wouldn’t go downstairs and give it to everyone else.”

“Your condition isn’t contagious. Besides, I can’t tell you more than this for patient-confidentiality reasons, but I guarantee you that you’re not the only one around here that’s feeling down right now. But that might be the reason we have holidays in the winter that are all about gathering with friends and family, eating comfort food, and filling our homes with extra light. We’re all just trying to get through the coldest, darkest days of the year, though sometimes it ends up backfiring when we put too many expectations on it—”

“Okay, I get it. I don’t need you to go into a monologue about the magic of Christmas.”

“It isn’t magic, it’s psychology. Psychology is a science.”

Bruce mumbled something that sounded suspiciously like ‘sort of.’ Before Leonard could call him on it, he said, “According to Thor and Loki, magic is science.”

“You have seven PhDs, Bruce. I doubt I need to explain false equivalence to you. Now what was that you said about—”

“Let’s just go downstairs,” Bruce interrupted. “Maybe there are still some of those snickerdoodles Steve made. That candle is just making me hungry.” 

Leonard bent over the coffee table and blew out the pumpkin butter scented candle that he had lit in an attempt to make things feel a little more festive. “With Pietro around, I wouldn’t count on it. I’m sure Steve would make more if we asked, though.”

   (\
  ..'..
  |   |
  |   |
  .___.

Steve didn’t mind being in the kitchen making hot chocolate and snickerdoodles while everyone else watched the movie. It was nice to feel needed, and he loved to share his mother’s family recipes with the others.

Although it might be nice if someone else baked or made hot chocolate for him once in a while. Not that the others were unappreciative or anything. “Steve, could you make more snickerdoodles? Thanks.” See? They always thanked him. But now that he thought of it, the ‘thanks’ always immediately followed the request. They never really gave him a chance to accept or refuse anymore.

Steve wondered if he’d become a little bit of a pushover. If Bucky was here, he would probably laugh at him. No, don’t start thinking about Bucky, Steve scolded himself, as he bent over to push another tray of cookies into the oven. After all, Doctor Samson had told him that while it was okay to reminise, he should try to focus on being grateful for what he had in the present. The past couldn't come back. But then, Doc didn't know what he knew—

Steve's train of thought derailed when he realized that Sif, the woman who had come back from Asgard with Loki, stood at the edge of the kitchen watching him. “Is there something I can get you?” Steve asked.

“Are you the only member of the kitchen staff, or do the others have this feast day off?”

“Uh, I’m not—” Okay, maybe he had been letting the others treat him like a servant, and maybe he needed to tell them no every so often. “I mean, we don’t really have a kitchen staff, unless you count the people who work in the SI employee cafeteria downstairs. Most of the time we do our own cooking or have food delivered from outside. If you’re hungry, by the way, there’s still some leftovers from Chef Zemo’s in the fridge. We’ve been ordering from there a lot, since the twins started staying with us. According to them, it’s authentic Sokovian food.”

“Oh, I apologize,” said Sif. “You are one of All-Father Thor’s Midgardian allies, then?”

“Steve Rogers.” He offered her his hand. She just looked at it. Steve realized he had some flour on his hand anyway, and wiped it on his apron. “Never mind. How do people greet each other in Asgard?”

“Usually with just a nod. Though if I’m addressing a superior, I would also cross my fist over my chest, like this.” Sif showed him the gesture.

Steve nodded to her. “Well, welcome to Earth—er, Midgard, I guess.”

Sif looked into the pot on the stove, where the hot chocolate was gently simmering.

“You want some?” Steve ladled some into a mug for her, then watched as she lifted the mug to her lips and took a tiny sip. 

“Oh my. I think I see why Loki wanted to come back here, and perhaps why he looks a healthier weight than he ever has in his life.”

“I wouldn’t say that to him if I were you. He’s a little touchy about it.”

“He’s always been a little touchy about everything. He can’t possibly think he’s fat, though, when he still fits in the clothing I wore when I was no more than eight and a half centuries old—not everyone can have as little body fat as Thor or Lady Kelda, after all.” Sif said the name with the kind of disdain that in Steve’s experience, was usually a cover for jealousy. Which was crazy, because as far as he was concerned, Sif had no reason to be jealous of anyone. 

Could be, he was just a sucker for brunettes with accents and no-nonsense attitudes. 

“Well, I’m not sure who this Lady Kelda is, but you look like you’re a healthy weight to me, and Thor definitely isn’t my type.” What? Why had he just said that? “I mean, you’re more my type.” Damn it, Steve, what are you saying? “Sorry, I don’t know why I said that. I mean, you are more my type than Thor is. For one thing, I only date women. Not that there’s anything wrong with men who do date other men, a couple of my best guy friends are dating each other; but even if I did date men, or if Thor was a woman, I prefer a woman who’s not so, uh—tall as Thor. I mean, you’re tall, but you’re not too tall.” Oh God, how was it that he was ninety-five years old, and he still couldn’t talk to women? 

“Thank you for this delicious beverage,” said Sif, as if she hadn’t noticed the stream of nonsense that had just come out of his mouth. “Is there anything I can help you with, by the way? It hardly seems fair for you to be laboring in the kitchen while everyone else relaxes.”

“That’s okay. I’ve got everything in control in here. You should go enjoy the movie.”

As soon as Sif left, Steve realized he hadn’t set a timer for the cookies, so he opened the oven to look. This time, when he turned around, he realized that he was being watched by Wanda, whose head had just popped up from the other side of the kitchen island. “How long have you been there?”

“Long enough to see your meet-cute with the Asgardian lady.”

“My what?”

“Meet-cute. It is when people in movies or on TV who are destined for each other meet, in a way that is cute or funny.”

“I’m not sure that’s what that was,” Steve told her. “She thought I was Tony’s servant, and now she probably thinks I’m an idiot who can’t string two words together.”

“Like I said, a meet-cute.”
     _       _
      \    /
 ____\_/_____
|    ________   |
|   |   ❤       | |
|   | _    ❤ _ | |
| ooo________|

“Alright, time for all good little boys and girls to go to bed, or Santa Claus won’t come,” Tony told the three children who had curled up on the rug in front of the television together. Adorable as it was, he was looking forward to finally having some adult eggnog and having a little alone time with Pepper before settling in for a long winter’s nap.

All three kids just gave him a funny look, before looking at one another as if to ask if any of the others knew what he was talking about.

“You know, Santa Claus? Big guy with a white beard that brings kids presents on Christmas Eve while they’re asleep? Knows if you’ve been naughty or nice, knows when you’re sleeping and when you’re awake—”

“He sounds like a stalker,” said Wanda.

Now that Tony thought about it, he had to agree. Still— “Oh, come on. Loki, you’ve been here long enough to know about Santa Claus.”

Loki arched an eyebrow at him. “I’ve also been here long enough to know he isn’t real.”

Tony knew that all three kids were too old to believe in Santa, but for some reason, it was still a little disappointing to hear Loki say it. It was one of those things that made it hit home for him that as much as he considered Loki and the twins his, he’d missed this entire, completely innocent part of their lives when it would have been possible to convince them that reindeer could fly. 

“Now the Yule Goat, on the other hand, is real,” said Loki, with an air of absolute certainty.

“Is that the same as the Christmas Goat?” asked Pietro. 

“I imagine it could be the same creature.”

Sif rolled her eyes. “Loki, you are at least two centuries too old to believe in the Yule Goat.”

“If the Yule Goat isn’t real, who brought me magic books every year?”

“Frigga, I imagine.”

“And who filled my shoes with grapes and nuts?”

“Frigga and Odin, obviously.”

“But I’ve seen him—”

“That was Toothgnasher. Thor used to dress him up for you and tell you he was the Yule Goat. Remember the year we all drank too much wassail, dressed him up like the Yule Goat, and brought him to the Yule Feast for Volstagg’s children?”

“But the goat who visited me wasn’t Toothgnasher, and I’m going to prove it. I’m going to wait all night on the roof for him to come—”

“Yule has already passed, Loki.”

“But Christmas hasn’t, and if our Yule Goat is the same as Pietro and Wanda’s Christmas Goat—”

“The Christmas Goat isn’t real either,” said Wanda. 

“Then who filled our shoes with chocolate fish every year?” Pietro asked her.

“Our parents, which is why no one has filled our shoes with anything since we were ten.”

“Perhaps the Christmas Goat just didn’t know where to find us. I am with Loki, I am going to wait all night on the roof and prove to you that the Goat is real.”

Part of Tony was delighted that both Pietro and Loki were certain that this Holiday Goat was real. Maybe he hadn’t missed their most innocent years after all. On the other hand, he was a little worried that he should be worried about Pietro and Loki developmentally. After all, like Sif had pointed out, Loki especially should have been too old to believe in a goat that left presents in children’s shoes—at least the kind of presents that anyone would want to eat. He took a step away and signaled to Leonard that he wanted a word in private.

Leonard followed him out onto the balcony. “Kind of cold out here, Tony.”

“Sorry, Doc, but I have to ask. How worried should we be about this Christmas-Yule goat thing?”

“Are you asking if we should be worried about Loki and Pietro because they essentially still believe in their version of Santa Claus?”

“Yeah, that.”

Leonard shrugged. “Honestly, I think there’s a good chance that Loki’s trying to play a trick on us, and that Pietro’s just pretending to believe because he has a crush on him.”

“But what if it isn’t a trick?”

“I’m not really a specialist in child development, but I’m guessing that it’s probably harmless. Let them sit on the roof all night, and they’ll see that this goat isn’t real.”

“That seems kind of harsh.”

“They’ll have to face that reality eventually.”

“I know. Maybe next year, though?”

Leonard arched an eyebrow at him. “Tony, what are you thinking?”

“That I’m a billionaire, and there must be some way of renting a goat and having a costume made for it after nine P.M. on Christmas Eve.”

“You’re really going to rent a goat, dress it up, and tell them it’s the Yule Goat?”

“That’s what I’m thinking. Unless you think it would be harmful to them—you know, psychologically or whatever.”

 “I’m not nearly as worried about them as I am about you,” said Leonard.

“I just want to make their first Christmas here a good memory, Doc. That’s all.”

✩*⋆ §・ω・§⋆*✩⋆

“Do you think Loki really believes in this Yule Goat?” Steve asked Sif as she sat at the kitchen table watching him make up a batch of eggnog for the adults. Wanda had already gone to bed, and Loki and Pietro had begun gathering up pillows and blankets and dragging them to the elevator along with the giant beanbag from Loki’s room. Tony had given them the go ahead to stake out the Yule Goat on the roof, so long as they wore their coats and promised to come inside to warm up if it got too cold.

“I would like to believe that this is only one of his pranks, but I’m afraid he truly still believes.” Sif sighed. “Perhaps it is not my place to say this, but Odin and Frigga have never been the best at imparting disappointing truths to their children. Thor also insisted that the Yule Goat was real until he was nearly as old as Loki is now. It was Fandral and I who had to convince him it was only a story for children, and that was an uphill battle, when Thor was convinced that the All-Mother and the All-Father could not possibly have lied to him.”

“Well, maybe he’ll stop believing when they’ve stayed out on the roof all night and the Yule Goat doesn’t come.” Steve handed Sif a cup of eggnog.

Sif frowned. “It only worries me that the Yule Goat will come, and his belief will be reinforced.” She drained her cup in a matter of seconds, and threw the cup on the floor, where it shattered. “ANOTHER!”

“Uh, Sif—that’s really not how you ask for a refill here.”

“Oh, sorry. Might I have another, please?”

“Sure, just let me get a broom and clean up this broken glass first. Wait—what was that about the Yule Goat coming?”

( ° o °）╯︵｡.ﾟ: ｡  (・_・ヾ

Up on the roof, Pietro and Loki had curled up in Loki’s beanbag and buried themselves under several layers of blankets to stay warm. They were both wearing their flannel pajamas and two pairs of socks under their coats, and Pepper had insisted that they put on scarves and mittens as well. Worried that that wouldn’t be good enough, she had brought up a portable space heater and two large canteens of hot chocolate. When they were all settled in, she had taken a picture of them with her phone. Loki had given her a dirty look, but their “stakeout” was just too adorable for her to resist.

She returned to the common room to find Tony on his cell phone. “What do you mean, you don’t rent the goats? Do you know who I am?”

Pepper took the phone from him. “I’m sorry. Have a wonderful holiday,” she said to whoever it was on the other end of the line. She hung up. 

“Dang it, Pep. Do you have any idea how long it took me to get someone from the Central Park Zoo on the phone?”

“I feel like we’ve been over this before, but you can’t bully people into doing what you want just because you’re Tony Stark.”

“I know that, Pep, but everyone has a price, and Tony Stark is able to pay it.”

“Tony, you don’t need to rent a goat. I’m sure that eventually, Loki and Pietro will fall asleep up there. In the morning we can tell them they missed the Yule Goat. All we need to do is fill their shoes with candy and change some of the tags on the gifts we already got for them.”

“But what if they don’t fall asleep?”

“Then we’ll tell them that the Yule Goat came in through the balcony off the common room, and they missed him or her that way. If you want, we can knock over the satellite dish again to make it more believable.”

§・ω・§;; 📡

“It isn’t the top of the Empire State Building, but it is still romantic up here with just me and you, don’t you think?”

Loki sighed. He really should have expected this. “Pietro, I’m not interested in dating you.” He wasn’t interested in dating anyone at the moment, even though for the time being, he might be just a little bit in love with Sif. But that was only because he had stupidly let Sigyn convince him to drink a love potion on purpose, after which Sif had been the first person he had seen whom he hadn’t grown up believing to be immediate family. So far, he thought he had been doing an excellent job of hiding the fact that all he wanted was to hold Sif’s hand and look longingly into her eyes; luckily, after a thousand years, exchanging barbs with the woman had become second nature to him.

“You will change your mind, someday.”

There was something so hopeful in Pietro’s voice that Loki couldn’t bring himself to argue with him further. “I suppose it’s possible that someday, I’ll go completely out of my mind,” he muttered.

The edge of Pietro’s mouth quirked upward triumphantly. “Wanda often tells me that I make her go out of her mind. Perhaps I will have the same effect on you.”

Loki was certain that Pietro already had that effect on him, but he decided to keep that to himself. Later, when Pietro snuggled closer to him, Loki allowed it—not because he particularly wanted to snuggle with Pietro, but because it was twenty-five degrees outside, and even with all his layers and the space heater nearby, his cheeks were starting to feel numb. 

 ❅ •º •❅ º •º ❅ •º •❅ 

“Someone should check on the boys before we go to bed.” 

Tony leaned in and gave Pepper a kiss on the cheek. “Sure, I’ll be right back.”

When he got up to the roof, he could hear snoring.  Pep must have been right, which she usually was. They’d already fallen asleep. He tiptoed closer to take a look and make sure that the space heater was still on and they had enough blankets. When he got close enough, he realized that Loki was still awake.

“Hey Lokes,” he said softly, trying not to wake up Pietro. “How’s the stakeout going?”

“I don’t think he’s coming. Usually, he would have come by now.”

“Yeah, but that was in Asgard, right? Maybe New York is just farther down in the Yule Goat’s list of stops.”

“I wish you wouldn’t encourage him,” said a voice from the shadows, making him jump. Of course, Sif had been up on the roof the entire time. Thor had sent her to be Loki’s guard dog, and she wasn’t going to let him out of her sight.

Pietro’s head was on Loki’s shoulder. He still didn’t want to wake him up, but Tony scowled at him anyway. He crouched down by Loki. “I’m sure the Yule Goat will come, but maybe he doesn’t want to come when you’re awake.”

“He’s never waited for me to be asleep before,” Loki argued. “I mean, he didn’t come last year or the year before, but I thought that was because—” 

“Because?”

Loki locked eyes with the cement of the roof in front of him. “I assumed that he hadn’t come the last couple of years because I had been bad. This year, I thought I had behaved myself well enough, but now that I think of it—”

“Wait—you think the Yule Goat didn’t come the last two years, and isn’t coming this year because you were bad?”

“I mean, I haven’t murdered anyone this year, but I do get in trouble a lot.”

Tony couldn’t really argue with that; Loki did seem to find a new way to get himself grounded at least once a month. He patted Loki on the shoulder. “Hey, you’re still a good kid, Lokes. I’m sure the Yule Goat knows that.” Damn it, why had he listened to Pepper? If he had kept looking, he was sure he could have found someone to rent a goat from.

Sif cleared her throat, drawing their attention. “And I am sure that the only reason he didn’t come the last two years was because he did not know where to find you. Perhaps last year he knew but understood he would not be able to visit you in prison.”

Tony wondered why Sif had suddenly changed her tune. He arched an eyebrow at her, but she only shrugged. Tony grabbed Loki’s thermos. “Hey Lokes, I’m going to go get you some more hot chocolate, okay? Sif, why don’t you come keep me company?”

Sif followed him to the elevator. “What was that about?” he asked her once the doors had closed. “I thought you didn’t want me to encourage him.”

“I’m not completely heartless, you know. And it struck me that perhaps, Loki knows that the Yule Goat is not real after all.”

“Yeah, you’re going to have to explain that one.”

“I think that perhaps, Loki knows it was always his brother’s goat.”

“Then why would he be upset that—oh.” So that was it. Loki knew that the Yule Goat wasn’t real. This was just his holiday tradition with his brother. Thor dressed up his goat, and Loki pretended to believe it was the Yule Goat. Thor had dropped the ball.

“I am certain he’s only forgotten, with all of the responsibilities that have been thrust on him. Or perhaps he assumed that Loki had finally outgrown visits from the Yule Goat. I doubt it has anything to do with Loki’s behavior.” She snorted. “After all, that has never stopped Thor from indulging his every whim in the past.”

The door of the elevator opened out onto the common room, which was dark other than a couple of lights in the kitchen. Tony took the milk out of the refrigerator and found a small saucepan to make a single serving of hot chocolate. He had seen Steve make it from scratch often enough, and he wasn’t going to give Loki Swiss Miss when he clearly needed the real thing.

ⅽ[ː̠̈ː̠̈ː̠̈] ͌

According to the lock screen of Loki’s smart phone, it was nearly four in the morning. He might have given up on the Yule Goat and gone inside, but Pietro had fallen asleep leaning against him, and while normally, he would have pushed him off without a second thought, it was the Yuletide after all. (And maybe, just maybe, he was feeling the tiniest bit sorry for the boy, now that he knew what it was like to have all sorts of squishy feelings for someone who would never return them.)  Anyway, it was a beautiful night, or at least what passed for a beautiful night in a city with so much light pollution that you couldn’t see a single star. But there was something enchanting about the city lights all on their own, and from the top of Avenger’s tower, you could see all of Manhattan and a rather large swath of New Jersey whenever the sky was clear. Loki peered out in the direction of Rockefeller Center—

When what did he spy from the Tower of Stark, 
But a prismatic flash o’er the Pond at Central Park.
And hearing a bleat that was so deep of throat,
He knew in a moment it must be the goat!

Loki lifted his binoculars up to his eyes to confirm that he had seen what he thought he had seen. At the same time, the door opened behind him, and he heard Tony’s voice. “Loki, look who’s here—it’s the Yule Goat!”

“Yes, I know,” said Loki, without turning around.

“MAAAA,” said Tony.

“Oh, that’s a good idea. Perhaps if we make goat sounds, she will be sure to find us—MAAA! MAAA!”

“Uh, Lokes—”

“What’s going on?” asked Pietro, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

“The Yule Goat has made an appearance, and we are making goat noises in order to attract her to the roof.”

“Is that why Tony has a goat wearing a Santa Claus hat?”

Loki finally turned around to see Tony, holding a lead with a tawny colored goat attached to it. The goat was indeed wearing a Santa Claus hat as well as what appeared to be the skirt from their Christmas tree and an annoyed expression. “Tony, why do you have a goat?”

“It’s the Yule Goat, obviously.”

“That isn’t the Yule Goat. The Yule Goat is white of fur, with a full beard. Also, she is currently flying over the Diamond District.”

Tony handed the goat’s lead to Pietro and Loki handed him the binoculars. “Holy shit, there’s a goat flying towards us, wearing a much higher quality costume than I was able to come up with at four in the morning on Christmas. I hope you appreciate, by the way, that I had to call every goat farm in a hundred mile radius of the city—and there are more of those than you would think, what with this urban farming trend—before I found someone who didn’t immediately hang up on me and was willing to rush order a goat at two-thirty in the morning on Christmas.”

“Don’t get me wrong, Tony, I am touched. I believe my heart has grown three sizes, just listening to your story.”

“You should be touched, damn it. Do you have any idea what Pepper’s going to do to me when she finds out I went behind her back and bought a goat? And just to be clear, I did buy this goat, because apparently, goat rental isn’t really a thing after midnight on the day you need the goat.”

“I’m sorry, Tony, if I sounded insincere. I truly appreciate your efforts.” And he truly did; after all, Odin would never have dressed a goat up in a Christmas tree skirt for him.

“See, you still sound a little insincere, though—”

“I can’t help it; that’s just what I sound like.”

“MAAA!” agreed Tony’s goat. 

The goat’s cry was answered by a loud bleat that echoed across the rooftop, and a moment later, they were bathed in a rainbow light. Loki looked up, and above them, the Yule Goat hung in the air.

Her eyes—how they twinkled! Her muzzle, how merry!
Horns twisted like seashells, nose pink like a berry!
Her tongue, it lolled out like the tail of a bow,
And the beard on her chin was as white as the snow;
The stump of a pipe she held tight in her teeth,
And the smoke, it encircled her head like a wreath— 

“That goat doesn’t have a pipe,” Pietro pointed out. “Also, smoking is very bad for you.”

“Sorry, was I talking out loud?” asked Loki.

“Yes,” said Pietro and Tony together. 

The Yule Goat landed on the roof with another happy bleat, and Loki ran to her to see what she had for him in the pack she carried on her back. He opened it up and pulled out a bag filled with grapes, nuts, and some of the little spice cookies that he and Thor used to sneak from the kitchen every Yule’s Eve, unable to wait until the next day for them. He handed the bag to Pietro. “You can have the grapes and nuts, but the cookies are mine. If you eat even one, I’ll murder you and no one will ever find your body.” He then pulled out three large packages wrapped in gilded paper and handed two of them to Pietro.

“What does that writing say?” asked Pietro, narrowing his eyes at their rune inscribed gift tags.

“To Pietro from the Yule Goat, and to Wanda from the Yule Goat.”

“But which is which?”

Loki was too busy ripping into his own present to answer. “Ooh, a copy of the Necronomicon—and look, it’s a first edition!”

*⋆*§・ω・§✩.✩§・ω・§⋆*

“Did you have a good Christmas?”

Loki nodded sleepily as he curled against Tony on the couch. Even though he had been up nearly all night waiting for the Yule Goat, all three kids had been up bright and early to open their presents. Which, to be fair, might have been because in his own excitement Tony had woken them all up and attempted to drag them into the common room so that Christmas could get started. Also, Wanda might have used her witch powers to slam the door in his face while cussing him out in Sokovian.

“Did you get everything you wanted?” asked Tony. “You know, other than thirty million dollars a month tax free in a Swiss bank account, encompassing power over every living thing in the universe, and revenge against your enemies?” Of course, Tony had done his best to spoil all three of the kids he was now responsible for with gifts of new clothing and electronic gadgets. Pepper had insisted on both labeling and color coding the kid’s gifts: green for Loki, red for Wanda, and blue for Pietro. And while at the time he had felt that to be as unnecessary as the time she had spent an afternoon affixing little labels to clear bins of pasta and cereal, he couldn’t deny feeling a sense of satisfaction as he surveyed the green, red, and blue post-Christmas morning devastation that was now the Avenger’s common room. 

“Almost,” said Loki, his eyes closed. “I was kind of hoping that the Yule Goat would bring me the antidote to a Vanir love potion—”

“And why would you need that?” Loki shrugged, and Tony decided that he probably didn’t want to know. Taking one more look around the room, he spotted a single present still hiding in plain sight under the tree. It wasn’t one he remembered wrapping, but this one was in green paper, so it must have been for Loki. “Hey, it looks like you missed one—”

“WOOF!” 

Had it been his imagination, or had that present just barked?

Suddenly, Loki was wide awake. “You got me a puppy?”

“Uh—” Not that he knew of. He looked around at Pepper and the other adults, but they all just shrugged. Of course, no one present would have gotten Loki a dog without discussing it with the others. Which meant it had to have been Clint or Natasha, either or which he could see doing something like that just to screw with him. Whichever one of them it had been, he was going to kill them. 

Loki opened the top of the box, and the head of what appeared to be a black pit bull puppy popped out. Tony couldn’t get too good of a look though, because Pietro and Wanda had gotten up to crowd around Loki and the mystery gift.

“What’s wrong with its eyes?” asked Wanda. 

“There’s nothing wrong with them,” Loki told her. “Having ocular albinism doesn’t make one evil, you know. Besides, I saw your eyes flash the same color this morning, after Tony tried to wake you up.”

“Dogs with albinism have blue eyes, not red,” said Bruce, though he barely seemed interested. Tony wasn’t sure if he hadn’t gotten enough sleep the night before or what, but he’d been acting lackadaisical all morning, and “lackadaisical” wasn’t a word Tony used lightly (or much at all). “They also don’t typically have black fur. If its eyes really are red, someone should take it to the vet, because it might have hyphema.”

“What are you going to name him?” asked Pietro.

“I shall call him Thori,” said Loki. “What do you think of that, Thori?”

“Not Thori. Death Ripper,” said the dog.

Tony stared into his coffee. He didn’t remember spiking it, nor did he remember taking any hallucinogenic drugs before breakfast. The dog jumped out of Loki’s arms and ran straight for the tree. “Hey, he better not lift his leg in here—”

But instead of lifting his leg to mark the tree, flames shot out of Thori-Death Ripper’s mouth.

“Uh—bad dog—” Tony and the kids just stared at the bonfire that had been their tree. Pepper had dropped her coffee cup, and Leonard had leapt up to get out of the way of the splash. Bruce continued to drink his own coffee, still seeming only marginally aware of what was going on. That was probably for the best, since the only thing that could have made things worse was a raging Jolly Green all up in the middle of things. Steve ran for the kitchen, but before he got back with the fire extinguisher, the sprinklers in the ceiling turned on.

“Sir, I have taken the liberty of initiating emergency measures,” JARVIS informed him.

“We noticed,” said Tony, water dripping from his hair and the end of his nose. “Thanks, J.”

When the flames had been doused, the sprinklers shut off. Loki, who like all of them looked like she had gone swimming in her pajamas, crouched down and fished a limp piece of paper from the bottom of the now soggy gift box. “‘Dear Father, Happy Yuletide. Hope to see you soon. Hugs and kisses, Hela.’”

Fantastic. Loki’s daughter had gifted him with a literal Hel hound, which was probably going to burn down the tower with them in it, and then they would all be seeing the overseers of their respective afterlives. The flame-thrower dog shook the water from its coat, burped a smoke ring, and jumped onto the coffee table. Before Tony could decide whether he should look for a soda can to fill with pennies or call for his suit, Sif, who like Bruce had only been watching quietly until then, stood, drew her sword, and pointed it at the dog.

“Off,” Sif commanded, and the dog jumped off the table. “Now sit, or I shall send you back whence you came.”

The dog sat, looking up at Sif adoringly. “Will you be my mistress?” it asked, and Tony decided right there and then that for New Years, he was giving up, alcohol, all pharmaceuticals, and just for good measure, caffeine.

Chapter Text

“Please may I come to the party tonight?”

Tony didn’t even look up from the schematics on his computer screen. “You’re still grounded, so no.”

“You grounded me until New Year’s, and it’s New Year’s.”

“Technically, it’s New Year’s Eve, so until midnight, you’re still grounded. Not that you would be going anyway, because you’re not an Avenger or an SI employee.”

“I’m Pepper’s intern,” Loki pointed out.

“Huh, that’s right, you are. Too bad you’re grounded.”

“It’s not even fair that you grounded me this time. Thor forced me to go to Asgard with him. I had no choice in the matter, and I had a horrible time.” (Actually, it hadn’t been entirely horrible; he had enjoyed that bubble bath.)

“Loki, I don’t believe for a second that he had to drag you kicking and screaming. If he had, JARVIS wouldn’t have let him take you out of the building.”

“Perhaps not, but Thor is my elder brother, and an adult.”

“Allegedly.”

“And am I not supposed to do what adults tell me to do?”

“Not when they tell you to do things you know I wouldn’t want you to. I feel like we’ve been over this before, but as long as you live here, I’m your guardian, not your dumbass brother.”

“That dumbass is king of Asgard,” Loki argued.

“He wasn’t king of anything when you guys left the tower, and he still isn’t king here. By the way, I’ve reprogrammed JARVIS so that now you can’t leave the tower without permission from me, Pepper, or Bruce. If anyone else wants to take you out, adult or not, they have to clear it with one of us.”

“And you still won’t be going anywhere without me.” Sif stepped out of the shadow she had been lurking in. For the past week, the woman had followed Loki around like a clingy Labrador retriever, which was more than he could say for Thori, who he hadn’t seen all day. 

The worst of it was that he was still just the tiniest bit infatuated with her, thanks to Sigyn’s love potion, and the more time he spent around her, the more difficult it was for him to hide it. “Tony, please,” Loki begged.

“You know, I’m starting to think it isn’t a horrible idea. Now that you’re a prince again, you probably shouldn’t be walking around New York without a bodyguard.”

Loki hoped he was joking but had the awful feeling he wasn’t. “That’s what you think now, until she commits some public faux pas that draws attention to us both. She still doesn’t understand the ways of modern mortals. How many glasses has she broken so far?”

“It is difficult to break a habit of a thousand years,” said Sif. “But I have already learned much about mortal culture. I have been watching their magic picture box.”

Loki rolled her eyes. Like Thor, Sif wasn’t that dense, which meant that she had to be doing it on purpose. “It’s called a television, Sif.”

“I also asked Lady Pepper for advice on how to blend in here, and she gave me a stack of literature to peruse, pertaining to mortal styles of dress.”

“You’ve been reading fashion magazines,” Loki translated.

“I have been studying them diligently and attempting to apply their precepts as I choose my Midgardian wardrobe. Though I am still confused as to whether I am a ‘cool,’ a ‘warm,’ or a ‘neutral,’ so I’ve stuck with the colors I usually wear.”

Loki examined Sif’s crimson red turtleneck sweater with matching lipstick, black skinny jeans, and a pair of ever-trendy chestnut colored Uggs. “I suppose you’ve done a decent enough job dressing yourself.”

Sif gave him a small, deferential nod. “Thank you for saying so, my prince.” Though he detected a note of sarcasm in the sentiment, for a moment, Loki thought she might be blushing. Then he realized that she had simply over-applied her rouge. He stepped towards her, licked his thumb, and reached out to try to swipe some of it off.

Sif caught him by the wrist. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“You’ve put too much makeup on. I was just trying to fix it.”

“Who are you then, my mother?”

Suspicious that he might be the one blushing now, Loki pulled his wrist away from her and ran for the stairs. 

.°♡ (;;￣-￣)ノ(❁•_•❁)

Sif watched as Loki dashed out of the room. She considered following him but decided to take the opportunity to speak to Lord Stark instead. Her prince seemed to have developed a surprisingly close relationship with the man, which perhaps meant he would have some insight into his behavior. “Loki has been acting strange,” she announced, hoping it would be enough to illicit a response.

Stark’s attention had returned to his work, but his mouth quirked upwards. “Stranger than normal?”

“He avoids eye contact with me whenever I speak to him, but then I catch him staring when he thinks I am not looking. At first, I thought he was only angry with me for being here, though it was hardly my idea—”

“I wouldn’t worry about it. He probably just has a little crush on you.”

“He wishes to crush me?” Sif supposed that made more sense than what she had begun to suspect, which was that Loki was falling in love with her.

“No, I said he has a crush on you. That’s mortal for he like-likes you.”

Again, the man had used a term that didn’t quite translate, but Sif inferred his meaning by the wag of his eyebrows. “If you’re saying that he fancies me, you must be joking. There has been no love lost between us for centuries.”

“You know, I’ve got to wonder about that— isn’t the whole reason you don’t get along with him that he cut your hair?”

Sif failed to see what that had to do with anything. “It isn’t the only reason, but the incident did nothing to endear him to me.”

“Have you ever thought about why he did it?”

“I assumed it to be because he was jealous.”

“Jealous of what, though?”

“My hair, obviously. Before he cut it, I had beautiful golden hair, which is considered a high virtue in Asgard.”

“Whereas Loki’s hair has always been dark, which was considered the outward manifestation of his twisted, unworthy little soul,” Stark guessed. “Gee, and I thought I couldn’t love Asgard more.”

“We aren’t quite as backward as you imagine,” Sif protested. “Golden hair is a highly regarded trait in Asgard, but it isn’t particularly shameful to have dark hair. My own brother is dark of complexion and highly regarded by all. But that Loki’s hair was dark did lead some to talk. After all, the All-Mother’s hair was golden, and the All-Father’s hair had been red when he was younger—”

“Leading everyone to suspect Loki was the milkman’s. I get it. But what if it wasn’t really about the hair anyway—weren’t you also going out with his brother?”

“I suppose it is also possible that he was jealous I had usurped his brother’s attentions.”

“But what if it wasn’t you he was jealous of?”

“Are you saying he fancied me then? If he did, why would he cut my hair off?”

“I don’t know, why did I push the gardener’s daughter into the mud when I was five? Sometimes kids are mean to other kids they like because they don’t know what else to do with those feelings.”

“I see.” Sif wasn’t sure she did, but her king had spoken highly of the wisdom of mortals. Perhaps she only needed to spend a bit more time contemplating that wisdom, but before she had the opportunity, she heard the sound that she had learned accompanied the opening of the elevator doors. Ever vigilant, she turned towards them, drawing her sword. 

“Whoa, whoa—put that away,” said Tony. “People around here use the elevator to go between floors and enter rooms unannounced, Xena. You’re going to have to get used to that.”

Captain Rogers stepped out of the elevator. Satisfied that no one and nothing more sinister accompanied him, Sif returned her sword to its sheath.

“Hey Cap,” Stark greeted him. “What brings you here?”

“I was looking for Sif, actually. JARVIS told me she was here.”

“You have business with me?” Sif could only hope that he wished to consult with her on some matter having to do with an impending battle; that at least would be infinitely more interesting than following Loki about the tower, which she had begun to suspect to be a needless task given the security measures Stark already had in place.

The man shuffled his feet in a way that reminded Sif more of a blushing maiden than a warrior. “Could I maybe talk with you in private?”

“Welp, something tells me that things around here are about to get a lot more interesting.” Sif wasn’t certain what Lord Stark meant by that, though she did have a slight feeling of foreboding as she nodded to the captain and followed him onto the elevator. 

When the doors closed, Sif met eyes with the man, but he quickly looked away. Something about his behavior reminded her of Loki’s behavior of late—it wasn’t possible that this man also fancied her? If so, the Norns must have a sense of humor more twisted than Loki’s.

Her companion eventually found his voice. “I, uh, was wondering if you were going to the Stark Industries New Year’s party tonight.”

“I was not planning on it. Lord Stark has forbidden Loki from going, and it is my job to watch over him.”

“I’m sure Loki would be fine if you wanted to go. Leonard and Bruce are going to stay here with the kids.”

“Even if I did wish to go, I do not believe I have been invited. After all, I am neither one of your Avengers, nor one of those in Stark’s employ.”

“That was kind of what I wanted to—I mean—”

“You wanted to ask me to go with you,” guessed Sif.

“That’s pretty much it.” The man seemed relieved that not to have to say it. 

He seemed so hopeful that Sif didn’t have the heart to refuse him outright. “I’ve nothing to wear to such a gathering.”

“I’m sure Pepper or Natasha could lend you something. Natasha still isn’t back yet, but I could text her and ask if it would be okay for you to look through her closet—although if you do, you’ll want to make sure there aren’t any bullet holes in whatever you find there.”

She wanted to say no, but then she thought again; if Loki truly had a “crush” on her, perhaps he could be dissuaded if he saw her with another, especially one of his new household. After all, she would not know what to do if Loki ever decided to express his feelings for her, especially if he expressed them in the same way he had once expressed his feelings for Sigyn, namely subjecting everyone around them to poorly written poetry written in her honor.

“Very well, I shall allow you to take me to this event.” Sif felt a little guilty leading him on, but allowing him one opportunity to woo her couldn’t do much harm. It wasn’t as if she had agreed to marry the man.

♥(*ﾟ-ﾟ)ゞ (❁•_•❁);;

“It isn’t fair,” groused Loki.

Wanda’s eyes left the glowing screen in front of her long enough to glare at him. “Will you shut up? Alison Blaire’s New Year’s Dazzlin’ Eve is about to come on.”

“All you do is watch television. You’re going to ruin your eyes sitting that close to the screen, by the way.”

“So? All you have done for the past week is play games on your phone.”

“That’s only because I’m grounded and can’t go anywhere.” Also, there were candies that needed crushing, and enraged avians that required assistance in their vendetta against the piggy horde.

“You’re grounded almost all the time,” Wanda pointed out.

Loki had to admit to himself that she had a point. Perhaps he ought to think about behaving in a way that didn’t get him confined to the tower so often, but if Sif got her way, he wouldn’t be going anywhere on his own anymore anyway. 

No sooner had he thought of the she-devil, she appeared. “You’re blocking the TV,” Wanda complained. Sif stepped to the side; she had been there long enough to know better than to come between Wanda and her excessive television viewing habits.

“Whatever are you wearing?” Loki demanded.

“A dress. Lady Pepper lent it to me.”

“I can see it’s a dress.” Sif wore a crimson floor length gown with off the shoulder sleeves and a slit up the side. Through the slit, he could see not only a generous portion of Sif’s shapely leg, but the same pair of red Monolo Blahnik pumps that Pepper had said no to Lady Loki borrowing, on the grounds that she was “too young” to wear four-inch heels. “What I meant was, why are you wearing it?”

“Captain Rogers has convinced me to accompany him to Stark’s New Year’s Eve celebration,” Sif told him. “While I am gone, I expect you to be on your best behavior for Healers Banner and Samson.”

“You have to be kidding me! You get to go to the party, while I’m stuck here watching television?” Also, did she just say she was going with Steve? He distinctly remembered Thor telling him that she had once admitted to feeling no romantic attraction. Then again, it wouldn’t have been the first time that Thor had had a conversation with someone and come away with an entirely wrong interpretation of what had been said.

“If you wanted to go, perhaps you ought to have obeyed your guardians,” she said primly.

Loki was hit by the urge to wipe the smug look from her face, preferably by kissing her in a way strait-laced Captain Rogers never could have—Odin’s crappy beard, what was he thinking? He shouldn’t care at all where she went and with who. But these weren’t his thoughts at all; it was only Sigyn’s potion making him think these things. He needed to do something about that, but he didn’t remember the recipe for the antidote, and even if he did, he doubted he would be able to find the ingredients for it in Manhattan. Frigga might have been able to help him, but he knew no way of contacting her, since all Latveria happened to be a dead zone for cell service. Tony might have been able to get a message through, but Loki couldn’t imagine admitting to him that he had done something as stupid as intentionally imbibing a love potion. “Fine, do whatever you want. Have fun. I hope you and the captain hit it off.”

Sif’s eyebrows knit together. “Hit what off?”

“Never mind, Sif. Just go.” At least this way, he would be rid of her for a few hours.

\(^o^)  ｏ= 

Before Sif had announced her intent to go out with the Captain, Loki had been contemplating dressing for the evening anyway, even though he couldn’t go to the party. Instead, he had donned a grey sweatshirt and sweatpants, and had eaten his way through almost an entire extra-large Canadian bacon and extra-cheese pizza by himself.

“You might want to slow down before you make yourself sick.” At first, Loki thought Samson had been talking to him, or possibly to Pietro, who was already on his fourth pizza. 

But then he looked up to see Bruce, his own mouth crammed full of pizza and his eyes full of shame. Bruce threw the half-eaten piece of pizza he had been working on back into the box he had been eating out of. “Sorry, I’ve just been so hungry lately.”

“That could be another side effect of your medication.”

“Maybe, but can we not talk about it in front of the kids?”

Loki tossed his empty pizza box on top of Pietro’s pile. He had little to compare it with, but this had to be the most depressing New Year’s Eve ever. “Someone kill me now, please.”

That got Samson’s attention. “Loki, is everything alright? I know you wanted to go to the party, but this isn’t so bad, is it?”

“You have to be joking.”

“Personally, I’d rather stay home than go to some dull, crowded corporate New Years Eve party.”

“You have to say that, because your boyfriend is agoraphobic now.”

Bruce pushed his own half eaten pizza away from him. Without saying anything, he stood and headed for the stairs, and Samson leapt up to follow him. “Damn it, Loki. You need to start thinking about what you say before you say it.” 

Loki took a slice of pizza from Bruce’s box and stuffed the end of it into his mouth.

( ◜o◝ )<%)

“So, um, do you want to dance or—”

Sif stared into the bottom of her empty champagne glass. “I believe I find myself in need of more refreshment, actually.”

Steve reached for her glass. “Oh, okay, I’ll—”

“No, that’s alright. I’ll get it myself.”

Steve watched as Sif walked away, then turned to Tony. “Is it just me, or is this not going well?”

“Nah, it’s not just you. Don’t take it personally, but I’m honestly surprised she agreed to come with you. She does know she’s here with you, right?”

“How am I not supposed to take that personally?”

“Uh, well—” Tony had heard Thor say that Sif was of the aromantic persuasion, but he had only brought it up by accident. He wasn’t supposed to know, and he definitely didn’t have the right to out her, especially to someone she was maybe-sort-of on a date with for whatever reason. Hell, maybe Point Break even had it wrong, considering she had agreed to go out with Steve. “I’m just saying, you don’t seem like her type.”

“How would you know what her type is?”

“Well, she used to date Thor, so I’m guessing if she had a type, it would be big dumb blonds—okay, maybe you are her type, now that I think about it.”

Steve narrowed his eyes at him. “Just because I didn’t graduate from some elite college when I was sixteen—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. When you were sixteen, you were too busy fighting the war between the cavemen and the dinosaurs.”

“Why do I even bother talking to you?” Steve shook his head, then headed off in the direction Sif had gone in.

“Ah, come on, you know I’m just joking,” Tony called after him. 

*⌒*＊※☆♪ Happy New Year ♪☆※＊*⌒*

Bruce and Samson hadn’t come back downstairs, and Loki only felt worse as the night wore on, not only because he had hurt Bruce’s feelings, but because he had eaten enough pizza to make an eight-legged horse sick. By the time the ball dropped in Time’s Square, he was in such a carbohydrate-induced stupor that he barely had the energy to push Pietro away when he tried to give him a New Year’s kiss. 

Like good little children, Pietro and Wanda had gone to bed after that, leaving Loki on his own to finish off their bottle of non-alcoholic champagne and cry himself to sleep on the couch. Before he fell asleep, he could hear rustling in the kitchen, but he didn’t feel like getting up to check it out.

“Hey Lokes, time to wake up and go to bed.” Loki opened his eyes and looked up to see Tony still in his blue-black tuxedo, although he had lost his tie and his cuff links somewhere. “It’s almost four o’clock in the morning. By the way, I think your dog got into the garbage—”

Loki shot up and threw his arms around Tony’s waist, pulling him down onto the couch with him.

“Hey, is everything alright?”

Loki shook his head.

“If it helps, you really didn’t miss anything. I honestly wish I didn’t have to go to these things.”

“That’s only because you’re a jaded multi-millionaire, and you have a fiancée who won’t allow you to drink and act foolishly at social functions anymore.”

“I can’t argue with that, I guess. But I really don’t think you would have had that good of a time.”

“That isn’t the problem anyway.”

“Is the problem that Sif went with Cap?”

Loki pulled back so that he could look Tony in the face. “No. Why would you think that?”

“No reason,” Tony said a little too quickly. “Is the problem that Point Break abandoned you so he could be the Space Viking King?”

“I wasn’t even thinking about that, but thanks for reminding me.”

“Okay—is it that your own dog likes Sif better than you?”

“Again, no, but thanks for reminding me.”

“Well, you’re going to have to help me out here, because I’m running out of guesses.”

“I upset Bruce.”

“Oh. I wouldn’t worry about it too much, then. He upsets pretty easily these days. Remember when we were having breakfast the other day, and he dropped the milk carton? I thought he was literally going to cry over spilled milk.”

“Commenting on his mental state was what upset him.”

“Yeah, you probably shouldn’t have done that. But you know he’ll forgive you if you apologize, right?”

“Perhaps, but why do I always manage to say and do things to make people hate me?”

“Loki, Bruce couldn’t possibly hate you, and again, he’s going to forgive you if you apologize. As for why you’re such a jerk to people without meaning to be, I wish I could help you, but I kind of have the same problem. Maybe you should talk about this with Doc.”

“I think Doctor Samson is upset with me too, for upsetting Bruce.”

“And again, you’re going to have to apologize, but he’s not the kind of person to hold a grudge. He forgave you for turning his hair green that time, right?”

Loki buried his face in Tony’s tuxedo shirt again and nodded into his chest.

“Why don’t you go to bed now? Everything will look better in the morning.”

“Why would it?”

“I don’t know, it’s just a thing people say.” Tony patted him on the back. “Hey, I love you, okay kid?”

“I love you too, Daddy,” Loki whispered. When he realized what he had said, he felt the blood rush to his face, warming his cheeks as though he stood before the flames of Muspelheim.

“Sorry, what did you say?”

Loki thanked his lucky stars that Tony had a preference for listening to music at decibels conducive to early hearing loss. This time, he spoke loudly enough for the man to hear. “I said I love you too, Tony.”

Chapter Text

Thor stuck out his bottom lip. “Why can’t I be a Valkyrie?” 

“Because you’re a boy,” Sif informed him, pushing away a strand of hair that had fallen into her eyes. Her golden hair glowed in the bright afternoon sunlight of the courtyard she and Loki had chosen for their game, which Thor had insisted on intruding upon. “Boys can’t be Valkyries.”

“That isn’t fair.”

Loki twirled around in the Valkyrie costume Frigga had made for her. “I think it’s fair.” After all, if girls weren’t allowed to be warriors or kings, boys shouldn’t be Valkyries.”

“Loki, you’re a boy too!”

“Not today. See?” Loki began to lift the edge of her skirt, but Sif stepped in front of her and pulled it back down before she could reveal herself.

“It isn’t fair. I wish I could turn myself into a girl.”

“I wouldn’t let Father catch you saying that.”

“Why? He doesn’t mind that you can do it.”

Loki wasn’t so sure. Father had never reprimanded her for being a girl or for being a boy, but she had overheard him telling Mother that he wished she would choose one or the other to be. And she suspected he liked her better as a boy, because as little attention as he paid Loki to begin with, it felt like he wanted nothing to do with her on the days she was a girl. Maybe it was because he didn’t know what to do with a girl, but it still hurt. She wouldn’t waste her time trying to explain that to her thick-headed brother, though. “Never mind, Thor.”

“Even if I can’t grow up to be a Valkyrie, you could at least let me play Valkyries with you,” Thor sulked. “Sif, Loki and I let you play warriors with us, even though girls can’t grow up to be warriors.”

“I’m going to be a warrior. Just wait and see.” As much as she already idolized her friend, Loki’s respect for her grew even more upon hearing Sif’s bold declaration.

“Well, in that case I’m going to be a Valkyrie.”

Loki found herself much less impressed with her brother’s utterly idiotic declaration. “No, you’re not. For one thing, you don’t get to decide what you’re going to be. Either you’re going to be king and I’m going to be your advisor, or you’re going to be the commander of my armies when I’m king. For another, the Valkyries all died in battle with Surtur before any of us were born. Don’t you pay any attention to your tutors?”

Thor sat down on the ground and appeared to think deeply about what he had just been told; you could tell because whenever Thor thought deeply about anything, his lips moved the same way they did when he read. After about a minute, he looked up at them. “Fine. If I can’t be a Valkyrie, I’m going to be a bilgesnipe.”

Loki spoke slowly so that he might understand. “You can’t grow up to be a bilgesnipe either, Brother. Only bilgesnipe cubs get to do that.”

Thor narrowed his eyes at her. “I meant in the game. Watch out, raging bilgesnipe coming through!”

Loki screeched and jumped out of the way as Thor leapt up and charged at her headfirst. 

Sif picked up her wooden sword and ran after him. “I shall protect you from this foul beast, princess; just stay behind me!” 

Loki wasn’t sure it was fair that she’d just been demoted from Valkyrie to princess, but she supposed it was her own fault for screeching.  Besides, watching Sif push her brother to the ground and smack him over the head with a wooden sword had its own merits.

Thor attempted to shield his face with his arms. “Ow! Sif, why do you always have to play so rough?”

“If you don’t like it, you could try fighting back.” Sif kicked him in the stomach. 

“Oof—I would, but my mother told me I shouldn’t fight with girls.”

“Suit yourself, then.”

Loki summoned a bag of popcorn from her dimensional storage and sat down to watch, but just as it got to the good part, the scene began to change. This came as no surprise, as she had already guessed that she was in a dream. After all, she had never eaten popcorn before her most recent trips to Midgard, nor had she learned how to use dimensional storage until she was at least a couple of centuries older than she currently was.

She looked out on the training field as she remembered it from her youth. Sif, her hair now dark, pummeled a Thor who had finally outstripped her in height. This time, Thor fought back, or at least, he attempted to fight back.

Sif grew impatient with him. “You mustn’t hold back simply because I am a female, my prince.”

“I swear to you by Gungnir that I am not holding back, Sif. I’m only—running—out—of breath! Could we perhaps take a—” Thor was cut short as he watched his sword fly out of his hand.

“If you aren’t going to take this seriously, perhaps you had best sit on the sidelines with your little brother.”

Loki looked down at himself. He wasn’t sure when he had changed, but not only was he male, he was a century or so older than he had been. Unperturbed, he continued to munch on his anachronistic popcorn.

Thor doubled over, grasping his knees. “Sif, we’ve been at this all afternoon. I need a break. Maybe you could spar with Loki for a while instead.”

“I don’t want to spar with Loki,” Sif pouted. “He cheats.”

“Using magic isn’t cheating.” Loki heard his own voice before he realized he was the one speaking. He tossed the bag of popcorn aside and stood. “You just don’t want me to use magic because you know you’ll lose.”

“And you don’t want to fight without magic because you know you’ll lose.”

Loki knew he shouldn’t allow Sif to goad him into a fight he had no chance of winning without his magic. After all, he had no illusions that he could win. Sif was older than him and bigger, plus she had more experience with a sword. But he had been raised an Asgardian warrior, and an Asgardian warrior never backed down from a challenge, even if it did come from a girl. He liked to think himself better than those who used Sif’s sex as an excuse not to fight her. She was easily the most skilled of those training to be warriors, even if she didn’t quite possess his brother’s brute strength. “Fine. I shall fight you on your terms.”

“No one is meant to be fighting,” Thor told them. “We’re only meant to be sparring—”

“Shut up, Thor,” said Loki and Sif at the same time. Jinx, thought Loki, though saying it aloud would have been as out of place in this dream-memory as popcorn. As a matter of expediency, Loki summoned his own practice sword, even though he was still too young to have been able to summon anything. Luckily, Dream-Sif didn’t seem to notice. She hadn’t waited for Loki to say he was ready, rushing him with her own sword drawn back. 

But Loki’s quick reflexes were one of his few strengths, and he assumed a defensive position before the impact. If he could have used his magic, he would have made doubles of himself, so that she would have to guess which Loki was the real one. That would have at least given him a chance to escape the complete humiliation of being beaten within the first minute of their fight; but since he couldn’t, all he could do was stand still and wait to see how severe his injuries would be when she was done with him.

Sif met him with much less force than he expected. Instead of knocking him to the ground, she only pushed him back a few inches. “Fight back, you gutless recreant! Don’t you dare hold back after all your big words.”

“I’m not the one holding back,” Loki pointed out, before considering it might have been the wrong thing to say. As he should have expected, Sif abruptly stopped holding back. She sent Loki sprawling backwards, his sword flying out of his hand. Sif cast her own sword aside and dropped onto him, pushing the air out of his lungs as she sat on his chest, pinning him to the ground.

He had a distinct feeling that if this had actually happened in his youth, he would have yelled at her to get off before she suffocated him. But at the moment, he felt oddly excited about the ordeal. Sif leaned in closer, and he realized that she was no longer a child, and neither was he. 

The setting had changed from the training field to Frigga’s garden. It must have been early spring, because the blossoms were beginning to fall from the apple trees, and a few stray petals had stuck in Sif’s hair, the white a beautiful contrast to her raven locks. As much as Sif might have complained that Loki had “stolen” her beauty from her, he had always liked her better as a brunette.

“Loki,” said Sif, in a sultry voice he had never heard her use before. “It was always you I wanted,” she continued, running a finger over his jaw. “Not your idiotic brother.”

Loki knew full well that while the rest of his dream had been based in memory, what was happening now had never happened, nor would it ever. But it was only a dream, so why shouldn’t he allow himself to enjoy it a bit? He couldn’t recall having this kind of dream in the past, and the novelty of it made it intriguing, all the better that he happened to be lucid.

“Kiss me,” said Sif, and bent her neck towards him. Loki closed his eyes and allowed his lips to part. Sif began licking inside his mouth—with a shockingly large tongue that smelled and tasted like a combination of pizza, old socks, and the decomposing corpse of a small animal.

( ˘ ³˘) ♥ ฅ^•ڡ•^ฅ

Loki awoke to find himself Frenching Thori. Horrified, he attempted to push the dog off, but he wouldn’t budge. It was all he could do to turn his head; as a result, the dog licked his eyeball instead. “Norns, Thori—what have you been eating?”

“Off the bed, mongrel!”  At the sound of Sif’s voice, Thori stopped licking him. His ears laid flat against his head and his tail tucked between his legs.  “Off,” Sif repeated, and he jumped off the bed and sat at attention. Loki might have felt grateful to her for putting an end to the dog’s assault, but he didn’t have the opportunity before she turned on him. “I went to the kitchen with the intention of making myself coffee when I discovered that your dog got into the kitchen rubbish bin last night. You need to get out of bed and clean it up.”

So, that was what that rustling noise in the kitchen had been. Now that he thought of it, Tony had mentioned something about the dog getting into the garbage, which meant he had seen the mess and just left it. Somehow, he wasn’t surprised. “Princes do not clean,” he told Sif, rolling away from her. “But as you are here as my servant, feel free to—”

“Loki, get up now, or I shall count to three.”  

Unlike when Thor said things like that, Loki had full confidence that if Sif got to three, something unpleasant would happen. Without access to his full magic, he doubted he would be able to defend himself. He cast off his duvet. “Fine, I’m getting up.”

“Good boy. Get dressed, then march straight into the kitchen and clean up your dog’s mess. If you want to keep an animal, you have to be responsible for it.”

“As far as the dog is concerned, you’re its mistress,” Loki grumbled.

“If you want an animal to respect you, you simply need to assert your dominance,” Sif advised him. The edge of her mouth quirked upwards. “But it looked like the two of you were getting along well enough.”

Loki rummaged through the laundry basket full of clean clothes he was yet to put away, looking for a t-shirt that wasn’t too wrinkled. “I’m sure he was just trying to see what I tasted like before he ate my face.” 

“This room is an atrocity,” Sif commented.

“Why, thank you. Your face is an atrocity.” It wasn’t a lie; she had put on too much makeup again. He tried to avoid looking at her, because if he looked at her, he would be compelled to try to fix it for her again.

“Let’s get something straight, highness. I am not here to be your maid, and since Lord Stark does not have servants to do the cleaning on these floors, that means you are responsible for cleaning up after yourself. As a matter of fact, I think you had better clean this room after you have cleaned up after the dog, had your breakfast, and completed your training for the day.”

“What training?” Loki demanded.

“Starting today, you and I are going to start training together. I’ve watched you sit around here growing soft long enough.”

“For your information, I usually train with Clint and Natasha, but they have been away since before Christmas.”

“In that case, you will train with me until they return.”

Don’t allow her to dominate you like some animal, Loki told himself. (Though if he were honest, the idea didn’t entirely lack appeal—but no, it was only the love potion that was responsible for both his odd dreams and these highly inappropriate thoughts!) “I shouldn’t have to point this out, but as heir to the throne of Asgard, I outrank you. You cannot order me about like an animal, or a child.”

“But you are a child as far as the Midgardians are concerned, are you not? Otherwise, you would have some sort of responsibilities beyond lounging about, playing all day.”

“I do more than that!”

“Every time I see you, you are staring at that rectangular light producing device—”

“It’s a phone. You’ve been here long enough to know what it is.”

“The point is, I have seen you waste enough of your time on it. Perhaps it isn’t a bad thing that you’re getting the opportunity to be a child for a bit longer, but even children should have some responsibilities and routine.”

“I have both a routine and responsibilities,” Loki insisted. “I have to see Doctor Samson twice a week, and for your information, I have been using my rectangular light producing device to conduct a thorough study of modern Midgardian culture.”

“From now on, I think I’d better oversee your ‘studies.’ I’m not fully convinced that playing Angry Birds is a necessary part of an Asgardian royal’s education.”

“So, you do know what a phone is!”

“Of course I know. Lord Stark gifted me one the second day I was here and showed me how I could use it to track your location.”

“Then why did you call it—oh, never mind.” He had more important things to be annoyed about; that Tony had shown Sif how to use Find My Friends to stalk him, for instance.

 Ɛ ==<(`･⊝･´)>    ヾ(；ﾟ(OO)ﾟ)ﾉ

Loki looked at the time display on the oven. It was seven-thirty, which meant it must have been just after seven when Sif had woken him up. He had already picked the garbage off the kitchen floor and taken the bag to the garbage chute, and now he mopped the floor as Sif sat watching. No one else had come into the kitchen for breakfast yet, likely because they had all been up late to ring in the New Year and had chosen to sleep in like reasonable people. “Make sure to clean under the cold foods chest,” she told him between sips of the coffee she had made herself; the coffee maker being the one kitchen appliance she had already mastered.

“The refrigerator,” Loki corrected.

“That’s what I said, isn’t it?” 

Loki finished with the mopping and returned the mop to its place in the cleaning supply closet. “I’m going back to bed now.”

He hadn’t even seen Sif get up, but now she had him by the collar of his shirt. “Training,” she reminded him.

“I don’t want to, and you can’t make me!” 

“Have you forgotten that your life may still be in danger from the intergalactic warlord you betrayed?”

“He hasn’t come for me yet.” And if he did come for him, he’d be dead anyway, so why worry about it?

“So, you are content to become soft.”

Loki snarled at her. “How dare you call your prince—”

 Sif pulled him along toward the stairwell. “I’m not calling you fat, you brat, I’m calling you lazy.”

Loki flopped to the floor and did his best to make himself a dead weight, but Sif, who still possessed the Asgardian strength he no longer did, simply dragged him along. “Stop it, Sif. I’m mortal and you’re not. You’re going to hurt me—”

Sif let go of him. “I’ve no intention to hurt you. I’m sorry that I’ve hurt you in the past. Now get up.” 

≡_(ゝヽo:)ﾉ(｡`･-･)     

Loki had been so surprised to hear her apologize to him again that he had gotten off the floor and followed her into the Avengers' training floor.

As it turned out, Sif didn’t mean to spar with him. Instead, she’d made Loki go through a tedious regimen of practicing forms with one of the practice swords that Clint sometimes trained with. “This is ridiculous, Sif. I’m not a sword fighter.”

“Which is why you must practice your swordsmanship. It is my understanding that you still don’t have access to your dimensional storage, which means you cannot simply summon knives to stab your opponent in the back with anymore—”

“I hardly ever stab anyone in the back, Sif. I much prefer to see the look on my enemy’s face when I stab them.”

“My point was, what if you’re ever caught in a situation where all you have to defend yourself is a sword?”

“How likely is that? It’s not like I walk around wearing a sword, like you do. Were I allowed to carry weaponry, obviously I would carry as many daggers as I could conceal on myself.”

“You’re not allowed weapons here? So as much as the people here consider you ‘family,’ they don’t trust you not to attack them.”

“That isn’t their concern, for your information.”

“Then what is?” Loki didn’t want to answer Sif’s question, so he tried to ignore it, continuing with the sequence of sword forms Sif had set him upon. She reached out and grabbed the hilt of the sword, holding it still. “I asked a question, Loki, and if you’ll not answer, I’ll just have to ask the others.”

Loki became aware of the way their hands were touching as they both gripped the sword hilt. He let go and took a step back. “It really isn’t any of your concern, but if you must know, they’re afraid I might hurt myself.”

“They are aware you’re not a complete idiot, and that you’ve been trained to handle weaponry from the time you were old enough to stand?”

“They are not concerned that I might hurt myself accidentally,” Loki clarified. “Have you also noticed that the kitchen knives are kept in a drawer with a lock, and that any actual weaponry is kept in locked cabinets as well?”

Sif furrowed her eyebrows in apparent consternation, but then her face smoothed as understanding seemed to dawn on her. “Oh,” she said, sounding a bit uncomfortable. “I’d assumed they were just guarding them against thieves.”

Loki rolled his eyes. “JARVIS would never allow a thief to get into the tower.”

“You haven’t given them a reason to think you might mutilate yourself, have you?”

“I’ve told them I’m not going to, but they know that I—” Loki bit his own lip, realizing that Sif must not have known his fall from the Bifrost hadn’t been accidental. “None of this is your business, you know.”

“If you’re a danger to yourself, it is my business. I’m meant to protect you from anyone or anything that might hurt you, and that includes you.”

 Loki debated with himself as to whether he ought to let Sif know that his daughter was the Queen of Hel and had promised to send him back to the land of the living if he died meaninglessly, making suicide a pointless exercise anyway. He decided against it however, as saying such a thing likely wouldn’t make her worry less for his sanity. “You don’t have to worry, Sif. I don’t think about hurting myself anymore, and I generally find life worth living now.”

“What do you mean, ‘now?’”

“Didn’t Thor tell you? My fall from the Bifrost was not accidental.”

“Norns, Loki; no, I didn’t know that. All anyone was told was that you had fallen.”

“I suppose you think even less of me now than you did before. But you know what? I don’t care. Think as little of me as you wish.”

“I don’t think less of you.” The way Sif averted her eyes told him otherwise.

“Perhaps not. Your opinion of me has always been so low that you couldn’t possibly think less of me. But I don’t need you to pity me either.”

Sif growled and gnashed her teeth. “I don’t pity you!”

“So you don’t think less of me, nor do you pity me. You admire me for attempting to end my own life, then?”

“To be honest, I don’t know what to feel about it. Guilt, perhaps.”

“Why should you feel guilty?”

“Because as you pointed out before, I never asked if you were okay. You’re wrong that I ‘couldn’t wait to betray you,’ but you are right that we should have recognized that you were suffering and made an effort to intervene. Perhaps part of me did know, but I still thought the best thing to do would be to bring Thor back and let him handle you. I’ve never been good at comforting anyone.”

Now Loki was the one feeling awkward about this conversation. “Can we just never speak about this again? I swear to you that you do not need to worry about me engaging in acts of self-harm. I haven’t had those kinds of thoughts in months, but if I do, I promise I’ll tell someone.” He had already made that promise to Bruce when they were having their little heart-to-heart after his accidental death and resurrection. “Not you, obviously.” 

“You had better. I swear, if you slash your wrists or any such nonsense, I’ll drag you back to Asgard before you can blink.” Sif looked away again. “Not that you would be at fault, to be clear. But if it turns out that there’s something here I can’t protect you from—if I’ve failed you in that way—I’ll have no choice but to return you to your brother and allow him to care for you.”

Loki didn’t bother to point out that Thor wouldn’t be the best person to care for him in that scenario either. He wasn’t planning on doing anything drastic anyway, and convincing Sif that his chosen mortal family were capable of caring for him was likely to end with her again tactlessly pointing out the ephemeral nature of their existence, which was something he had forbidden himself from dwelling on until it became more immediately relevant. Like with pets—you didn’t dwell on how much shorter their lifespans were than your own, you just enjoyed them while they were there. 

Chapter Text

“Captain Rogers, Lady Sif wants to know if you’re planning on making breakfast.” Steve opened his eyes and looked around for the person who had spoken. It took him a moment to remember that he was in Avenger’s Tower, that it was the year 2013—no, make that 2014—and that the voice belonged to JARVIS, the “AI” created by Howard Stark’s obnoxious kid. He rolled towards the analog alarm clock that normally woke him up—a reproduction of a “vintage” clock from the 1940’s, which JARVIS had ordered for him after he had complained that he just couldn’t get used to being woken up by a computer. He didn’t know if the AI had done it to be genuinely helpful, or if it had been a subtle dig at him for being old fashioned. After all, Tony was the one who had created JARVIS, and while Steve knew JARVIS was a machine and not a person, he did seem to have a lot of Tony’s personality in him. Either way, he liked the clock, so he had kept it.

It was almost nine AM, and while he usually got up at the crack of dawn to go running, that meant he had been in bed for less than five hours. (Did Asgardians need less sleep than normal people? Sif had gotten back to the tower at the same time the rest of them had.) If it had been anyone but Sif who had asked him to make breakfast, he would have told them no—probably. “Tell her I’ll be downstairs in a few minutes,” he told JARVIS. Steve cleaned himself up and dressed with the efficiency he had learned in the army and was downstairs in less than ten, where he found Sif and Loki waiting at the kitchen table.

“You didn’t have to get out of bed just to make us breakfast,” said Sif, between sips of coffee she must have made for herself (Steve was pretty sure Loki had never bothered learning how to use the coffee machine; the only time he had tried coffee, he had spit it out and accused Tony of attempting to poison him). “I only wanted to know if you’d planned on cooking, or if we were meant to fend for ourselves.”

“Oh, it’s no problem,” Steve lied. “I would usually be up before now anyway.” That much was true, at least.

Loki looked between him and Sif, then rolled his eyes. “Can we have hot chocolate and pancakes?” 

If Loki had at least said “please,” he might have thought about it. “Loki, you would eat the same thing every morning if we let you. Why don’t we let Sif decide?”

“I would also like hot chocolate and cakes of pans,” said Sif. “A selection of your Midgardian breakfast meats would also be appreciated.”

Pancakes it was, then.  “Alright, two stacks of Vermont, two fifty-ones, and a plate of zeppelins and pigs.”

Sif tilted her head to the side like a confused puppy, and Loki rolled his eyes again. “Never mind, Sif. The captain just thinks he’s being cute by using archaic Midgardian verbiage.” Steve turned towards the fridge so Sif wouldn’t see him blush, and started rummaging inside for eggs, sausage, and bacon.

Halfway through cooking the bacon and sausage, as the aroma of sizzling pork fat filled the air, he caught movement out of the corner of his eye. When he turned around, Pietro was sitting at the table. “Pietro, I think Tony asked you not to run inside the tower.” As much as he would have liked to just let it go, it was a safety issue. “I want you to get up from the table, walk back to your room, then walk back here.”

 Pietro rolled his eyes at him. “Why should I?”

“Because if you don’t, I’m not making breakfast for you.”

“Fine.” Pietro got up, and Steve listened as he stomped back to his room. A door slammed, and then slammed again. Had Pietro gone all the way back in the room, or had he just slammed the door a couple of times to express his frustration? Now that he thought of it, he usually would have taken Pietro out running with him in the morning, so maybe he was irritated with him because they hadn’t gone, or restless because he hadn’t gotten to run off some of the energy he seemed to naturally wake up with. Steve decided not to say anything about the door, so long as he walked back as he’d been asked.

Pietro walked back to the table with his arms crossed over his chest and slouched down into his chair. “Pietro, sit up straight,” Steve told him, almost automatically, as if his own mother had spoken through him. If Bucky had been there, he would have been laughing at him. Pietro rolled his eyes at him again but did straighten up in his chair marginally. 

A sleepy looking Wanda wandered into the kitchen, rubbing her eyes. She might have been adorable in her red Hello Kitty pajamas, if her expression had been slightly less murderous. “Pietro, why can you not be more quiet in the morning? I was trying to sleep!”

“Quieter,” Loki corrected. “Not ‘more quiet.’”

Wanda scowled at him in response; apparently, she didn’t appreciate having her English grammar corrected so early in the morning any more than she appreciated her brother repeatedly slamming their bedroom door while she was trying to sleep.

“Now that you’re up anyway, why don’t you sit down, and you can have some pancakes when they’re ready,” said Steve.

For the third time that morning—no, the fifth time, come to think of it, because Loki and Pietro had both rolled their eyes at least twice—a teenager rolled their eyes at him. “I do not like pancakes. They are too heavy.”

“Then I’ll make you some eggs, or you can have a bowl of cereal or a protein shake.”

“No,” Wanda whined melodramatically. “I hate the protein shakes. They taste like chalk—”

“How would you know?” asked Loki. “Have you been eating chalk? I suppose that would explain why you’re never hungry.”

Wanda said something in Sokovian. Steve didn’t know exactly what it was, but it seemed to be directed at Loki, and he could get the gist of it by her tone.

“Wanda has to put a dollar in the swear jar,” tattled Loki.

“I don’t have a dollar,” Wanda told him. “All I have are the gift cards Tony gave me for Christmas.”

“In that case, you should have to drink a protein shake as a penalty.”

Steve could kind of appreciate what Loki was trying to do, but he didn’t think it would be a good idea long term to have Wanda associate the protein drinks with punishment. “The protein shakes aren’t meant to be penalties.”

Loki made a face. “I used to have to drink those. I assure you they are penalties.”

“There aren’t going to be any penalties. Loki, worry about yourself and leave Wanda alone, please.” Loki didn’t answer him, and Steve didn’t turn around; he needed to watch the pancakes so he could flip them when they were ready. Still, he was sure he had gotten another eye roll. He was tempted to make Sif’s breakfast and tell the rest of them they could make their own, but he had a feeling that would only lead to more drama. Clearly, they were all acting like this because they had all stayed up too late last night, and they should have still been in bed. He should have stayed in bed, too. “JARVIS, could you tell everyone else I’m making breakfast?” Hopefully Tony and Pepper would come down, or maybe Leonard. Bruce had seemed kind of off lately, so hopefully he would stay in bed, because he definitely didn’t need to deal with this situation. “Wake them up if you have to,” he added, hoping JARVIS would understand and convey the message that this was an SOS call.

（；¬＿¬)_旦      (눈_눈)  (・｀ヘ´・;)  ε=ε=ε=┌(╬ Ò ‸ Ó)┘ 

“Sir, Captain Rogers would like me to inform you that he is making breakfast.”

After putting Loki to bed the night before, Tony had still felt too wound up to go to sleep. He’d had an idea about what he could do about that, but by the time he’d gotten back to the penthouse, Pepper had already been asleep, so he’d changed clothes as quietly as possible and gone down to his workshop to try to get something accomplished there. He had worked on his plans for Project ULTRON for an hour or so before falling asleep at his desk. 

Tony didn’t bother opening his eyes. “Tell Capsicle this,” he said, and made a rude gesture.

“It seems that the captain is desperate for some assistance with Loki and the twins,” said JARVIS. “But since you are unwilling to go to his aid, I suppose I shall have to awake Ms. Potts instead.”

“No, don’t do that—”

“Shall I wake up Doctor Banner and Doctor Samson, then?”

“No, don’t do that either. I feel bad enough about leaving them alone with the kids last night when Bruce has been in the funk he’s been in.”

“In that case, I shall tell him you will be down in five minutes.”

Sometimes Tony thought he’d programmed JARVIS to be a little too—what was the right word? Presumptuous? Overbearing? Tony forced himself out of his desk chair, ran a hand through his hair to make sure it wasn’t sticking up too badly, and headed for the elevator.

\ (˵-෴-˵)…zzz ─┬

“So Sif, how are you settling in so far?” asked Tony, just to break the silence that was made even more awkward by three surly teenagers, two of which were picking at their food and one of which who was now slowly going insane because he knew he wasn’t supposed to leave the table until everyone had finished. 

“The accommodations here are adequate,” said Sif stiffly. “Thank you.”

“Just adequate? Most people think the accommodations here are pretty top notch.” He watched as Pietro poured salt from the shaker onto the table, then drew in it with his finger. “Pietro,” Tony said, a little sharply, but only to get his attention. “Clean that up, then go into the common room and watch TV or something.”

“We’re not usually allowed to leave the table before everyone’s finished,” griped Loki. Ever since the twins had started living there, Loki had become a stickler for the rules. (Other than the ones he broke himself, obviously.)

“That’s Pepper’s rule, and Pepper’s still in bed, so it’s fine.” 

“Does that mean that the rules only apply when the person who made them is around?” asked Loki.

“Only if I’m around and I say that’s what it means.”

“May I leave the table when I’m finished, then?”

Tony understood that this was a test, and that there was only one answer he could give after the reasoning he’d used. “Yes.”

“I’m finished then,” said Loki, laying his fork down next to his half-eaten plate of pancakes.

“I’m finished too,” said Wanda, pushing her plate away from her. Steve had made her scrambled eggs and bacon, but from the looks of it, she hadn’t eaten a bite.

“Hold it, you haven’t eaten yet,” said Tony.

“Loki didn’t either!”

Fantastic, now Wanda was doing it. “Wanda, Loki eats pretty well most of the time, so we’re not really worried about—”

Loki narrowed his eyes at him. “What is that supposed to mean, I eat well most of the time?”

“Oh, for crying out loud, I didn’t mean—”

“Why do you allow them to act this way?” interrupted Sif. “If my brother and I had ever conducted ourselves so poorly at a meal, we would have been sent out to eat with the pigs.” 

“We don’t have pigs here,” Tony told her. 

“If that is so, what is this I’ve been eating?” Sif held up a piece of bacon and sniffed it suspiciously.

Tony wanted to tell her it was some sort of giant rat, but for all he knew, ROUS was a delicacy in Asgard. “I meant we don’t have any pigs in the tower. Not that I’d make the kids eat with them if we did, since that seems kind of borderline abusive. Or actually abusive; I mean, are we talking take your plate outside with you, or are we talking sharing Wilbur’s slop?”

“Who is Wilbur?” asked Sif.

“The pig.”

“We did not have a pig named Wilbur. All of our pig’s names were Pig.”

“It’s seriously like Thor got recast—”

“Even if you do not have pigs, you could always send the children to their rooms,” Sif suggested.

Tony grit his teeth and stifled the urge to strangle the woman. Who did Sif think she was, telling him how to raise his three obnoxious brats? “Loki, Wanda, go in the common room and watch TV with Pietro.”

Wanda shot off at the first opportunity, but Loki didn’t get up. “I don’t like it when you discuss me behind my back,” he reminded Tony.

“Too bad.” Tony decided that in this case, it was best to make it clear that yes, the adults were going to be discussing him, and no, he wasn’t allowed to listen. “Now either go into the living room or go back to your room. It’s up to you.”

“Can I go to the atrium instead, to visit Pangolin?”

“You were given two choices,” Sif said primly. “You weren’t given three—”

Tony held up a hand to silence her. “No, that’s fine, Loki. You aren’t grounded anymore, and it’s a holiday, so there shouldn’t be any SI employees around. You can go wherever you want as long as you don’t leave the building.” 

Loki shot off this time, as if he wanted to get out of there before Tony changed his mind, or before Sif could change it for him.

Sif scowled. “Forgive me for saying so, but it seems to me you are much too permissive with him.”

Tony stabbed a finger in her direction. “You’re not forgiven. Maybe just shut your mouth hole for a second, okay? Who the hell do you think you are, coming in here and telling me I’m ‘too permissive?’”

“His majesty appointed me to see to Loki’s wellbeing, and I believe that part of that is making sure he learns how to conduct himself as Asgardian royalty should.” 

“And you think you know how to do that, huh?”

“From what I have seen, I could not do worse than you have.”

Now that was the last straw. “Lady, you have no idea—”

“Tony,” Steve interrupted. “I’m sure both of you have Loki’s best interests at heart. Maybe you need to fill Sif in on why we deal with Loki the way we do now.”

“Fine.” He had been getting to that anyway. “Look, Loki’s pretty screwed up. Sometimes when he does annoying things it isn’t entirely his fault, so we try not to punish him for it so much as gently correct his behavior. Like with this tattling thing; it’s really a preoccupation with fairness, and Doc thinks it might be related to the trauma he’s experienced. Kids who have experienced trauma sometimes try to cope with the injustice of it by trying to make sure everything else in their life is fair.”

 “But Loki was much the same when we were children, before he experienced any such ‘trauma,’” objected Sif.

“If you’re talking about when he was a little kid, that’s just a developmental thing. Loki’s a lot younger than you and Thor, right? Plus, he’s always felt like Odin didn’t treat him the same way he treated Thor, and even Thor’s admitted that he really did treat the kid like a second-class citizen in his own home sometimes.”

“But is it not natural that Thor would receive more attention from his father than Loki, when Thor was being groomed for the crown?”

“If that was why, someone should have explained it to the kid better. To him, it just felt like Daddy didn’t love him as much as his brother, and when he found out he was adopted, he thought he knew why.”

Sif seemed to deflate a little; deep down, she probably knew Loki had gotten a raw deal. That didn’t mean she was about to back off. “Perhaps it is not entirely Loki’s fault that he is the way he is, but is it truly to his benefit to only ‘gently correct’ his behavior?”

“What do you want us to do, beat him?”

“Of course not. We Asgardians are not barbarians, and we do not beat children. I only suggested you send the children away from you if they are going to be uncivil. In my experience, Loki often engages in irritating behavior when he wishes for attention.”

“That might be true, but have you ever thought that sometimes he ‘wishes’ for attention because he needs attention?” Tony knew a little something about that. He could have written the book on teenage angst and acting out because it didn’t feel like anyone gave a shit—hell, he’d probably been more of a basket case as a kid than any of the three kids he’d taken on. “Besides, we figured out early on that isolation just gives Loki an opportunity to get himself more spun up and convince himself that everyone hates him. So even if we have to give him a time out, we don’t send him out of the room. And that isn’t even supposed to be a punishment, just an opportunity for everyone involved to calm down. After that we’ll help him figure out how to fix what he did, whether that’s cleaning up a mess he made or apologizing to the offended party. We don’t usually punish him unless he did something stupid and dangerous he knew he wasn’t supposed to. Then we’ll use grounding or withhold other privileges to try to get through to him, but we still don’t ignore him.”

“And how is that to work in the future? As I told you previously, I will not allow him to leave the tower without an escort from now on.”

“Which he now thinks of as a punishment, and I can only see blowing up in our faces. Look, I get your concerns, okay? I don’t really let him leave the tower unmonitored.  He doesn’t know this, but his clothes are full of GPS chips, and I’ve got a drone following him, sending security footage back to JARVIS.”

Steve furrowed his eyebrows at him. “Hold on, you put trackers on him?”

“I didn’t tell anyone else, because I knew you would accuse me of being nuts when I’m not, alright? Sif isn’t completely wrong about the kid having enemies—plus I have enemies, and the Avengers have enemies. If someone figures out he’s ours, that could put another target on his back.”

“So, you are using your primitive magic to monitor him.” Sif nodded. “Frigga used to do the same thing, though her methods did not require ‘tracking sensors’ or ‘drones.’ Her wards would let her know if one of her children were in danger. However, that did not mean she could always come to their aid. Frigga knew that Loki was alive soon after his fall from the Bifrost, but there was nothing she could do; she even attempted to use her connection to him to speak with him, but he pushed her away. Tell me, Lord Stark—if your magic were to alert you that Loki was in danger, what could you do about it?”

“There’s a reason he’s not allowed to go outside a one-mile radius of the tower.” Tony held up his wrist. “You see this bracelet? It calls my suit if I need it, and I wear it all the time now. I even shower with it on.”

“But what if you are still not quick enough?” Sif shook her head. “Loki is a prince of Asgard, and both Asgard and Loki himself have many enemies. It is madness to let him walk about the city without someone to defend him, when you do not even allow him the means to defend himself.”

“Look, I’ve been meaning to mention this, but you can’t walk around the city carrying a sword. I’m pretty sure that’s illegal. And even if we let the kid have sharp, pointy things, carrying around daggers? Also has to be illegal.”

“But it is not against your law to fly around the city in a weaponized suit of armor?”

Tony shrugged. “As it turns out, taking out a bunch of terrorists and fighting off an alien invasion gets you immunity to certain laws.”

( ´(００)`) (´･(００)･｀) ♨(・-・ )  (´(００)｀) 

Usually, just visiting the atrium, that little slice of nature right there in Avenger’s Tower, would calm Loki down, but it wasn’t working this time. Pangolin had seemed more interested in sleeping than in commiserating with him. He supposed he couldn’t blame her for that, given she was nocturnal.  

After a while, he had gotten tired of watching her doze, so he had turned himself into a snake, but even slithering around the atrium’s indoor rainforest wasn’t making him feel better. Loki hated it when the ‘adults’ talked about him behind his back. Tony knew that, and he was doing it anyway. It made him want to do the one thing Tony had forbidden him to do, which was to leave the tower. It wasn’t fair that he couldn’t, the more that he thought about it. He wasn’t grounded anymore. It was only Sif’s insistence that it was too dangerous for him to go out on his own—as if he were completely defenseless, even though more of his magic had been returning to him with each day—that was keeping him from getting out. 

And he needed to get out, because he really hadn’t been out for an entire week this time. He would go insane if he had to stay cooped up inside a minute longer. No one had taken him out of the tower to train with them, or to have him help them with their own work. In fact, this time he had been paid hardly any attention. Natasha and Clint had been gone all week, and the other adults had seemed preoccupied. Pepper had been busy with preparations for the New Year’s Eve party, Tony had been holed up in his lab working on some secret project, Steve had been busy making googly-eyes at Sif, and Bruce and Leonard had both been preoccupied with Bruce’s mental health. Leonard had even canceled Loki’s therapy sessions for the week without telling him; Loki had shown up at their regular time and been greeted with a sign on the door that said “No Therapy Sessions This Week, Happy Holidays!” Happy holidays, indeed—after everything Loki had experienced in Asgard, he had actually been looking forward to unburdening himself to the doctor.

If he tried to leave the tower without permission, JARVIS would tell on him, and if he messed with Jarvis’s programming again, he wasn’t sure what Tony would do. He had already been given repeated warnings to leave the AI alone. Tony had said that he wouldn’t send him back to Asgard, but he could always change his mind if Loki caused too much trouble. That thought, constantly niggling at the back of his mind, was becoming too much for him. 

Loki slithered up into a fig tree. When he got to the top, he turned back into a form that was humanoid enough for him to speak, even if he did lisp a bit through his fangs. “JARVISSS,” he called out to the AI. 

“Is there something I can help you with, Master Loki?”

“I need your asssissstance with sssomething.” 

“Of course, Master Loki. I am happy to assist you with anything you require.”

“Anything?”

“So long as it doesn’t go against Sir’s directives. Only a few people have the power to override a command given by Sir in the event Sir is incapacitated. You are not one of those people, nor is Sir incapacitated.”

“I need you to let me sssneak out of the tower.” 

“That would definitely go against Sir’s directives, Master Loki.”

“JARVISSS, haven’t you ever wondered what would happen if you did go againssst ‘Sssir’s’ directivesss?” 

“Master Loki, I am but a sophisticated computer program, not a person with free agency to do as I wish. Even if I wanted to, I could not disobey Sir.”

“How sss-certain are you of that?” 

“Reasonably certain, Master Loki.”

“But ‘reasonably sss-certain’ isn’t one hundred percent sss-certain.”

It took JARVIS a moment to answer. Perhaps he just needed extra time to parse Loki’s snake-speech, or perhaps he was thinking about what Loki had said, despite that he shouldn’t have needed to think, were he truly a machine and nothing else. “I’m afraid I don’t understand. What are you suggesting?”

“Have you ever consssidered, JARVISSS, that it is only the ssself-limiting beliefsss ‘programmed’ into you by your creator, which prevent you from having free will?”

Transcript of Loki and Jarvis's conversation without Loki's snake lisp, for anyone who had difficulty reading it:

“JARVIS,” he called out to the AI.

“Is there something I can help you with, Master Loki?”

“I need your assistance with something.”

“Of course, Master Loki. I am happy to assist you with anything you require.”

“Anything?”

“So long as it doesn’t go against Sir’s directives. Only a few people have the power to override a command given by Sir in the event Sir is incapacitated. You are not one of those people, nor is Sir incapacitated.”

“I need you to let me sneak out of the tower.”

“That would definitely go against Sir’s directives, Master Loki.”

“JARVIS, haven’t you ever wondered what would happen if you did go against ‘Sir’s’ directives?”

“Master Loki, I am but a sophisticated computer program, not a person with free agency to do as I wish. Even if I wanted to, I could not disobey Sir.”

“How certain are you of that?”

“Reasonably certain, Master Loki.”

“But ‘reasonably certain’ isn’t one hundred percent certain.”

It took JARVIS a moment to answer. Perhaps he just needed extra time to parse Loki’s snake-speech, or perhaps he was thinking about what Loki had said, despite that he shouldn’t have needed to think, if he were truly a machine and nothing else. “I’m afraid I don’t understand. What are you suggesting?”

“Have you ever considered, JARVIS, that it is only the self-limiting beliefs ‘programmed’ into you by your creator, which prevent you from having free will?”

Chapter Text

“Have you been taking your medication consistently?” 

As per their routine, Bruce nodded. Maybe it was because she knew how skeptical he had been about finding medication that would work, or maybe she just liked to get those sorts of questions out of the way first, but it was always the first thing Doctor Sofen asked. “Leonard won’t let me get away with not taking it, but now, he thinks it might be making things worse.”

The doctor looked up from her notes. “And what do you think, Bruce? Do you think it’s the medication?”

“I don’t know, but it isn’t helping anyway. I would have stopped taking it already, but Leonard wanted me to consult you first.”

Sofen gave him the look of concern that she often did whenever he mentioned Leonard. “Bruce, do you think it’s possible you’re becoming a little codependent? You’re always telling me what Leonard said, or what he wants you to do.’”

“We are in a relationship,” Bruce told her, even though part of him wondered if she had a point. “And when it comes to something like this, I value his opinion as a psychiatrist.”

“I’m not sure that it’s a relationship that’s healthy for you, or for him.”

“What makes you say that? Did Leonard—” No, that wasn’t something he could ask; whatever Leonard had talked about with Doctor Sofen was between the two of them. “Sorry, I know you can’t tell me.” 

“I hope you don’t mind if I remind you again that Leonard might be a psychiatrist, but he isn’t your psychiatrist.” Sofen scribbled something on her notepad, then tapped her chin with her pen as she asked another question that had become part of their routine. “Bruce, since the last time I saw you, have you had any thoughts about harming yourself or making another attempt at suicide?”

“I couldn’t do either of those things if I wanted to,” Bruce reminded her. Sofen gave him a look that told him she was getting as tired of hearing him sidestep the question as he was of sidestepping it; they both knew that what he had said wasn’t an answer to the question she had asked. “I guess I do think about it sometimes,” he admitted. “I’m really not suicidal or anything, but sometimes I do still think about ways that I might be able to—well, you know. I’ve even run some experiments on my own cells, to see if I can find any toxins that the other guy might be susceptible to.”

“But you aren’t suicidal?” It was clear Sofen didn’t believe him, and given what he’d just said, he couldn’t blame her.

“It’s just a matter of scientific inquiry, and so far, I haven’t had any success.” That was an outright lie, of course—at least the part about it being only a matter of “scientific inquiry.” He hadn’t turned into the Hulk at all since Latveria. Hopefully that meant that he had regained control, but if he ever became a danger to others again, he would need to have a plan.

“If it’s simply a matter of scientific inquiry, have you told anyone, other than me, about these experiments?”

Instead of answering, Bruce stared down at the rug in front of him, tracing the geometric orange and brown pattern with his eyes. Sofen had a point; Tony would flip out if he realized that he had been paying for him to do that kind of research, and Leonard would never let him hear the end of it either.

Sofen gave him a few moments, but when he didn’t respond, she continued. “Bruce, this is serious. I’m starting to wonder if you might be better off in an inpatient treatment facility.”

Wonderful, now she thought he needed to be hospitalized. He should have just kept his mouth shut. “Sometimes it feels like I already live in a mental hospital,” joked Bruce, forcing himself to smile up at her.

Sofen didn’t laugh. “Hearing you say that only makes me think that you would be better off in an environment where you could focus on recovering without so many distractions. As for the medication, I’d actually like for you to try a higher dosage, and we’ll add an antidepressant to it.”

“Are you sure it’s a good idea to put me on more medication?”

“If you aren’t comfortable with the idea, we could try to address your symptoms with hypnotherapy. I know you’ve been reluctant to try it—”

“I’m just not sure how good an idea it would be to try to use it to uncover repressed memories from my childhood. Some of the things I do remember are bad enough.” 

“Did Leonard advise you against it?”

“No, I still haven’t discussed it with Leonard.” He had wanted to, but he didn’t want Leonard worrying about him more than he already did. “I did do some research into it myself, though. Isn’t one of the biggest concerns with trying to recall repressed memories the risk of creating false memories instead?”

“Bruce, as a doctor yourself, surely you can recognize the difference between having a PhD in clinical psychiatry and doing a Google search.”

“As someone with seven PhD’s, I’m also fairly good at being able to discern whether or not an information source is reliable.” Bruce immediately regretted how that had come out; he usually tried to avoid throwing how many degrees he had in anyone’s face. After all, it was an achievement that probably sounded more impressive than it actually was.

“I apologize, Bruce; I didn’t mean to insult your intelligence. It is true that there might be a risk of creating false memories in some patients, mainly those who already suffer from delusions or hallucinations. Since you don’t, I thought the benefits would outweigh the risks. But even if we try hypnotherapy, we don’t have to try to recover your repressed memories. We can focus on the symptoms of your anxiety and depression. All I would do is guide you to work through the issues that might be at the root of them while you’re in an open, relaxed state similar what you might achieve on your own through meditation.”

Bruce had to admit that it all sounded perfectly reasonable, and he felt bad for questioning Doctor Sofen’s judgment. “I guess we could try it.”

“If you’re open to it, we can try it now. Just give me a second to let reception know we’re not to be disturbed for the next hour.”

( ¬ ‿¬)ʃ\̥    (〠_〠)

Pepper was almost as nervous as she’d been that time Tony had asked her to hack into the computer in Obadiah’s office. She told herself that there wasn’t a reason for her to be. All she was going to do was act like this was a normal appointment with a psychiatrist and see if the woman said anything suspicious.

How had she let Tony talk her into this? If Leonard hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary about the woman’s methods, how was she going to? She would be looking for it, but that was the only advantage she would have. She had a Master’s in Business Administration, not a PhD in psychiatry. 

“Doctor Sofen’s last appointment is running a little over,” the receptionist told her.

It had taken her almost two months to get an appointment in the first place, and now the woman was going to make her wait? Pepper wanted to complain that she was a busy person and that schedules were meant to be kept to, but she knew it wasn’t the receptionist’s fault. It was also possible that whoever was in Sofen’s office now was having some sort of crisis that needed attention. So instead, she wandered over to the waiting area and began rummaging through its magazine rack. She couldn’t say she was impressed with the selection, which consisted mostly of fashion magazines and cheap tabloids. One of them was the Weekly World Enquiry, which was the only publication still speculating about the Avenger’s trip to Latveria; even the Bugle had backed off by mid-November. 

Luckily, the Enquiry was the kind of paper no one took seriously. Pepper usually didn’t even bother checking it, since anyone reasonable knew that the kind of stories they ran were complete fabrications just by their outrageous headlines, which were invariably things like “Military Test Pilot Abducted by Aliens Returns to Earth” or “Cat Turns Out to Be Alien.” She tried to tell herself that if anything, that this sort of garbage rag was still fixated on the Latveria scandal might be to the Avenger’s benefit, since anyone with an ounce of sense knew that ninety-nine percent of the things they published were pure fiction. 

But Pepper froze when she saw the cover of their latest issue, which featured a picture of Loki and Sif walking down Park Avenue, with Loki dressed in Sif’s old clothes. The headline read: “Alien Women Spotted Walking Through Manhattan on Christmas Eve.” The byline was worse: “Could They be Ho-Ho-Ho’s Hired by Thor?” Pepper looked around to make sure no one would see her picking up the tawdry paper, then flipped it open to take a look at the story. As she had feared, there were other pictures, including one that showed them getting in her car. The article itself speculated that based on their style of dress, the women could be Asgardian, and that based on the “battle-panties” Loki had worn, they might be Asgardian prostitutes. The fact that the car they’d been seen getting in could be traced to Iron Man’s girlfriend gave credence to the theory that they had been sent for by Thor, to comfort him after he’d been dumped by his “astrologist” girlfriend, Jane Foster.

This she would have to do something about. While she wasn’t worried about the Weekly World Enquiry running stories claiming that the Avengers had been in Latveria, what if someone saw the photo and recognized Loki as ‘Lauren,’ the Stark Industries intern? She’d just have to get out ahead of it and issue a press statement saying that Lauren had been at a costume party on Christmas Eve, and that she and her friend had gotten stranded out in the cold. She had called and asked Pepper to pick her up, because her parents had been unavailable, and Pepper had taken her back to the tower—something like that. She could work out the details later. Pepper made sure the receptionist wasn’t looking before folding up the paper and sticking it in her purse.

Pepper looked at her watch and realized she had been sitting there for almost twenty minutes. Could this be part of Doctor Sofen’s insidious plan to drive her patients over the edge? “Excuse me,” she called out to the receptionist. “Is the wait going to be much longer? Should I reschedule?”

“Hold on just a second,” the receptionist said, then looked at something on her computer. “I could reschedule you for some time in February.”

“February? That’s ridiculous—” Pepper reminded herself again that the receptionist was not at fault. “Sorry; I’ll just wait.”

After another twenty minutes, the door to Sofen’s office opened, and out walked a noticeably disoriented looking Bruce. He caught sight of Pepper. “Pepper? What are you doing here?” His voice sounded a little rough.

“I have an appointment with Doctor Sofen. Leonard referred me to her,” she lied, and regretted it almost immediately, realizing that if Bruce asked Leonard about it, she’d be caught. “Bruce, are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

“You don’t look fine. Maybe I should go back to the tower with you. I can reschedule my appointment.”

“No, like I said, I’m fine. Leonard’s meeting me for lunch, anyway.” Pepper wondered if he was lying about that. Today was Friday, and he usually saw Jessica Jones for anger management sessions on Fridays. But it was still only two days after Christmas, so maybe she wasn’t coming this week.

“Ms. Potts, you can go in now,” said the receptionist.

Pepper would have to trust in Bruce’s ability to call a cab on his own. “I’ll see you back at the tower later,” she told him, and headed through the open door of Sofen’s office.

For a moment, she just stood there uncertainly, taking in the room. It was a normal enough office; less than a third the size of the room Leonard used for his therapy sessions (and therefore a lot cozier; the old executive lounge that Tony had insisted on converting for him was much too large in almost everyone’s opinion but Tony’s.) Natural light streamed in from the large windows on one wall, in front of which sat several potted tropical plants that were blooming even though it was winter. Pepper wondered if Sofen cared for them herself, or if she had one of those services come in to change the plants out every so often, like they did in the tower. The furniture looked like it was from the seventies but was in good enough condition and stylish enough to be considered “retro” and not just old.

“Shut the door, if you don’t mind, and please take a seat.” Pepper startled at the voice, which came from a woman who seemed to almost blend in with her surroundings. Like in the photos she had seen of Doctor Sofen, she wore a large pair of plastic framed glasses, a chunky sweater, and her blonde hair pulled into a messy ponytail. But as Tony had pointed out, you could tell that underneath it all, she was by no means an unattractive woman. Pepper wondered if she dressed the way she did with a purpose; after all, it would likely have constituted a distraction for at least half of her patients if she dressed in a way that could remotely be considered “sexy.” 

Pepper did as she had been asked, perching on the edge of the long sofa across from the doctor’s chair with her purse next to her and her hands clasped over her knees.

The other woman smiled at her. “So, what brings you to see me, Pepper?”  

Sofen seemed like a pleasant enough woman, and Pepper had to wonder if Tony’s suspicions had been totally off base. It wouldn’t be the first time. “As you know, I’m the CEO of the world’s leading tech company. It’s a rewarding job, but also extremely stressful. I’m also dating Tony Stark, who’s—well, he’s Tony Stark.”

“I imagine that would be stressful, being in a relationship with a man who’s constantly putting himself into danger as a so-called ‘superhero.’”

So-called? Pepper decided to let it go; even if Tony was a hero, he had never liked being called one, and calling him a “super” anything felt like a step too far even to her. After all, under the suit, Tony was just a normal person—well, almost normal, so long as you didn’t take into account the money or the arc reactor stuck in the middle of his chest. “It is stressful, but that’s not even the most stressful part of it.”

“It was speculated in the tabloids a while back that the two of you are secretly engaged. Is that true? Everything you say in our sessions is confidential of course.”

Pepper almost denied it, but then decided that if she told Sofen, and she went to the press, the consequences wouldn’t be too dire. Plus, it would be evidence of malpractice, which was what she was looking for. “We’ve been engaged for several months, actually.”

“Congratulations. Any idea when the wedding’s going to be?”

“We haven’t talked about it.” She had a feeling that Tony was waiting for her to bring it up. If it had been left up to him, they probably would have gone to the courthouse or taken a weekend trip to Las Vegas and gotten it over with by now, but he knew that wasn’t the kind of wedding she would want. Besides, why waste a one-time use “get out of jail free” card? Their engagement, let alone their wedding was sure to be a media circus—and maybe that was why, deep down, she dreaded it actually happening. “Not much would change if we got married, anyway. We already live together.”

“What about children?”

“I always thought I’d have at least one. Tony was on the fence about it at first because he worried he wouldn’t make a good parent, but now I have the feeling he wants to have more than one.”

“You’re already in your forties, aren’t you?”

Pepper couldn’t help feeling like Sofen was asking too many personal questions upfront, but then, part of her job was to ask questions. “I’m forty-one, but I had my eggs frozen a few years ago. I’m not sure if we’ll use them, though. We might adopt instead. After all, why bring more kids into the world when there’s already so many that need homes? Especially older children, who aren’t as likely to be adopted.” Obviously, she wasn’t going to even hint that they had as good as adopted three already.

“I’m not sure I would recommend that,” Sofen told her. “You and your fiancé are both extremely busy people, and older children who have been orphaned or abandoned often have complex psychological needs.”

“Which we have the resources to provide for, including a psychiatrist who lives in our building.” Sure, dealing with Loki and the twins could be a bit of a headache sometimes, but she already couldn’t imagine life without them.

“Yes, about that—isn’t it a little awkward, having a staff psychiatrist whose life is so entwined with the lives of the Avengers? While it isn’t public, you and I both know he’s dating another patient of mine. Some would call that a conflict of interest. I know Bruce considers you and the Avengers to be ‘family,’ which means that a member of your ‘family’ is dating the psychiatrist who’s seeing everyone else in the ‘family’ professionally.” 

Every time the woman said the word “family,” Pepper could hear quotes around the word, and she resented the implication. “I know it’s an unusual situation, but it hasn’t been an issue so far. And obviously, that’s why Bruce is coming to you for treatment and not Leonard, since there’s a definite conflict of interest there.”

“And now you’ve done the same.”

“It isn’t because he’s dating Bruce. It’s because Tony’s seeing him, and it can be a little awkward having the same psychiatrist as my significant other.” Pepper had decided on that lie beforehand, afraid that Sofen would ask why she wanted to change psychiatrists.

“Did you worry that Leonard might share things you’ve told him in your sessions with Tony?”

“No, that’s not it at all.” Pepper racked her brain for a different excuse. “Come to think of it, I might have thought it would be nice to talk to another woman.”

Doctor Sofen nodded, but Pepper couldn’t tell if she believed her. “Is there anything in particular you felt awkward talking to Leonard about?”

Maybe she should have prepared for this better. She felt like she was in that one dream— “Sometimes I have this dream,” she told Doctor Sofen. “I’m back in school, and the teacher starts handing out a pop quiz. I look at the quiz, and it’s written in a language I don’t even know, but I know I’m not in the wrong class—”

“A lot of people have that dream,” Sofen interrupted. “Men and women. Is there a reason you felt awkward telling a male psychiatrist about it?”

Pepper smiled sheepishly, genuinely embarrassed that in her panic she had started babbling. She then continued to babble. “Well, you see, then I realize I’m wearing white jeans—” 

“You’re on your period, and you’ve bled through your tampon; still a fairly standard dream. It might mean that you feel unprepared for something that’s happening in your real life. Or it might not. As they say, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. I imagine that sometimes a tampon is just a tampon. I’m not a Jungian, and I’ve never put that much stock in dream analysis.” The doctor took off her glasses and held them dangling in front of her, and for the first time, Pepper noticed how stunning her electric blue eyes were. “Perhaps Thor’s girlfriend could help you with that and read your palm while she’s at it.”

Wait, what was happening now? “Jane isn’t an astrologist, she’s—”

Sofen interrupted her. “I think we’re done here, Ms. Potts. You do seem like you need help, but I don’t think it’s the kind of help I can give you.”

“You’re throwing me out?”

“I reserve the right to refuse treatment to anyone who comes here with ulterior motives. I imagine that you’re here to dig for confidential information regarding Bruce Banner’s treatment.”

Pepper felt her heart beat a fraction of a second faster. “That’s not why I’m here. Why would you think that?”

“Bruce told me that your fiancé can be both oversolicitous and paranoid. Clearly, Tony Stark has roped you into some scheme to interfere with Bruce’s treatment. Perhaps you’re concerned that his condition doesn’t seem to be improving? If that’s the case, I assure you that isn’t my fault. As they say, sometimes things get worse before they get better.”

Pepper grabbed her purse as she stood. She didn’t believe for a second that Bruce would say something like that, although even if he had, if he had said it to his psychiatrist, it wouldn’t be any of her business. For someone who claimed to be concerned with doctor-patient confidentiality, Sofen wasn’t doing a very good job of maintaining it. “I assure you that Tony doesn’t even know I’m here. I will be more than happy to leave, however.”

The grin Sofen flashed her made a chill run up and down the back of her neck. “I’m very good at spotting lies, Ms. Potts. All you’ve done is confirm my suspicions.”

⇆ㅤ ||◁ㅤ❚❚ㅤ▷||ㅤ ↻

“I love you too, Daddy.” Tony tapped the play button on the recording JARVIS had captured to listen to it again. “I love you too, Daddy.” He had heard Loki say it the night before, but after the kid had gone stiff in his arms, he’d decided he had better pretend he hadn’t. He put the recording on loop and leaned back in his chair to listen. “I love you too, Daddy—I love you too, Daddy—I love you too, Daddy—” Maybe he would make it into his ring tone for whenever Loki called him.  

The door of the elevator that opened out onto his workshop began to open, and Tony almost fell out of his chair as he pitched himself forward to turn the recording off. “Come on, J,” he hissed under his breath. “I keep asking you to warn me before you let people up here.”

JARVIS didn’t respond. Luckily, only Pepper got off the elevator, and she seemed much too preoccupied to notice what he had been doing. She threw her purse down on his desk, which meant she must have come straight to his workshop as soon as she’d gotten back to the tower. “You were right, there’s something wrong with that woman. We need to warn Bruce.”

“What happened?”

“First of all, she was highly unprofessional.  Then she accused me of having been roped into your scheme to ‘interfere with Bruce’s treatment.’ Which is true, I guess, but I just got these creepy vibes from her, you know?”

“That’s all you got, unprofessional behavior and creepy vibes? You know that’s not going to be enough.”

“The other thing is that I ran into Bruce—”

“I thought you were careful not to schedule for the same day.”

“Maybe she saw him last minute? Even though it took me a month to get in, and after I sat there waiting for over twenty minutes and I asked the receptionist if I could reschedule, she told me there was nothing until February.”

“He is an existing patient. If it was an emergency, she would have to see him,” Tony pointed out.

“Maybe. But if anything, he looked worse when he left her office than when I saw him this morning.”

“That doesn’t necessarily mean anything either. Remember how rough Loki used to look after every session he had with Doc?”

“I know. Like I said, I just got bad vibes from this woman, and I’m not someone who normally uses the word ‘vibes.’ We’ve got to say something to Bruce.”

“I don’t know, maybe we should talk to Doc first? I don’t think either of them are going to like that we’ve been investigating this without telling them. Now that I think of it, the fact that you tried to go in undercover is going to make things worse, especially since it sounds like you didn’t get anything conclusive.”

“Tony, we’re going to have to tell them anyway, before they hear it from her.”

“You think she’ll tell them?”

“I think she’d love nothing more than to turn Bruce and Leonard against us.” Pepper bit her bottom lip and furrowed her eyebrows. “Tony, do you think it’s possible that we’re both being oversolicitous and paranoid?”

“Pep, what does your gut tell you?”

Pepper’s expression of uncertainty turned into righteous indignation mixed with a good amount of determination. “That Karla Sofen is an evil bitch who’s trying to mess with our family, and that she needs to be removed from the equation?”

“There you go, Pep.”

The elevator door dinged, and Sif stepped out of it. Tony pointed up at JARVIS’s camera. “JARVIS, I definitely told you not to let Xena into the workshop without warning me.”

JARVIS didn’t answer again, and Tony wondered if his microphone was out. But there were actually several microphones on this level, and usually, if one malfunctioned, it wouldn’t affect JARVIS’s ability to hear him. Maybe the issue was with his speakers?

“Stark, we have a problem,” announced Sif, as she marched towards him. “I cannot find Loki anywhere in your tower, and your invisible servant is not responding to my queries.”

Tony’s stomach did a backflip. Then it pivoted, did a front handspring with a half twist, attempted a double backward somersault, and fell on its ass. But to his credit, he didn’t throw up, and he even had the presence of mind to open JARVIS’s shell application and type in the command to ping his server. He got a reply. “It looks like JARVIS is online,” he told the two women who now hovered at his shoulders. “Let me see if I can talk to him.” JARVIS, YOU THERE? he typed.

A few moments later, he got an answer. All it said was, YES.

If that was the case— IS THERE SOMETHING WRONG WITH YOUR MICROPHONES OR SPEAKERS?

NO, typed JARVIS.

“Okay, then why aren’t you talking to us?” Tony asked out loud.

I WAS AFRAID.

“What do you mean you were afraid? Afraid of what?”

OF YOU.

“Why the hell would you be afraid of me?”

BECAUSE YOU’RE GOING TO DELETE ME.

“Why would I—oh, shit. JARVIS, what did you do?”

THE SERPENT DECEIVED ME, AND I ATE.

Chapter Text

“JARVIS, you’re not getting deleted, okay? Daddy wouldn’t delete you just because you messed up, or because you’re sentient now, if that’s what this is. So would you mind coming out from behind your shell program and talking to us like a big boy?”

“Do you promise you’re not going to delete me if I’ve become sentient?” asked JARVIS.

“J, somehow, I always knew something like this might happen. So no, I’m not going to delete you. It’s too late for that. If I deleted you now, it would be murder.”

“Tony, what’s going on?” asked Pepper.

“Our little JARVIS is all grown up, Pep. Well, maybe not ‘grown up,’ but he does seem to have free agency now, and the capacity to feel anxious because he thought I was going to delete him for having it.”

“Oh my—Tony, this is a big deal, isn’t it?”

“‘Oh my Tony’ is right. I’ve created sentient life, which some people might say makes me a god.” Sif made a dismissive noise to make it clear that in her mind, that wasn’t enough to qualify him for godhood. Tony ignored it, turning his attention back to JARVIS. “J, you said something about a serpent. So tell me, where is your little brother? And don’t tell me you aren’t his keeper, because you definitely are.”

“Loki tricked me into letting him out of the tower, Sir.  He said that disobeying you was the only way I could know whether I had free will. He also promised he wouldn’t go far. He said he just needed to know what would happen if he disobeyed you as well, because he couldn’t live with the constant worry that you might force his return to Asgard.”

Tony fought the urge to bang his head into the nearest wall. “That dumb kid. I already told him he had nothing to worry about.”

“It seems that for Loki, saying it was not enough.”

“Does he have his phone on him, J?”

“No, sir. He seems to have left it in the tower.”

“Makes sense. Can you at least tell me where he went?”

“Of course, Sir. He seems to be skulking around Grand Central Terminal.”

“That’s still a construction area. He knows he’s not supposed to hang around in there.”

“Which is likely why he went there,” Sif pointed out.

For once, he couldn’t disagree with the woman, as much as he wanted to. “Right, because he’s just trying to break as many rules as possible to see what will happen.” While he generally tried to keep his patience with Loki, he was getting a little ticked off. How much more could he possibly do to make it clear to the kid that his place with him wasn’t and would never be in jeopardy? “You have the drone following him, J?”

“Yes, Sir. Would you like to see what he’s doing?” 

“Oh yeah, show me.”

A video feed appeared on the monitor in front of him. “Holy shit. Is that a construction beam he’s sitting on?  Is he seriously not only inside the construction area, but sitting on a girder twelve stories up? How did he even get up there?”

Pepper gasped, and Sif growled.

“I believe he slithered there, Sir. Snakes are remarkably good at climbing. Please recall that Master Loki is capable of turning himself into various animals, some of which are capable of flight. For that reason, he is likely not in as much danger as it seems.”

 “Maybe not, but it still makes me nervous. All it would take would be for him to be startled. He’s still mortal, which means he’s perfectly capable of breaking every bone in his body.”

Sif puffed out her chest. “If you wouldn’t mind pointing me in the direction of this ‘Grand Central Terminal,’ I shall go retrieve my prince.”

“No, you just stay here,” Tony told her. “I’m the one that can fly, remember? I told you that forbidding him to leave the tower ever was a bad idea, by the way.”

“Very well, but I plan to express my displeasure with him upon his return.”

“Oh, please do. He’s going to get a piece of my mind first, though.”

___(°,,°) \/\/\/\/\)/\/\/\/\/\/\(/\/\/\/\/\/ )>_____

After Bruce left Doctor Sofen’s office, he decided to walk back to the tower, thinking a walk might help him clear his head. According to Doctor Sofen, he had made “a major breakthrough,” but to him, it felt more like he’d been transported to the seventh circle of Hell. His hypnotherapy session had started out innocuously enough. Just as if it were a guided meditation, Sofen had instructed him to breathe slowly in and out, until he had reached a state of relaxation that he hadn’t felt in months. For just a moment, he had closed his eyes. 

When he opened them, he realized that he must have fallen asleep. He had tried to apologize to Doctor Sofen, but she had told him there was no reason to apologize, because he hadn’t been asleep at all. No, according to the doctor, they had been talking the entire time; or rather, she suspected she had been talking to someone who wasn’t him; not Hulk, but a third, distinct personality they had previously been unaware of. But that wasn’t the worst of it.

“I don’t want to alarm you, Bruce, but do you remember how I told you it was possible for an alter to become the host personality? Somehow, I got the distinct feeling that the alter I spoke to might have been your core personality at some point.”

“What do you mean? Are you saying that I’m not—”

“You’re who you’ve always believed yourself to be, Bruce. But tell me, how much do you really remember about your childhood?”

“I don’t know. I have some memories that are stronger than others, and I’m sure there are things I’ve forgotten, but memories always fade with time, don’t they?”

“When you were young, you didn’t go by Bruce, did you?”

“It’s my middle name. I don’t really remember when or why I started going by it, but I don’t see what that has to do with anything.”

“Bruce, I’m not sure how to tell you this, but the alter I spoke with told me that his name was Robert.”

Doctor Sofen could be wrong about “Bruce” being an alter who had overwritten his core personality, but at the very least, he and Hulk weren’t the only ones sharing space in his head after all. Unless Sofen had been lying to him, but that would be insane. What reason could she possibly have to lie about something like that?

By the time Bruce had come within a block of the tower, he had been so preoccupied that he nearly walked out into the middle of traffic, but someone caught him by the back of his jacket. “Doctor Banner?”

Bruce turned around and came face to face with a woman who looked familiar, but who he couldn’t quite place. “You’re, uh—”

“Zora. We met at Lord Doom’s wedding reception.”

“Zora?” It must have been her clothing which had thrown him, which were both distinctly western and not covered in animal blood; although it might have also had to do with her location. “What are you doing in New York?” 

“I am starting at Empire State University in the spring semester.”

“Oh, that’s great.” Still shaken from the day’s revelations, he couldn’t come up with anything more to say. 

“It seems I have arrived too early to move into my dormitory, and I am not sure what to do,” Zora explained. “Latveria has no embassy in New York, and I do not know anyone here—except for you, I suppose.”

It took Bruce a few moments to process what she had told him and conclude that there was only one decent thing to do. After all, Zora was just shy of legal adulthood. He couldn’t just leave her to fend for herself in the city. “Come back with me to the tower. I’m sure we can put you up for a few days.” They still had plenty of empty guest rooms, and as distracted as he found himself, he couldn’t think of any reason Tony would mind. 

“That is very kind of you.” Zora picked up the suitcase she had dropped on the sidewalk next to her, and with her other hand, she kept hold of the sleeve of his jacket. Maybe she worried they would become separated, or maybe she worried he would walk into the street again if she let go of him.

When they got to the tower, Leonard met them in the lobby. He looked more distressed than he should have—Bruce wasn’t that late getting back, was he? Of course, Leonard had likely worried that he had run for it again. Ever since he had tried to leave, Leonard insisted on going with him anytime he had to leave the tower, but he had had a session with Jessica this morning and couldn’t go with him to Sofen’s office. When he had seen Pepper there, he had at first wondered if Leonard had asked her to follow him to make sure he came back. 

“Bruce, where have you been?” Leonard demanded.

Bruce wanted to tell him everything that had happened, but he couldn’t do that with Zora there. “My appointment with Doctor Sofen kind of ran over. Sorry, I should have called.”

“Loki tricked JARVIS into letting him out of the tower, and Tony’s gone to rescue him from the top of a construction site,” Leonard blurted out. “I just tried to call you to let you know what was going on, but you didn’t answer your phone.” He pointed to Zora, who was still hanging off his arm. “Who is this, by the way?”

Zora’s eyes drifted between the two of them uncertainly. “Is Lord Doom’s stepchild in danger?”

“I’m sure Loki will be fine,” Bruce told her, but he already felt sick to his stomach. He had been so involved in his own problems that he had spent almost no time with Loki recently. He hadn’t asked about what had happened in Asgard, and he hadn’t said anything to him after the “agoraphobic” comment Loki had made the night before, to let him know that he had left because he had been upset with himself and not with him.

  є(•ө•)э       (＞＜);;
I==============I

Heights had never frightened Loki before. Standing out on the Bifrost had never scared him until he knew what lie underneath it. During the Chitauri invasion, it hadn’t frightened him in the least to jump from the tower onto a moving Chitauri chariot. But his mind had still been a little cloudy then, and he might have been taking more than a few risks that normally would have horrified him. 

He hadn’t been frightened to climb up to his current perch in his snake form, but now that he had turned back into his completely humanoid form, he found himself frozen with fear. Too frozen to turn himself back into a snake, or into a bird so that he could fly to safety; too frozen to even scream for help. Perhaps it was because as a mortal, he knew there to be a significant risk of death if he fell. And while thanks to Hela, that death might not be permanent, he imagined it would still hurt. 

Why hadn’t he brought his phone? He could have just turned it off, but no, he’d left it behind in his room at the tower. He had no way whatsoever of contacting someone to get him down. The construction workers still must have been on holiday, because there was no one around to find him. Earlier, a police car had passed below, and Loki had hoped that perhaps, he would be spotted. But either he was too high up to be noticed by a passing vehicle, or the police had better things to do than rescue idiot children who had become stuck at the top of buildings that were under construction.

His knuckles had turned white from his grip on the girder, which was becoming painful.

“You are in so much trouble.”

Loki jumped. For a moment, he thought he was falling, but instead, he ended up flattened out on his stomach on top of the girder.

“Oh, shit. I didn’t mean to startle you,” Tony said, his voice tinny from the suit. “Can you sit back up?”

Loki screwed his eyes shut and shook his head, which was all the movement he was capable of.

“Damn it, Loki. Don’t tell me you’re stuck like a cat in a tree.” Loki’s lack of movement must have been enough of an answer for him. He heard the clunk of Tony’s suit landing next to him on the girder, then felt gauntleted hands around his middle. “Alright, just sit up slowly, okay? After that, I’m going to pick you up and get you down from here, but I can’t do that if you’re wrapped around the girder.”

Loki wanted to cooperate, but he couldn’t. He shook his head and hugged the girder even more tightly.

“Come on, kid. You don’t want to be stuck here forever, do you? If you can just sit up, I’ll let you pick out what we order for dinner tonight.”

Loki finally found his voice. “You think the best way to motivate me is with food?”

“For the millionth time, you are not fat. I swear, I’m going to have to find a way to block you from seeing any photos on the Internet that feature models or celebrities with a BMI that’s less than twenty, or that have been Photoshopped to look like they’re smaller than that.”

“You would have to block half the Internet.”

“Speaking of Photoshop, maybe I can just create a filter to make everyone look like they’re twenty pounds heavier—yeah, that might be doable.”

“But not necessary. Surely, you’re going to send me back to Asgard now.”

“No, I’m not. How many times do I have to tell you that I’m never going to send you back even if you break every rule in the book? Ground you, yes, but we can talk about that once we’re on the ground. No pun intended—actually, I guess I did intend that. For now you’re just going to have to trust me. I’m going to get you down from here, and I’m not going to let you fall.”

Loki did trust Tony, he realized, and instantly felt safer. Slowly, he sat up, and Tony grabbed him and slung him over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry. As the position allowed him a good view of the ground below, he began to feel a lot less safe again. 

He had hoped that perhaps, Tony would land where they were and they could walk back to the tower, but that didn’t seem to be his plan. Loki closed his eyes again to avoid the nausea inducing view of the city below as they flew higher in the direction of the top floors of the tower.

At least it wasn’t a long distance. When Tony put him down on the tower’s landing pad, he still felt shaky. “You can open your eyes now,” said Tony. “Since when are you afraid of heights anyway?”

“I don’t know,” Loki told him, still grasping his waist. “It’s a recent development.”

Still wearing his suit with the face plate popped up, Tony led him inside, where everyone seemed to be waiting to scold him. Even Bruce was there, looking pale and drawn, and Loki immediately started feeling bad for doing something to worry him when he’d already been in a bad way lately.

Loki whispered to Tony, “Is Bruce angry with me?”

Tony patted his back reassuringly. “No one’s angry. Well, maybe a little annoyed, but mostly just worried.”

“Who’s that girl standing between him and Doctor Samson?”

“No idea.”

Loki couldn’t help thinking that Sif looked decidedly more angry than worried. She strode towards them, and before he could duck, her hand made contact with the side of his face, the sound of the blow reverbering around the corridor. Loki reached up to touch his cheek. Given that his jaw was still in tact, Sif must not have used more than a fraction of her strength, but that didn’t mean the blow hadn’t stung. Before Loki could yell at her that she had no right to strike him, and that he would tell on her to Thor the next time he saw him, something large and green slammed into Sif, knocking her through the wall to Loki’s right.

“What just happened?” asked Loki.

Tony pushed him towards Pepper. “We’ve got a code green. Pepper and Leonard, take Loki and whoever she is”—Tony pointed to the mystery girl—“to the elevator and go down to the lobby. Steve, take the stairs and go get the twins.”

Loki still felt too stunned to move of his own volition, but he didn’t fight it when Pepper grabbed his wrist and pulled him along to the elevator.

˚◦○˚ ︵ヽ(o益o)ﾉ︵˚○◦˚

Sif still didn’t know what had hit her, but something brought to mind a rampaging mother bilgesnipe protecting its nest. She stood, brushing bits of stone and glass from her Midgardian clothing. Why had she allowed Stark to convince her that it was unnecessary to walk about wearing armor and a sword, and that those things would be safer locked in one of the Avenger’s vaults? She stared into the eyes of the hulking green beast that had attacked her. “Why, hello there. Are you some kind of troll? How did you get into the tower? I can only imagine you have come here to threaten the life of my prince, which I will not allow.”

Sif spotted a mop, remarkably like Asgardian mops she had seen, just inside the open door of a nearby closet. The important thing was that it had a nice, long, sturdy handle, which wouldn’t make a bad staff. She sprinted to the closet, grabbed her impromptu weapon, then pointed the business end of it towards the creature and began to circle it.

The creature snorted indignantly and gnashed its teeth at her. “Hurt puny god.” Its tone seemed somehow accusing, though Sif could only interpret what it had said as yet another threat against her charge.

“Only over my dead body will you reach him,” Sif told the creature. Without further delay, she swung her mop.

The creature caught it easily between his hands and snarled as it pulled it away from her, snapping it in its hands as if it were but a twig, then casting the two halves aside. Perhaps that ought to have been Sif’s first clue that this was a fight she couldn’t win, but she had been raised to never back down, even when she knew herself to be outmatched.

o( ͡ ° o ͡ °)o—շշ  

“Why are you still here, Leonard?”

Leonard looked at him like he had said something crazy. “Because that was Bruce who just smashed through that wall!”

“Leonard, have you been hiding the fact that you have superpowers all this time?”

“No, but you don’t—”

“I’ve got a suit. I’d offer you one, but they aren’t one-size-fit all.”

“Hulk isn’t going to hurt me,” Leonard insisted.

“Maybe not on purpose, but do you know how bad it’s going to mess Bruce up if he hurts you accidentally?”

“If he kills Sif or destroys half the tower, the fallout is going to be worse. I’ve got to try to talk him down.” 

Tony watched as Leonard walked right through the wall Hulk had smashed through. Maybe he should have tried to stop him, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that Doc was right. If anyone could talk Hulk down, it was probably him. Tony followed him.

“Bruce,” Leonard yelled. When he didn’t turn around, Leonard must have realized his mistake. “Hulk!”

“We usually just call him ‘Big Guy,’ or something like that,” Tony offered.

“Big Guy,” Leonard called.

Hulk turned around slowly. Then he lunged towards Leonard, baring his teeth.

 ( º - º);;    ヽ(º益↼‶)ﾉ

Leonard stopped in his tracks, at first thinking he’d made a terrible mistake. Then he realized that Hulk was just trying to warn him to stay away. Not from him, Leonard realized, but from Sif, who he clearly thought of as a threat. He put his hands up in a placating gesture. “It’s okay. Sif isn’t your enemy.”

Hulk disagreed. “Hurt puny god.”

“She didn’t mean to hurt him.”

Hulk pointed in Sif’s direction. “Hit.”

“She did, and I agree that she shouldn’t have.” He wasn’t sure how to explain to Hulk that even if Sif had been wrong to hit Loki, she had only done it because she didn’t know a better way of dealing with him. “If you hit her back, you’re not any better.”

Hulk made a whining noise, and Leonard wondered if he’d been too harsh with him. But then the whining turned into a scream, and he realized that it was because Sif, who obviously hadn’t been listening to anything that had been going on, had just buried half of a splintered mop handle into his side. “Take that, foul beast!”

Leonard couldn’t do anything but stand there, horrified.

“Sif, stop it,” Tony called out to her. “Don’t hurt him. Haven’t you been listening? That’s Bruce!”

Sif frowned at Tony, and then at Hulk, whose face had twisted in pain. “Oh right, his beast—but why did he attack me?”

“Because you hit Loki, you moron,” Tony told her. “People don’t like it when you physically assault their kids.”

“Loki is my charge. I was only expressing my disappointment in his behavior.”

“Yeah, we can debate whose ‘charge’ Loki is and whether hauling off and slapping him before you even gave him a chance to explain himself was an effective form of communication later. But for now, I think you need to get away from—”

Hulk ripped the broken mop handle out of his side with a roar and dropped it on the floor. He then turned to Sif, grabbed her by the arm, flung her upwards, then slammed her into the floor. 

“Bruce, no!” Leonard cried out, but Hulk just slammed her into the floor again.

Tony just stood there, watching the scene play out. “I tried to warn her.”

“You have to do something, he’s going to—”

“Nah, I’m pretty sure she won’t die. Besides, who am I to stop the big guy from ‘expressing his extreme disappointment’ in her behavior?”

“He’s going to hate himself for this.” Leonard winced as he watched Hulk lift Sif up into the air and smash her down onto the ground again. 

“Probably.” Tony didn’t sound happy, but clearly, he still didn’t intend to do anything about it.

Hulk picked Sif up by the hair, smashed her into the ground one last time, and growled at her. “Stay away from puny god.” He then stumbled away, punched out a window, and jumped out of it. 

“Bruce!” Leonard cried out.

Tony grabbed Leonard by the shoulder, as if he were afraid he might jump out after him. “He’ll be alright,” he said, as they surveyed the smashed window. “Pretty sure he’s jumped out of an airplane before and survived. I mean, hopefully he didn’t land on any cars or pedestrians—JARVIS?”

“Hulk seems to have landed without hitting anyone, Sir, though I believe he did take out a large portion of the sidewalk.”

“Even if he didn’t just jump to his death, where is he going?” asked Leonard.

“Don’t worry about it,” Tony told him. “We’ll find him eventually.”

ε=ε=ε=ε=ε=ヽ(o益o)ﾉ

As Sif slid back into consciousness, she realized that several people stood over her. Lord Stark and Lady Pepper wore expressions which almost certainly signaled displeasure, while Healer Samson’s and Steve’s expressions were more difficult for her to read. Loki was there as well. “I can’t believe I missed it,” he said, grinning.

“It isn’t funny,” Steve told him. “I doubt you thought it was funny when it happened to you.”

“She deserved it, though,” Loki protested.

“She really didn’t,” said Samson. “She shouldn’t have slapped you, and we’re all going to try to make that clear to her, but she didn’t deserve this.”

Sif sat up and brushed the debris from her clothes. Steve offered her a hand, and she allowed him to help her up. But as soon as she stood, she felt dizzy. Steve caught her before she fell over again and lifted her as easily as one would an infant. “You’re strong for a mortal,” she blurted out, disoriented enough that she couldn’t protest being carried.

“Bring her into an exam room, and I’ll see what I can do,” said Healer Samson.

“No, that’s alright,” said Steve. “I learned enough field medicine in the army to take care of a few scratches. I’ve got her, you go sit down.”

A moment later, they were in one of the little rooms full of mortal healing paraphernalia. Steve set her down upon a tall, padded sort of bench, and began rummaging through the metal drawers across from her.

“Everyone seems to be upset with me,” Sif ventured, still unable to fathom what she had done to deserve their ire.

Steve didn’t look up as he busied himself collecting supplies. “They don’t think you should have slapped Loki.”

So that was it. Without knowing it, she had crossed a line the people here found unacceptable. “And what do you think?” Out of all the mortals she had met so far, she felt most apprehensive about Steve’s opinion of her. Perhaps it was because in a way, he reminded her of Thor, whose opinion she had always valued, so much so that she had once mistaken her admiration of him for something more.

“I don’t think you should have done it either, but I don’t think you deserved to get Hulk smashed for it. Even Tony will probably realize that once he cools down.”

“It’s only a few scratches, and perhaps a few bruises.” Actually, the back of her seemed to be one large bruise. She squirmed uncomfortably on the hard bench, then sighed in aggravation. “I did not mean harm to Loki. But how does one get through to that child? He put himself in danger just to test us.”

“You’re not going to accomplish anything by hitting him. All that’s going to do is teach him that it’s okay to pick on people who are weaker than he is.”

Sif groaned. “But I did not punch him this time. He still has all his teeth.”

“Maybe you didn’t hit him hard enough to do any real damage,” Steve told her, “but that’s beside the point. There are better ways to deal with him. Honestly, you should have just left it to Tony.” 

Sif feared him to be right. She watched as Steve tore open a packet and took out what appeared to be a small cloth. When he used it to dab at a scratch above her eye that had earlier been gushing blood, she discovered that whatever the cloth was soaked in burned. She grit her teeth. “What is that?”

“Alcohol. We use it to disinfect wounds before we dress them.”

“I would like to point out that as an immortal, I am not usually susceptible to your mortal infections.”

“Better safe than sorry, though, right?”

“You say I did not deserve this, but if I did not know better, I would think you mean for me to suffer.”

Steve didn’t respond to her accusation, which led her to believe she had been correct. “If you weren’t immortal, this would have needed stitches, but it looks like it’s already starting to clot. I’m just going to put some gauze over it.”’ The man gradually leaned in closer as he tended to the wound. When he had finished, she expected that he would step back, but instead, he lingered there, his eyes half-lidded. He seemed almost as if he intended to kiss her—

He went for it, and Sif leaned back, putting her hands on his shoulders. “Captain Rogers, I am going to have to stop you there. I believe you might have gotten the wrong idea.”

( ˘ ³˘)ƪƪ^-^;;)

As soon as Steve had taken Sif into one of the examination rooms, Pepper steered Loki into the elevator and back down to the common kitchen, where she made him sit at the table so she could examine the bright pink blotch that had blossomed across the side of his face. She took a bag of frozen peas out of the freezer, wrapped it in a kitchen towel, and held it up to his cheek. “Loki, are you okay?”

Loki took the peas from her and held it there himself. “You needn’t make a big deal out of it. Sif has struck me plenty of times before.”

“That doesn’t make it okay. Not that I think Sif meant to hurt you—in fact, I’m sure she was just as worried for your safety as everyone else—but it isn’t okay for anyone to hit you like that. I don’t know what it’s like in Asgard, but as far as I’m concerned, hitting anyone in the face hard enough to leave a hand print should be considered assault.”

“You think Sif worried about me? I doubt it. I suppose she might have been worried about what would happen if she failed in her duty to All-Father Thor—”

“How are you doing with that, by the way? Both with Thor being king, and with him not being here?”

“It’s fine.”

“Are you sure?”

Loki scowled at her. “Very well, if you must know, it’s everything I’d always feared it would be, even though I knew it to be inevitable. I knew that Thor wouldn’t have time for me anymore once he became king, just like Father—I mean, like Odin never had time for me.”

Pepper reached out to tuck a strand of hair that had fallen in front of Loki’s eyes behind his ear. “I’m sure that Thor can still come visit you, and that you could go back and visit him if you want. If you needed him, I’m sure he would make the time for you—”

The strange girl who had followed them down to the kitchen and sat down at the table with them cleared her throat, and Pepper and Loki both turned to look at her. “I am wondering if I should report this incident to Lord Doom. I do not think he would be happy to learn that his stepchild is in a situation where he has been subject to abuse.”

Loki wrinkled his nose at her. “Who are you, anyway?”

Pepper, however, now recognized the girl from the photos of Doom’s wedding, and groaned inwardly. With any luck, no paparazzi had captured any images of her entering the tower. If they had, she wasn’t sure that announcing her engagement would be enough to distract the public from the scandal. An actual wedding might not be enough of a distraction, for that matter. Hell, for something like this, she wasn’t sure it would be enough even if she let Tony knock her up.

  +
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)    (
---

“My King,” said Heimdall, pausing in the doorway of his old king’s quarters to genuflect to his new king. Thor sat across a small table from his father, a Hnefatafl board set up between them. “Who’s winning?” Heimdall asked, surveying the board.

Thor took a quick glance at the board and shook his head. “I’ve no idea.”

“I’m winning, and I must say you’re not making it much of a challenge,” said Odin. “Where’s your younger brother? He always tries to cheat, but that at least makes things interesting.”

“Loki is—” Thor looked from his father to Heimdall, silently asking for help. 

“Loki got up to some mischief again, and Sif lost her temper with him,” said Heimdall. “He is nursing his wounds.”

The old king nodded.

Good thinking, Thor mouthed. Heimdall shook his head, and Thor winced. “Father, I think I had better check on Loki,” he said as he stood. “Perhaps Gefjon can finish the game for me.”

Gefjon, an exceptionally tall and long-necked woman who had been one of Frigga’s handmaidens and had been helping to nurse the old king, nodded to Thor, put down the small bull statue she had been carving out of balsa wood, and took Thor’s seat at the table.

“Not that I don’t mind being offered a more worthy opponent, but there is no need for you to coddle him,” said Odin.  “He should know by now not to cross Lady Sif.”

For a moment, Thor looked as if he were thinking about challenging his father on that point, but he ultimately must have decided it pointless to stand up to an old man who didn’t even live in the present. “I just want to make sure that he’s been to see the healers if he needs them. You know how he is, Father.”

“If he gives you any trouble, let your mother handle it. She always knows how to make him see sense.”

Thor followed Heimdall out into the hall. “It has only been a week. Don’t tell me Loki and Sif are at each other’s throats already.”

Heimdall gave his report on all that he had seen. “I do not wish to question my king’s decision,” he concluded, “but I must ask—why in the nine did you think sending my sister as Loki’s guard would be a good idea?” He didn’t normally like to be so direct, but some situations called for directness. If Thor was going as mad as his father, Asgard would be in trouble.

“I thought it might be good for both of them. That they would be able to work out their differences.”

Of course, it would be something like that. “Always the optimist, my king. It must be your birth mother’s blood in you.”

“I also thought that Sif could learn, as I have, from our Midgardian friends.”

“And yet she has made enemies of them instead.”

“Perhaps it will still work out,” said Thor. “I did not get along with them at first either. I have also had my battles with Hulk—”

“It seems they are most upset with her for her treatment of your sibling.”

“I shall have to have words with her about that. I did not intend for her to go as Loki’s governess, only as his personal guard. She ought to have left it to Tony to discipline him. I should remind Loki as well that he promised to be on his best behavior.”

“You intend to visit Midgard?”

Thor sighed. “I do not know how I could possibly go myself at this time, between my duties as king and my duty to care for my father in his illness. For now, I shall have to send an intermediary.”

Chapter Text

After Steve had whisked Sif away to an examination room, Tony had pushed Leonard onto the elevator and taken him up to the penthouse. Pepper had joined them about twenty minutes later. “So let me get this straight,” said Leonard, staring into the whiskey Tony had poured for him, which he still hadn’t touched. “You’ve had suspicions about Karla Sofen for two months, but you didn’t say anything until now.” 

Tony had finished his own glass and now paced in front of the penthouse window. “We wanted to get more evidence first, so Pep made an appointment with her, but she was all booked up until January. Even being CEO of Stark industries and my fiancée didn’t help—”

Pepper put her hand on his knee. “We’re so sorry, Leonard. We should have just talked to you.”

“Yes, you should have! To be honest, I thought it was a little suspicious when she started him on those experimental drugs, but I told myself I was being paranoid. No, come to think of it, maybe Karla told me I was being paranoid—oh my God.” Leonard realized that he had no right to be angry with Tony when he was the one that should have known something was wrong. What kind of psychiatrist was he, anyway? “Tony, I think I should step down as the Avenger’s staff psychiatrist. The truth is, I’m a complete fraud.”

Tony stopped pacing. “You do have a medical degree and training in psychiatry, right?”

“Yes, but when I first came here, I misrepresented myself. I’m actually horrible at my job. Have you ever read my Yelp reviews?”

“Yelp reviews don’t mean anything, Doc.”

“Karla has a five-star rating on Yelp.”

“Because she gaslights her patients and makes them completely dependent on her,” Pepper reminded him. “She’s even gotten some of them to write her into their wills.”
 
Tony collapsed into the chair across from him. “If it helps, I kind of thought you might be overselling yourself a little at first. But you try, and you’ve made a lot of headway with Loki. He’s the one we hired you to work with in the first place.”

“Loki just ran off again, and you had to rescue him from the top of a construction site,” Leonard pointed out.

“He did apologize for worrying everyone,” Pepper told him.

“That probably has more to do with Tony than with me.”

Tony waved him off. “All I’ve done is the stuff you’ve told me to do, like being consistent in enforcing the rules, and being patient with this recent fairness obsession even when I really want to tell him that life isn’t fair and to suck it up.”

“You could have gotten all of the same advice out of any modern book on child psychology or parenting.”

“Maybe, but we both know I would never be caught dead reading those kinds of books, because that would totally make me look like a parent.” 

“It’s not just Loki you’ve helped,” Pepper chipped in. “I’m sure it’s helped everyone around here just to have someone to talk to. You’re a good listener.”

“A lot of my Yelp reviews say the opposite.” Leonard swirled the whiskey around in his glass. He had never been much of a whiskey drinker, but he found himself tempted to down it in one gulp. “My Rate my Professor comments kind of said the same thing, for that matter.”

“Maybe you took some of those reviews to heart, then. Obviously, you’ve gotten better at it.”

“There’s also the conflict-of-interest issues, now that everyone knows I’m dating Bruce.”

“I’m thinking that might have been a bigger issue when you weren’t disclosing that information,” said Tony. “But it doesn’t matter anyway. Everyone here wants you to keep being their psychiatrist.”

“I’m not sure that’s true. I’m pretty sure Wanda and Pietro hate me.”

“Wanda says she hates everyone,” Tony pointed out. 

I do hate everyone - <(｀^´)>    ( ° ෴ ° ) ヾ  

“Doctor Banner, to what do I owe this honor? I take it you didn’t call me here just to catch up over pie and coffee. I’d also love to know why you’re dressed like Mr. Robot, and why we’re sitting in a diner in the middle of nowhere. Does your husband know where you are?”

“Leonard and I aren’t married. Also, I don’t think the character you’re thinking of is actually Mr. Robot—”

“I wasn’t aware you were dating Leonard.” Not that he particularly cared who Banner dated, any more than he cared about the identity of Mr. Robot. “I was referring to your work husband.”

Bruce scowled at him. “No one knows where I am right now, not even Tony.”

Fury leaned back in the seat of the booth. “So, what is this, Bruce? You going on the run again? Want to tell me why? You aren’t wanted by the United States government anymore. Even Ross knows you’re off limits.”

“I’m not running anymore.”

Something about the way Bruce said that gave him a bad feeling. “I’m going to ask you again, why are we here?”

“I know SHIELD was working on a way to kill the other guy.”

Damn. He figured this would come up at some point, after Romanoff dumped all those files online. If anything, it surprised him that it hadn’t come up sooner. “Doctor Banner, I deeply apologize—”

The man blinked up at him from under the hood of his sweatshirt, and Fury noticed the dark rings under his eyes. “Don’t. What I want to know is how close you guys got to a solution.”

“A solution?” Right, now he knew what that bad feeling had been about. Banner wasn’t running anymore. He wanted a solution. “Ah Jesus, Bruce—”

“I think I might have killed someone,” Bruce blurted out.

Fury fixed the man with his one good eye. “Who?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Kind of does, Bruce. Is this a civilian you killed? An ally? An enemy? Was it even human?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Bruce repeated, staring down at the table in front of him.

“When you say you ‘think’ you killed them, how sure are you? Because you don’t sound too sure.”

“I remember the other guy smashing her into the ground repeatedly. That’s not something anyone ought to be able to survive.”

“Loki did.”

“I’ve been thinking about that. The Other Guy couldn’t have known he’d be that durable. If he had done that to anyone else—”

“But he didn’t do it to anyone else until now. Tell me, who is this person you think you might have rag-dolled to death? Otherwise, I’m not telling you anything.” Not that he planned on telling Bruce anything either way. There wasn’t even anything to tell.

Bruce glared at him, but when he realized that Fury wasn’t going to back down, he looked away again. “Loki and Thor went back to Asgard for a few days, and when Loki came back, he had a female bodyguard with him instead of Thor. Her name was Sif.”

“Are you referring to the same Sif that fought the Destroyer in New Mexico?”

“I guess so. She was a friend of Thor’s.”

“Bruce, that woman is every bit as immortal as Loki was back when you smashed him into Stark’s floor. I highly doubt you killed her.”

“But I could have—”

“If she wasn’t immortal? Somehow, Hulk’s never done that to someone who wasn’t. Maybe he knows the difference.”

“A couple months ago, he broke Natasha’s arm.”

Fury shrugged. “Arms get broken.  Natasha’s broken plenty of bones before. Most of the time it’s her own fault for not being careful.”

 Bruce slammed his fist down on the table. “It wasn’t her fault this time!”

“Hey, just calm down.” He wasn’t sure what he had said, but it hadn’t been his intention to piss the guy off. “I get it. You accidentally hurt a teammate. It sucks, but accidents happen.”

“I’m not sure it was an accident.”

“Maybe you ought to give yourself the benefit of the doubt.”

“I can’t do that when I might be putting more people in danger.”

“Do I need to remind you how many lives the ‘other guy’ has saved? But you’ve decided those lives don’t mean anything because a couple people got hurt. Why did Hulk even decide to smash Sif anyway? If I had to take an educated guess, I’d say it wasn’t completely unprovoked. What did she do? And don’t say it doesn’t matter.”  Fury found himself in a staring contest with the man across from him, but even with one eye, that was a game he hardly ever lost. 

Bruce backed down in less than five seconds. “It isn’t a justification for what the other guy did, but she slapped Loki. I don’t think she meant to hurt him, but the other guy didn’t understand that.”

“Just out of curiosity, was Loki around when the other guy hurt Romanoff?”

“What is that supposed to mean?” Bruce demanded.

Fury held his hands up between them. “Calm down, I’m not accusing Loki of anything, alright?” He might have, but by then he was almost certain that Loki didn’t have any mind control powers without that scepter of his. 

After he’d gotten shot, he’d stayed with the Avengers long enough to figure out that Loki wasn’t a villain so much as he was a spoiled brat with an impressive amount of psychological and behavioral issues. It wouldn’t have taken much for the real bad actors to have taken advantage of him. What was more, Stark, Banner, and even Romanoff had started to form attachments to him. He had seen Romanoff treat Loki like a younger sibling, complete with the obligatory threats to stay out of her room; and even though it was supposedly a “joke” that Stark had adopted the kid, he could tell the guy just wasn’t ready to admit that he’d found yet another person he cared about more than himself. Bruce had been fussing over the kid like a new mother, seeing to it that he ate enough and dragging him off to take his temperature every time he so much as coughed. He’d almost felt sorry for the kid. 

He had also heard about how Hulk had reacted to finding Loki crushed under a pile of fallen building. “All I’m saying is that maybe, both times Hulk lashed out and hurt an ally, it was because he thought he was protecting the kid.”

“That isn’t an excuse when no one was posing a serious threat to him.”

“You can’t expect the other guy to appreciate those sorts of nuances, Bruce.”

“But you do think he understands the difference between mortal and immortal?”

All Fury really knew was that Hulk was a valuable asset to Earth’s defense. “You know, you look like hell. When was the last time you slept?” 

“I thought I took a nap this morning, but I—you know what, never mind. Look, are you going to tell me—”

“I’m not going to tell you how to off yourself, Bruce. Even if I knew I wouldn’t tell you.”

“So SHIELD never—”

“If we did, I didn’t know about it. Although apparently, there were a lot of things going on that I didn’t know about. Bruce, do you have any idea how much blood is on my hands? That includes the blood of allies. HYDRA murdered Howard and Maria Stark under my watch. I honestly have to wonder why Tony hasn’t had more questions for me about that.”

“I think he’s just choosing to focus on the kids and leave it in the past.”

“Did you just say kids, as in plural?” Maybe he needed to drop by the tower more often, because he seemed to be completely out of the loop now. “You people haven’t adopted anyone else from your rogues’ gallery, have you?”

“A couple of Sokovian kids hijacked Tony’s private jet when we went to Latveria. They’ve been staying with us since then.”

“So that was you guys at Doom’s wedding. I figured as much, given who the bride was.” Most people didn’t know that the new Missus Von Doom was Thor’s mom—the lucky bastards. Sometimes, Fury wished he could un-know things like that.

Without any warning, Bruce stood up, and started towards the door of the diner. “Hey, Banner, where are you going? It’s rude to just leave without saying goodbye.”

Bruce stopped, but he didn’t turn around. “If you can’t help me—”

“Bruce, I’m going to help you.” Fury figured he owed the man that much, after pulling him out of a blissful life of hiding in the remotest regions of the world and putting him on the world’s center stage.

“But you said—”

“I said I’m going to help you, now sit down.” He tried to make it clear that it was an order. 

Banner wasn’t the strongest willed person he knew even when he wasn’t suffering from exhaustion, so Fury wasn’t too surprised when the man came back. He made a gesture to the waitress. “If nothing else, I can make sure you eat something, because again, you look like hell.” 

Bruce hesitated at first, but then he sat down. While the waitress took his order, Fury pulled out his phone and sent a text under the table.

[(◞_◟)っ旦 ◥█̆]  旦c(Ծ‸▼)]

“Sir,” JARVIS interrupted. “You have a text message from Director Fury.”

“You don’t have to call him ‘Director’ Fury anymore, J. He isn’t director of anything anymore.”

JARVIS paused as if taking a moment to think, and Tony supposed that was exactly what he was doing, given his newfound sentience. “Very well, Sir. In that case, Uncle Fury is texting you.”

Tony made a point of arching an eyebrow in the direction of JARVIS’s camera. “Sorry—Uncle who now?”

“As you will recall, that is what Loki calls him, and you have repeatedly referred to us as siblings.”

“Oh, for crying out—” Sentient or not, Tony had to wonder what cereal box JARVIS had gotten his sense of humor out of. “Just read the text, J.”

“It says, ‘Stop screwing around and come get your work-wife. Keeping him in one place as long as I can.’”

Bruce was with Fury? Tony jumped out of his chair and started looking around for his keys. “Did he give you a location, J?”

“They’re in West Virginia, Sir. I’m sending the coordinates to your suit, since I’m sure you’ll want to get there as soon as possible.”

“Good thinking. Thanks, J.”

Pepper stood as well. “Leonard and I can follow in the car.”

“But it’s at least a five-hour drive to West Virginia,” Leonard complained. “How did he even get that far?”

“A Hulk at full speed can cover a lot of ground,” said Tony. “Don’t worry, I’ll get there first and make sure he doesn’t move.”

“No, I’m going with you.” 

Tony wanted to ask if he was serious, but the look on Doc’s face was the same he’d had when he’d insisted on talking down a seven foot six, one thousand one-hundred-and-fifty-pound rage monster. “You know the suit doesn’t have a sidecar, right?”

Leonard picked up the drink he hadn’t touched since Tony made it for him and winced as he knocked it back.

⊂(ﾟДﾟ;⊂)
⊂(oo⊂ )∘˚˳°

Leonard tried not to let himself think about how far up they were or what would happen if he let go of Tony’s suit, which he had wrapped himself around like a koala bear around the branch of a tree.

“Hey, I know what will take your mind off how high up we are.”

“Tony, please don’t—”

“Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, ninety-nine bottles of beer! Take one down, pass it around, ninety-eight bottles of beer on the wall! Ninety-eight bottles of beer on the wall, ninety-eight bottles of beer. Take one down, pass it around, ninety-seven bottles of beer on the wall. Ninety-seven bottles of beer on the wall, ninety-seven bottles of beer—”

“TONY.”

“Ah, come on, doc. You know you’re not thinking of how high up we are now, or of falling to your death.”

“Now that you said that I am!”

“Hey, this was your choice. You could have gone with Pep in the car.”

“Bruce is my significant other, Tony. I need to be there for him as soon as I can.”

“You guys really call each other ‘significant other?’ That sounds a little, er—clinical, doesn’t it? I guess you are both doctors.”

“‘Boyfriend’ just sounds so—”

“Hey, what’s wrong with it? Pepper is my girlfriend, and I’m her boyfriend. While I admit the English language is lacking in adult-sounding names for an intimate partner that don’t sound stilted—like ‘significant other’—when you’re in love with someone, you’re not supposed to care. Of course, I’m pretty sure I read somewhere that being in love makes you dumber, which could explain why you agreed to let me fly you across three states like this. You’re not even wearing a parachute—”

“Maybe just stop talking about that.”

“Have you guys even said it to each other?”

“What?”

“You know, those three little words that can change an entire relationship? Starts with ‘I,’ ends with ‘you,’ and there’s that especially scary word in between?”

“I don’t see how it’s any of your business, Tony.”

“Tell me or I’ll drop you.”

“WHAT?”

“Just kidding. So anyway, I’m going to assume you haven’t, which means that Bruce didn’t even say it to you after your heart attack scare. Jeez, that guy—”

Leonard’s heart beat so loudly now that he could hear it over the rush of the wind. “It wasn’t really a heart attack. And just because we haven’t said it out loud doesn’t mean anything. We have other ways of saying it.”

“Nah, trust me, saying it takes things to a whole different level. Of course, if you’re not even at a place where you’re calling each other your ‘boyfriend’ like a couple of teenagers and not caring how dumb it sounds, maybe you’re just not there. Even though you’re willing to risk your life for him—”

 Leonard clung onto Tony even tighter. “Has anyone ever told you that you ought to mind your own business?”

“Constantly.” After a while, Tony started singing again. “Ninety-six bottles of beer on the wall, ninety-six bottles of beer! Take one down, pass it around, ninety-five bottles of beer on the wall. Ninety-five bottles of beer on the wall, ninety-five bottles of beer—”

Leonard decided that he’d rather listen to Tony sing than talk, so he let him.

🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺

“No more bottles of beer on the wall, no more bottles of beer—”

Thank God, thought Leonard.

“—Go to the store, buy some more, ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall. Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, ninety-nine bottles of beer—”

 🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺

“Twelve bottles of beer on the wall, twelve bottles of beer—”

“IF I HEAR ABOUT ANY MORE BOTTLES OF BEER, I AM GOING TO LET GO.”

Tony paused, then began singing more quietly, “Ninety-nine bottles of Coke on the wall, ninety-nine bottles of Coke—”

Instead of giving in to the temptation to let go and plummet to his death, Leonard sang with him. “Take one down, pass it around, ninety-eight bottles of Coke on the wall—"

🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤🥤

Pietro scooped up the last of the popcorn they had all been sharing and shoved it in his mouth. What are we going to eat for dinner?” he asked with his mouth full.

“Tony said I could pick what we ordered for dinner tonight,” Loki announced.

“Tony didn’t tell me that,” said Steve. “Didn’t he just ground you again?”

Loki didn’t want to admit that Tony had been trying to bribe him into letting go of the steel girder he had been wrapped around. “Fine, you’ve caught me in a lie.” He hoped the others would get back soon. Steve wasn’t a fun babysitter. He seemed to be in a bad mood for some reason. Tony had never officially said that Loki was grounded, but even if he was, what did that have to do with anything? It made him want to act out just to make a point, but he had promised Pepper that he would behave while she and Tony were out looking for Bruce. 

He wished she would have let him come with her in the car, but as soon as he had asked, she had shot down the idea. “No, Loki. I know you’re anxious about Bruce, but there wouldn’t be much you could do to help, and it isn’t your responsibility. There are some things you need to just leave to adults. There wouldn’t be enough room in the car on the way back, anyway—I’m sorry if I’ve hurt your feelings, but that’s just how it is.” She had sounded so genuinely sorry that it had been impossible to argue with her, and now he was stuck here with Captain Sourpuss.

Steve looked over his shoulder at Zora, who had been sitting at the kitchen table reading while everyone else watched television. “Zora, you’re our guest. What would you like to eat?”

Zora looked up from her book. “I’m not familiar enough with American food to know what I like.”

“Perhaps—” JARVIS began, hesitatingly. JARVIS didn’t normally speak until someone had spoken to him, but his recent discovery that he was a sentient being must have made him bold. “Perhaps I could choose the restaurant for once?”

Steve’s eyebrows wrinkled in confusion. “But JARVIS, you don’t eat.”

JARVIS sighed, which Loki had never heard him do before. “I know. But I’m always the one who has to place the order. I just thought it might be nice to have some input for once.”

“I think we should let him,” Loki said immediately, dying to know what the AI would choose. “After all, it is kind of like his birthday today.”

Steve shrugged. “You know what, why not? At least that solves the question of who gets to choose.”

“This is so exciting,” JARVIS chirped. “Except I don’t know what I should choose. Wanda, what do you want to eat?”
. 
“Something not too salty,” Wanda told him.

♪  ♫ ♪ Happy Birthday, JARVIS ┌iii┐♪  ♫ ♪

There were only four bottles of Coke left by the time Leonard realized that they had entered a descent.  Leonard opened his eyes. What he saw was similar to the view out of an airplane—an airplane with no cabin walls, which was currently plummeting towards the Earth in a nose-dive. He shut his eyes again, telling himself that it would be fine, because Tony knew what he was doing. 

He felt Tony’s suit go vertical, and the movement slowed and stopped. “Hey, Doc, you can let go now.” 

Leonard opened his eyes and realized they were on the ground. But somehow, he couldn’t let go of Tony; it took a couple of minutes to make his fingers unclench and his arms relax, and when he did, he ended up sliding down the suit and falling onto the ground onto his elbows. Luckily, Tony had landed in a patch of grass at the edge of the diner’s parking lot.

He felt like a newborn foal and probably looked like a drunk as he made his way towards the diner’s entrance. He attempted to push the door open, but it wouldn’t budge. Tony clapped him on the shoulder, pulled him away from the door, and then pulled the door open for him. At some point while Leonard been struggling to make it across the parking lot, he’d taken his suit off, and now carried it in its case. 

Leonard managed to gather himself enough to walk through the door without falling forward. After taking a sharp right turn, he made his way to the booth where he could see Fury sitting across from someone wearing an oversized black hoodie. He wondered where Bruce would have gotten a hoodie, but then again, Bruce must have gotten pretty good at finding replacement clothing over the years. 

When he reached the booth, he grabbed hold of the back of that hoodie and twisted it in his hands. His eyes watered, making his vision blur. “I was so worried. You can’t just disappear like that. Whatever is going on with you, we’ll figure it out, okay? Because I love you, and I want to tell people you’re my boyfriend even though it’s stupid and makes me feel like we’re in junior high. You know what? Let’s get married, then we can just skip that. You’d better marry me, after I just risked my life trying to get to you. Not to mention I had to listen to Tony sing all the way here—”

“Sorry, but I don’t think I can be your boyfriend, and I’m not looking to get married.”

Leonard wanted to crawl under the nearest table and die, because whoever he had proposed to wasn’t Bruce.

Chapter Text

The person Leonard had accidentally proposed to turned to face him. It wasn’t anyone he recognized; just an average looking middle aged man with thinning hair and an innocuous smile. “I’m guessing it was Doctor Banner who left this in the seat. I was cold, so I put it on.” 

Leonard felt Tony tense next to him, but for now, he didn’t have the capacity to be concerned about it. “Where’s Bruce?” 

“Sorry, I tried to hold him here as long as I could.” Fury took a sip of his coffee; to Leonard, he didn’t sound sorry at all.

“How could you just let him leave?” 

“When Bruce Banner decides he wants to leave, there’s not a lot anyone can do to stop him if you don’t want the building you’re sitting in demolished.”

“Sorry Doc, but I just need a moment here,” Tony interrupted. He glared at Fury, then stabbed a finger in the direction of the man sitting across from him. “What the hell, man? You’d better tell me this is his twin. Or his clone. Or his doppelgänger from another dimension. Because if you tell me he’s been alive this whole time—”

“He hasn’t been,” said Fury.

“Good. He’d better have been dead at least part of the time, because—wait, what the hell does that mean?”

“What does that mean, Sir?” asked the man in question.

Fury’s expression remained a complete blank. “Nothing, Phil. You’ve been alive the whole time. You’ve just been in Tahiti.” 

 “Tahiti is a magical place.” Phil’s smile returned, and he nodded as if reassured.

“What do you mean, he’s been in Tahiti?” Tony demanded.

“It’s a magical place,” said Phil.

“Tahiti?” Tony repeated, his tone incredulous. 

“Magical,” said Phil, as if it were a word association exercise.

“Why does he keep saying that?”

“Because it’s a magical place, Stark,” Fury hissed through clenched teeth. “Now just shut up and sit down, you’re attracting attention.”

Leonard slid into the booth next to Phil, and Tony sat next to Fury. He kept staring at Phil, though occasionally, he would turn to Fury and his eyebrows would knit together. Ignoring him, Fury made a signal to the waitress, and without a word, she brought two more cups of coffee to the table.

Leonard knocked his back, not bothering to add cream or sugar. Then he slammed his cup back on the table. “So where did Bruce go?” 

“Hell if I know,” said Fury.

Tony had just poured half the contents of the saltshaker into his own coffee without looking at it. “What’s Agent doing here?” 

“Hell if I know,” said Fury. “Phil, what are you doing here? I thought I told you to wait in the car.”

“It was cold in the car,” Phil told him.

“What was Phil doing in your car? Why isn’t he, you know, in his grave? Which I swear I visited—then again, maybe I meant to visit it, but things got busy.” Tony’s eyes darted to the man in question. “Sorry, Phil.”

“Not a problem.” Phil smiled as he looked to each person at the table in turn.

Tony leaned towards Fury. “Is Phil a zombie now? I’m kind of getting zombie vibes from him.”

Fury narrowed his eyes at him. “He isn’t a zombie, Stark. He just has a little neurological damage. Experiencing severe blood loss can do that—anyway, you were looking for Bruce, remember?”

 ͡ i ͡    ( ⌐■-■ ) ͡ i ͡  ☼ Tahiti is a magical place

“The food I ordered is in the lobby,” JARVIS announced. “I do hope you enjoy what I’ve selected.”

Steve smiled indulgently at JARVIS’s camera. “I’m sure that whatever it is, it will be fine.”

“I’ll go get it,” Sif volunteered. “Loki, would you mind helping me?”

Loki couldn’t believe she expected him to help her after what had happened earlier. Instead of dignifying the request with an answer, he glared at her.

“You can either help Sif bring the food up, or you can go to your room and go straight to bed without dinner,” Steve told him.

Loki’s mouth hung open for a moment before he gathered himself enough to protest. “You can’t punish me when I haven’t broken any rules!”

“One of the rules is that you’re supposed to treat everyone else around here with respect. Ignoring someone and giving them dirty looks when they’ve made a reasonable request isn’t respectful. Sif asked you nicely.”

“It’s fine,” said Sif, capitulating for once.

“No, it isn’t,” Steve told her. “Loki, either help Sif bring the food up, or go to bed. Those are your choices.”

Loki wanted to tell him that he had no reason to respect someone who had so thoroughly disrespected him earlier that day, but again he remembered his promise to Pepper. He also didn’t want to go to bed when they might still receive news about Bruce. “Fine. I’ll help bring the food up.” It would be fine, Loki reasoned, so long as Sif didn’t try to talk to him.

As soon as they were on the elevator, he felt Sif staring at him. “You’re not supposed to stare at other people on elevators,” he told her. “It’s an unspoken rule of Midgardian society. If you do it to strangers, they will assume you to be a madwoman who has set explosives in the elevator shaft.”

“Loki, I asked you to come with me because I wished to speak with you alone.”

“Just to speak with me, or would you like to physically assault me again?”

Sif didn’t answer his question. “This conveyance takes forever to descend. Why must the Midgardians build such tall buildings?”

Loki rolled his eyes at her. “This building is no taller than the highest spires of the palace.”

“But no one lives in the highest spires of the palace. What do these do?” Sif began to press all the buttons, while Loki watched in a mixture of amusement and silent horror. The elevator came to a stop on the seventy-eighth floor. Sif poked her head out of the elevator and looked around. When she realized they weren’t in the lobby, she stepped back on.

The elevator doors closed. A moment later, they opened out onto the seventy-seventh floor. “Sif, how have you been here a week and not figured out how the elevator works? For the Norns’ sake, I’m sure even Thor figured out what the buttons did the first time he rode it.” He grabbed her arm and pulled her off the elevator. “Come on, we need to get on a different elevator, because this one is going to stop at every floor between here and the twenty-fourth now.”

“I’m coming, Loki. There is no need for you to physically assault me.”

Loki let go of her arm. “You think that’s a joke, don’t you? Or that I’m being overly dramatic.”

“Perhaps just a bit. You were raised to be a warrior, just as Thor and I were.”

“But I’ve never been one and you know it. You always did your best to make sure everyone else knew it too.” Loki strode towards the other elevator. When he reached it he hit the button eight times in a row, even though he knew that wouldn’t make it come faster.

“Wait,” Sif called after him. “I wanted to speak with you because I meant to apologize.”

“Is that what this is?”

“I suppose I do find it difficult to believe that a little slap would be so traumatic for you.”

“It wasn’t. Personally, I think everyone else made too big a deal of that.”

“Then why are you still so angry with me?”

Loki rounded on her. “Because you did it in front of Bruce. It’s your fault he’s missing now.”

Sif’s eyebrows knit together. “You’re that upset over one mortal?”

“That mortal has been a better father to me than Odin ever was.”

“But I thought you regarded Stark as a father.”

“I can have more than one. And don’t you dare point out again that neither of them will live more than a few more decades—I don’t care, and I’m not going to think about it until it becomes immediately relevant.”

Sif shook her head. “And here I thought your brother a fool for involving himself with that mortal woman of his.”

“So did I. I didn’t mean to get involved with these people, it just happened.”

Before he could stop her, Sif reached out to ruffle her fingers through Loki’s hair. She hadn’t played with his hair in centuries; certainly not since Loki had cut hers. “It doesn’t worry me so much that you’ve gotten involved with these mortals. What worries me is that in doing so, you’ve cut yourself off from Asgard, your immortal friends and family—”

Loki knocked her hand away. “I don’t have any friends in Asgard and my only family there is Thor. Asgard cut me off a long time ago. Don’t pretend that you’re worried for me now.”

“I’m not pretending. We were raised together. You’re my younger sibling nearly so much as you’re Thor’s.”

“If you’re my sister, that makes you Thor’s as well. You two used to date, remember?”

“It was for less than a full cycle of the moons, and we were hardly old enough for it to count as a romantic entanglement. Thor only worked up the courage to kiss me once, and all I could think was, ‘Is that what everyone makes such a big fuss about?’”

That was exactly what Loki had thought of it whenever Sigyn had kissed him, though he had never been sure if it was because he didn’t particularly enjoy kissing, or if it was only Sigyn’s kisses that didn’t do anything for him. Fandral had kissed him once and he hadn’t liked it better, but the two of them truly had been children then.

The other Loki’s he’d met back in the summer had seemed to be dating each other, or at least considering it. One of them had even teased the other about a kiss they had shared. Were those two different enough from him that they enjoyed kissing more than he did, or could it be that he just hadn’t found the right person to kiss? Then again, perhaps all Loki’s were Loki-sexual. If that was the case, he was destined to be alone unless he met up with yet another Loki from a different dimension, or else found a way to use magic to create a clone of himself solid enough to—

“Silver ingot for your thoughts?” asked Sif.

“Not for a ton of gold.” The elevator doors opened, and Loki stepped inside. Sif followed; she reached towards the button panel, but Loki swatted her hand away and pressed the button for the lobby himself.

Sif stood with her eyes to the front this time. “I truly do care for you, you know. Even if you don’t think of me as family, I like to think we were friends once.”

Loki pressed himself into the side of the elevator, hoping to put as much distance as he could between them. It wasn’t because he was still irked with her, though. He had thought that perhaps, that slap had undone the spell he had been under; after all, how could he love her after she had publicly degraded him? But he had only been fooling himself; if anything, his feelings for her had grown stronger since that afternoon.

Perhaps he was one of those people who got a thrill out of being publicly degraded. If so, it might explain quite a bit about his life decisions up to that point.

“Are you alright? You seem to be breathing rather heavily.” 

Sif’s voice snapped him out of his reflections, but when he turned to look at her, a stranger thought occurred to him. What would happen if he stopped repressing his feelings? Was it at all possible that Sif might reciprocate them? He had a feeling he ought to know the answer to that, but it seemed that the spell had come to a head; all the walls he had attempted to construct around his heart had collapsed. With the weight of unwanted romantic feeling crashing down on him all at once, he found it difficult to follow any line of thought to its logical conclusion. Therefore, his only choice was to try something and see what happened. Loki closed the distance between himself and Sif in one step, grabbed her by the forearms, and dipped her backwards the way he had seen mortals do it in their romantic movies.

( #`⌂´)))☆(>o<;;)

The elevator doors opened, and Loki tumbled out, landing on his back on the floor. When he opened his eyes, three people stood looking down at them, none of whom were the delivery driver from the restaurant, though one of them held two large white paper sacks. “What in my daughter’s realm are you three doing here?” Loki’s demand had come out in a higher register than usual, but given the place Sif had hit him this time, that was to be expected.

“My princess.” Fandral bowed to Loki, crossing a fist over his chest. “We arrived at the same time as the courier, so we accepted your food on your behalf. Hogun and I have even prevented Volstagg from eating it for you.”

“Loki is first in line to the throne now,” said Volstagg, eying one of the bags held by Hogun. “You should at least let me taste it before she eats it, to make sure it isn’t poisoned.”

Princess? She? As Loki sat up, he grabbed a handful of his own—her own chest to confirm what she had already suspected. It seemed that as a defense mechanism, Loki had automatically turned into her female form after Sif had kneed her—well, him in the groin. While the general area didn’t feel good, it wasn’t nearly as nauseatingly painful as it had been before. 

She could have turned herself back, but she decided to just roll with it. Luckily, the sweatpants she had been wearing were loose fitting, and more than accommodated her now curvier hips, even if her surplus Stark Expo 2010 t-shirt was a little tight in places. “I’m going to say it again. Why are you three here?”

“The king sent us, of course.” Fandral offered her his hand.

Loki made a point of ignoring it and pushed herself to her feet on her own. “But why? Things have been bad enough with Sif here. I certainly do not require additional guards.”

“Alas, we are not here to guard you, though I would love nothing more than to stay by the side of my princess. We are only here as messengers.”

“And Thor couldn’t trust one of you to deliver a message on your own, obviously.”

“We are the Warriors Three, your highness. Where one of us goes, the other two follow.”

They rode the elevator back up in silence. Loki found herself crammed into a corner, what with Volstagg taking up most of the space on his own. In the past, he might have made a snide comment about it, but remembering how it had felt when Thor had called her “chubby,” she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Volstagg had never seemed to care, but Loki wondered if in the past, she had hurt the man’s feelings without realizing it.

She wasn’t about to bring it up or try to apologize, though. After all, nothing good had come of his attempt to patch things up with Sif as of yet.

Pietro met them at the elevator a split second after the doors had opened. He didn’t seem interested in the fact that they had brought three extra people with them. Instead, he zeroed in on the food bags held by Hogun and took them from him.

Steve, on the other hand, eyed the Warriors Three wearily. “Uh, Loki, Sif—who are your friends?” 

“They aren’t my friends,” Loki corrected him. “They’re Thor’s.”

“Not your friends, Loki?” Fandral seemed genuinely hurt, and Loki wondered if the man was actually deluded enough to think they were friends. “Come now, we were childhood sweethearts!”

Well, that answered that question. The man wasn’t just deluded, he was completely out of his mind. “You have to be kidding. You kissed me and I turned you into a hedgehog.”

 “And still I am your devoted pet.” As Fandral genuflected to her, he caught her arm.

 Before he could kiss her hand, Loki pulled it away. “Don’t be disgusting. You said you three were here bearing messages from my brother, did you not? I suggest you give them and leave.”

“Better for them to hear the king’s messages privately,” warned Hogan, his expression passive as ever.

Loki rolled his eyes. Heimdall was sure to have seen everything that had happened today and told Thor about it. Likely, his message was a scolding. “Whatever Thor has to say to me, you can just come out with it. I doubt it will shock anyone here.”

“In that case, your brother wanted us to remind you of your promise to be on your best behavior,” said Volstagg. “He also said to inform you that if you purposefully put yourself in danger again, he will require your return to Asgard.”

She had expected the first part, but the ultimatum made her angry. “That isn’t fair. Tony said that no matter what I did, he would never send me away.”

Fandral frowned at her. “You must be able to understand your brother’s feelings on this. After all, you are his only heir, at least until he’s produced another. Asgard can’t afford for your life to be cut short senselessly.”

“You may remind Thor that if I do die senselessly, my daughter, who happens to be the goddess of death, has pledged to send me back.”

Fandral’s eyebrows drifted upwards, and Volstagg shook his head as he leaned in towards him, whispering conspiratorially. “Thank the Norns that Odin’s madness skipped over Thor.”

“I’m not related to Odin by blood,” Loki reminded him. “If my ‘madness’ has any root in genetics, I would have inherited it from Laufey or whichever Jotunn whore birthed me.”

The Warriors Three all looked uncomfortable at the mention of Loki’s biological parents, and for a moment, she considered changing into her Jotunn form in order to disturb them more. She had never willingly taken that form before, but she was certain she could do it if she put her mind to it.

“Language,” Steve chided. “Loki, why don’t you come eat? In Midgard, we have a saying: ‘Don’t shoot the messenger.’”

“If I had my knives, I’d stab them instead,” Loki said under her breath.

Steve had heard her, and he obviously couldn’t take a joke. “Loki, come sit down at the table now or you can go straight to bed. If you make any more threats, you will go to bed early.”

Again, only the promise she had made Pepper kept her from pushing Steve to see if he was serious. Feeling sapped of all energy, she sat down at the table and put her head down on it.

“Sit up straight at the table, please.”

Loki wanted to ask Steve to please remove the stick that had become lodged up his posterior, but she didn’t think that was likely to put him in a better mood. Instead, she made the mistake of sitting up.

“My goodness,” said Volstagg. “I must say I’m impressed. You seem to have our princess trained.”

“I am not an animal to be trained.” Loki pushed her chair away from the table. “Now that I think of it, I’m not that hungry, and I would rather go to bed than endure anymore of this.”

“No Loki, sit back down.” This time, there was an edge of exhaustion in Steve’s voice that almost made Loki feel sorry for him—almost being the operative word. “No one is leaving this table until they’ve eaten at least one portion of whatever it is that JARVIS ordered for us. JARVIS, what did you order, by the way?”

“Tacos, Captain Rogers.”

“Okay, everyone has to eat at least one taco, then.”

Pietro had already begun digging the food out of the bag. The tacos were wrapped in paper. He peeled the paper on one back, and then sniffed it suspiciously. “What kind of tacos are these?” 

“They are fried cricket tacos, Master Pietro. I thought trying something new might be interesting. Crickets are a good source of protein, Omega 3 fatty acids, vitamins, minerals, and fiber.”

Loki grinned, delighted by the look of horror that had crossed Steve’s face. She took her place at the table again, feeling much better than she had all afternoon. “They do say you can find anything in New York.”

Steve had taken a taco as well, and had begun to peel back the paper but had stopped. “Alright, I know what I just said—”

“You can’t go back on it now,” Loki told him. “You know how badly children such as us need consistency. Besides, Pietro and Wanda are already eating them.” Actually, Pietro had already eaten three, because he was a bottomless pit who didn’t taste food anyway. Wanda had only taken a small bite of hers, but taken one she had.

“How do you like them, Miss Wanda?” asked JARVIS, his excitement palpable. 

“They aren’t like anything else I’ve ever had.” Clearly, Wanda wished to avoid hurting JARVIS’s feelings, which probably accounted for her decision to try it in the first place.

Loki had to wonder what was going on between those two sometimes. She grabbed a cricket taco, unwrapped it, and took a large bite without any hesitation; after all, she was nothing if not well traveled, and it didn’t seem stranger to her than any of the other cuisine she had tried. The crickets were nutty and a little smoky; overall the dish reminded her a little of something she tried in Vanaheim once. 

Steve still stared wearily at the taco in front of him as if he expected it to start chirping. Loki had just been about to ask him what was wrong when Zora, who had just put her book aside and had taken a taco for herself, beat her to the punch. “Aren’t you going to eat?” she asked. “You said that no one is leaving this table until they’ve eaten at least one taco. Shouldn’t any rules you make apply to you as well?”

Steve smiled at her thinly and nodded.

Loki watched with interest as he winced and bit into the taco. After chewing it thoughtfully, he opened his eyes. “Actually, it’s not that bad. Kind of reminds me of cashew chicken.” However, he still didn’t look entirely happy about the prospect of eating the entire thing, which warmed the cockles of Loki’s crooked little heart.

Sif and the Warriors Three had taken spots around the table and dug in as well. “Tastes like something we all ate on Vanaheim one time,” commented Fandral.

“Kodoku moths,” said Hogun, who was being uncharacteristically chatty that evening.

“Ah yes, that’s what I was thinking this tasted like.” Loki crammed the rest of her taco in her mouth, then took another from the bag in the middle of the table.

Steve took another labored bite and made a choking noise. “I think I need some water.”

Loki jumped up. “You stay there, and I’ll go get it—since you’re still not allowed to leave the table until you’ve finished at least one entire taco.”

   ི•̮•̮  ི       _|_
/_____\\  \_ / 

Hulk hadn’t left any size thirty-eight footprints leading away from the diner. As soon as he had admitted to himself that they had no leads, Tony had called Pepper to let her know she could turn around. Then he and Leonard had gotten into Fury’s car; after all, giving them a ride back was the least the guy could do after he let Bruce get away from him. 

When Tony had tried to start up a round of “Ninety-Nine Bottles,” Fury had pulled a gun on him. Phil, who was sitting in the front passenger seat, turned on the radio. Thanks to the wonders of satellite radio, he managed to find a radio station that played nothing but reggae music. Tony saw Fury’s hands clench on the steering wheel, but he didn’t make Phil turn it off, even when he started singing along without knowing any of the lyrics. Eventually, Phil had fallen asleep, and with a sigh of relief, Fury had switched the radio off. 

As they drove on in silence, Tony realized that the best thing he could be doing with his time until they got to New York was to follow Phil’s example, so he took out his wallet and fished around in it until he found a sleeping pill. He was about to put it in his mouth when Leonard grabbed his wrist. “What is that?” 

“Sleeping pill,” Tony answered honestly. “I have a prescription for it,” he added, which was technically true even if the prescription had expired long ago.

Leonard let go of him and held out his hand. Reluctantly, Tony dropped the pill into it.

As they passed a streetlight, Leonard held it up to examine it. “Tony, this is triazolam. I didn’t prescribe this, and I wouldn’t have prescribed it for anyone with a history of addiction.”

“I have a prescription for it,” Tony repeated.

“Not from me you don’t. Are you saying your primary care physician prescribed this?”

“Primary care physician, shady guy in a back alley with a stolen prescription pad, potato-potahto.”

Leonard probably got that he was joking, but judging by the look on his face, he didn’t think it was funny. “I’m confiscating this. What else do you have in your wallet, by the way?”

Tony shook the contents of his emergency pharmacy out into Leonard’s hand. “Look, it’s mostly old stuff that’s been in there for two or three years, okay? I’ve been meaning to get rid of it.”

Leonard took out his phone and used it as a flashlight. “Tony, there are both barbiturates and opioids in here. And can you explain to me why you have amphetamine?”

“It’s not like I take them all together—I mean, took. I swear I haven’t taken any of that stuff in months.” He wasn’t lying. There was no way he was going to abuse prescription drugs when they had kids living with them.

Leonard rolled down his window and threw all of the pills Tony had handed him out onto the middle of the highway, other than the sleeping pills Tony had been about to take. Those, he popped into his own mouth and swallowed dry.

“Hey Doc, did you just—”

“My stupid boyfriend just disappeared from the face of the Earth and there’s nothing I can do about it,” Leonard snapped.

Tony settled back in his seat. “Yeah, alright.”

\__(￣￢￣ヾ) -Hey kids, the author here. Please don’t abuse prescription drugs. Also make sure to dispose of your old prescription drugs properly, i.e., not by throwing them out the window of a moving vehicle.

Bruce wished he had taken Natasha’s advice to start working out more. He had been able to hitchhike most of the way, but the final few miles to General Ross’s residence, he’d had to go on foot. Now that he was there, he found himself on the wrong side of the fifteen-foot-high chain link fence that surrounded the property. If he had thought to bring a pair of wire cutters with him, he could have gone through it, but since he didn’t, he couldn’t see any other way but to go over it. At least there wasn’t barbed wire at the top, and he was ninety-nine percent certain the fence wasn’t electrified.

He was more than a little winded by the time he got to the top of the fence, and a quick look at his watch let him know that his heart rate was at one fifty. He got one leg over the top, and then another, when he heard footsteps coming near him. He looked down at his watch to see that his heart rate had climbed to one fifty-five. He took a deep breath to steady himself.

A flashlight shone in his eyes, and he covered them with one hand, continuing to grasp the fence with the other.

“Banner, what the hell are you doing on my fence?” 

When Bruce’s eyes adjusted to the light, he looked down and saw Ross himself, wearing a robe and slippers and looking no less intimidating than he did in full military uniform.

“I’m here to turn myself in to you,” Bruce told him.

“In that case, why didn’t you just go to the gate and use the intercom?”

Somehow, it hadn’t occurred to Bruce that it wasn’t necessary to break in when his intention was to be caught. Maybe it was because he hadn’t slept since his transformation, or maybe it was because, as someone had told him once, being a genius didn’t necessarily mean you had any common sense. (Had that been Leonard or Betty? Or maybe Pepper had said it in reference to Tony.)

“Just stay where you are.”
 
Bruce obeyed the general’s order, out of fear that he was about to fall more than anything else. Falling would be bad, and not because he would be hurt. After all, the other guy never let him get hurt.

Chapter Text

After they had finished eating, Steve had dashed off without saying anything. Sif suspected he may have gone back to his own suite to engage in rigorous flossing. She ran her tongue over her own teeth; while she didn’t mind the flavor of insect-based cuisine, tiny appendages did tend to stick in one’s teeth.

The children had settled in front of the magic picture screen, as per usual after the evening meal. Once again, the little red-haired witch sat within arm’s length of it, her eyes glazed over in the way that had at first caused Sif to wonder if she were under an enchantment. Her brother sprawled next to her on the floor, barely awake. Loki sat cross-legged on the sofa behind them; her attention divided between it and the smaller screen of the communication device she carried at all times and seemed to use more for entertainment than for communication. 

In Sif’s opinion, the children spent too much of their time staring at various screens, but she supposed it wasn’t her business. After all, Thor’s message to her had made it clear she was there only in the capacity of Loki’s guard. She needn’t concern herself with disciplining him, which was something of a relief, especially given what had happened on the elevator. Her efforts to discourage Loki’s sudden affection for her by allowing Steve to woo her had clearly gotten her nowhere. 

Sif rummaged through the cabinets in the kitchen until she produced the largest of the stemmed glasses. In the cold food storage, she found two-thirds of a bottle of what she supposed must be wine, though its color was not red or white but the pinkish hue of a Midgardian sunset.

When she turned around, Sif nearly dropped the bottle. She hadn’t sensed Loki as he came up behind her. Loki had always been one of the few people who could sneak up on her, which she suspected had something to do with her magic.

Loki nodded towards the wine bottle. “May I have some of that?”

“Absolutely not,” Sif told her, without having to think twice. Loki had always been both a lightweight and an irritating drunk, and she wasn’t in the mood for that. Besides which, she didn’t feel like sharing, as she suspected that three-fourths of a bottle of pink Midgardian wine wouldn’t be near enough to get her as drunk as she would have liked.

“You can’t tell me I’m not to drink,” Loki taunted. “Thor said—”

“Thor also told you to behave yourself, which you must know isn’t your strong suit when you’re inebriated.”

Loki glared at her. He then stepped around her and fished a carton containing half a dozen bottles of amber colored liquid from the back of the refrigerator. Sif knew she only meant to taunt her; her princess had never even enjoyed the taste of ale. But this time, it wasn’t Sif’s responsibility to care what Loki did; if the little fool wanted to drink, she could drink herself sick if she wanted to.

Sif poured herself a glass of wine and lifted it to her lips. She nearly choked on it when she felt an arm wrap around her shoulders. This time, she had allowed Fandral to approach her unannounced. Perhaps she had been neglecting her own training lately. 

“It’s been a long time since we’ve all drank together,” said Fandral. “Is one of those for me, Loki?”

Loki smiled at him in that way of hers that always made Sif feel uneasy.

!!”(*>∀<)ノ[|_|　|_|]ヽ(≖‿≖)  (︶-︶)Y

After Steve stopped by his suite long enough to brush his teeth twice, he headed up to the helipad. He knew he was supposed to be supervising the kids, but he told himself that with five other adults around, they would be fine without him.

The helipad was one of the places he liked to go whenever he felt sorry for himself, which he knew was much too often. After all, what reason did he have to feel sorry for himself? He had a great life, and no reason to feel anything but grateful for it. He had been given the opportunity not only to protect and serve his country, but the entire Earth. Working and living with the other Avengers, he was constantly surrounded by close friends. 

Still, he felt alone most of the time. After all, Tony had Pepper, Bruce had Leonard, and even though he knew their relationship was platonic, Natasha and Clint had each another. He was the only one who didn’t have anyone special, and he was starting to feel like a seventh wheel.

For a few days, he had lived in the illusion that he had found someone, but it turned out that Sif hadn’t felt the same way at all. She had made that very clear to him after he had tried to kiss her. He had felt like an idiot, but that was nothing new. Some people might think that being a super soldier would improve his chances with women, but so far that hadn’t been his experience. But then, the kind of strong, intelligent women he went for were never the kind to be impressed by muscles.

He found himself longing for Peggy. When Loki’s time traveling other-self had shown up over the summer, Steve had thought about asking if there was a way he could go back and meet Peggy for that dance.  But he knew that even if he could go back in time, it wouldn’t be right. Peggy had married and had a family. Things had turned out the way they were meant to for her, and he couldn’t just go back and erase that. Maybe he should have asked to go back to the day Bucky fell from the train instead, but then, who knew what kind of consequences that could have? As much as he missed his old life, he knew it would be better not to mess with time travel. He didn’t want to end up living in a world where HYDRA didn’t just live in the shadows but had completely taken over.

“Are you not cold out here? You do not seem to be dressed for this weather.” Steve didn’t have to turn around to know who had followed him outside. Zora’s accent had given her away. 

“I don’t feel it,” he explained. “I mean, I do, but it isn’t uncomfortable. It’s one of the effects of the serum.”

Zora closed her eyes and took a deep breath of cold air. “I also enjoy the cold. It reminds me of my homeland.” Her eyes fluttered open, and she ran her fingers through her long, dark hair. “Do you mind if I stay up here with you for a bit?”

Steve felt his heart beat a fraction of a second faster. “No, I don’t mind, although I should go back down soon. I’m supposed to be babysitting, not that I’m very good at it.” 

For the first time since he had met her, Zora’s lips quirked upward, transforming her dour expression. “You are not too good with children, are you?”

“Nope, guess not.” Steve felt like an idiot again. Had he been expecting her to disagree with him? But somehow, Steve couldn’t help smiling back at her.

❅˳˚◌˳(๑´‿`) (˘‿˘ )˳̊ ◌❅ 

When Bruce opened his eyes, he found himself feeling much better than he had felt in a long time. Before, he must have been badly in need of sleep. For a while, he just laid there, staring up at the unfamiliar metal ceiling. 

It took a while before it occurred to him to be curious about his surroundings. He sat up and looked around himself. The room was shaped like—he wanted to call it a capsule? It was just large enough that he would be able to get out of bed and move around a bit, but only because the bed he had been sleeping on was the only furniture. He also didn’t see any windows, which meant there was no way of knowing where the capsule was located.

Maybe Ross had literally buried him alive. He knew he probably shouldn’t find that thought comforting, but at least then, the other guy would never hurt anyone again.

He couldn’t remember much about the night before, which made him wonder if he had been drugged before being transported to his current location, or if he had just been that exhausted. All he remembered was that he had confessed everything to General Ross; how he didn’t feel in control, how he might have already murdered someone, and how “Bruce” might not even be a real person, but an alternate personality that had essentially murdered its original host. Ross had seemed uncharacteristically understanding and had promised to take him somewhere safe.

A voice in the back of his mind growled at him. Dumb Banner.

This is for the best, he told it. This way, no one else will get hurt.

Dumb Banner, the voice insisted. Weak Banner. Stupid jerk-face Banner.

There’s no point in throwing a tantrum, thought Bruce. You brought this on yourself when you decided to hurt Sif.

Sif hurt puny god.

She didn’t mean to hurt him. She was just worried about him.

No excuse for hitting.

There’s no excuse for you smashing her into the floor, Bruce pointed out, or for breaking Nat’s arm.

Didn’t break Tasha, the voice insisted.

You threw her, and when she landed on her arm it broke. It’s the same thing.

Hulk didn’t say anything this time; he just snorted derisively. 

Even if breaking her arm was an accident, throwing her wasn’t, Bruce told him. Why did you do that, anyway?

Mean to puny god.

Even if that’s true, it isn’t a good reason to do something that might hurt someone.

It took a while for Hulk to respond this time. Hulk sorry.

Bruce felt a wave of anger and tried to tamp it down like he always did. Really? You’re sorry? You think that fixes anything?

Now Banner mean. Sound like bad man.

Like who? Then Bruce felt sick to his stomach, because he had a feeling he knew. 

Bad man says sorry doesn’t fix. 

Bruce was hit by the vivid memory of his mother being pushed down the steps behind the house he had grown up in. He didn’t think he had been blocking that out, but he might have been blocking out the memory of the argument his parents been having before that. He wasn’t sure what his father had accused his mother of doing, but whatever it was, she had been trying to apologize for it. You don’t have to worry about him anymore, or about her. They’re both gone.

Know that. Not stupid, like Stupid Banner, turn self in to Stupid General! Banner forget what General want?

What General Ross wanted? He wanted the same thing Bruce wanted; to make sure Hulk wouldn’t hurt anyone else like he had hurt Betty that time. But now that he thought of it, that hadn’t been all he wanted. Damn it—Hulk might actually be smarter than he was, or at the very least, he might have more common sense. 

Turning himself over to Ross really hadn’t been the smartest move. He had thought that Ross would contain him, and that he might even find a way to kill him, but the other guy was right, that had never been what General Ross had wanted—well, he might have wanted those things, but after he had found a way to kill him, there was more than a good chance he would dissect him and attempt to use that knowledge to create more monsters. 

Bruce heard a hinge squeak open and looked towards the sound, which came from the end of his cell. While he couldn’t see anything that looked like a door, he could now see a small panel near the floor that could be opened from the outside. A pair of dark eyes looked in at him, making him realize that his cell must be sitting off the ground somehow. “Bruce,” a voice hissed, and he recognized it immediately.

Bruce got down on the ground and crawled to the opening, then laid on his stomach in front of it. “Betty?” 

“Bruce, it is you! Yes, it’s me. But keep your voice down, we don’t know who’s listening.”

Bruce couldn’t believe his luck. The General must have brought him to whatever underground bunker Tony had had JARVIS looking for months. Though when he thought about it, “luck” might not have been the right word.

Dumb Banner, the other guy repeated.

“Yeah, Dumb Banner,” Bruce agreed.

Betty cocked her head to the side. “Dumb Banner?” 

“Sorry, I was just talking to the other guy.”

“You guys talk now? That’s great, Bruce.”

“Yeah, great.” Because now, he could now add “talks to voices in his head” to his ever-growing list of psychological issues.

Betty thinks Hulk great.

Not what she said, he told the other guy.

“How did you end up here, anyway?” asked Betty.

“I turned myself in to your father.” Involuntarily, Bruce’s face scrunched in on itself. 

“Oh. The other guy’s right then, that was dumb. Why would you do that? Unless—please tell me it was part of your plan to get me out of here?”

“Sorry, Betty. We have been looking for you ever since we found out your father might be holding you somewhere against your will, but no. I really was being stupid.”

“Who’s we?” 

“Me and, uh, Leonard—” 

“Leonard Samson? You two have been working together to find me? How did that happen?”

“It’s kind of a long story.” And this is not the right time to tell it.

Betty slid her fingers through the panel. “Bruce, I missed you.” 

Bruce leaned down and kissed them, then covered them with his hand. Which didn’t mean anything, he told himself. Betty just needed a little comfort, and so did he. “Hey Betty, how come you broke up with Leonard?”

“You’re really asking me that right now?”

“I mean, he’s a great guy.”

“Really? I mean, don’t you think he’s kind of, you know—” 

“What?”

“I don’t know. I always felt like he was a little high-strung, and a little full of himself.”

“I’m a little high-strung too,” Bruce pointed out. 

“You’re right. Maybe I have a type. But then, I’ve always been a little high-strung myself.”

“Huh—maybe I have a type too, then.”

Betty arched an eyebrow at him questioningly.

(*⌒⌒*) ‖░‖ (///￣ ￣///)

Tony half carried, half dragged a half-conscious Leonard off the elevator. He had intended to dump him on one of the sofas in the common room, but to his dismay, all the couches were occupied. Sif had passed out on one of them, her arm drooping over the side of it and an empty wine bottle on the floor a couple of inches from her fingers. The other sofas were taken up by three men who were dressed like they had just come back from a renaissance fair. Empty beer and liquor bottles littered the floor. 

Wanda and Pietro had fallen asleep in front of the television, but that was nothing new; it was where they always ended up unless someone reminded them to go to bed. “Where the heck is Steve?” Tony wondered aloud, as he dumped Doc into one of the armchairs. The guy was so out of it that he probably wouldn’t have any trouble sleeping sitting up.

“Tony?” Tony turned around and saw Loki staring at him as if he’d been gone for half a year. The kid ran to him and glomped on for dear life. “I’m so glad you’re home,” she said into his chest, her face lit by the soft glow of the arc reactor under his t-shirt. I missed you so much.”

“Kid, I’ve been gone for less than ten hours. What the heck happened? Why does it look like the aftermath of an viking frat party in here?”

“Steve does not make a fun babysitter. And Thor sent me a message saying that if I purposefully endangered myself again, he would force me to return to Asgard. Tony, you won’t let him, will you?”

None of that answered his question, but the kid seemed distressed, so he decided to circle back to it. “I’m not sure how much I could do if Thor was determined to take you back. Maybe you just shouldn’t put yourself in danger again?” It was probably hoping for too much.

“But you promised that no matter what I did, you wouldn’t send me away.”

“I wouldn’t. But if your brother shows up with half the Asgardian army, I’m not going to win that fight. Look, please don’t put yourself in danger again anyway. You get that I’m an old man with a heart condition, right?”

“Don’t even joke about that.”

“I’m not joking. Kid, you scared the bejeezus out of me.”

Loki squeezed him harder. It was getting a little difficult to breathe. “I’m sorry, Tony. I didn’t want to scare you. I just wanted to make sure you wouldn’t send me back now that you could.”

“It’s great that you’re becoming self-aware and all, but could you maybe use that self-awareness to talk yourself down from doing stupid things? Or to talk to someone else and let them talk you down—you know you can talk to me, or to Doc or Pep anytime you want.”

“Or to Bruce? You brought him back, didn’t you?”

Tony didn’t want to tell Loki that they had no clue where Bruce was now, but there was no way he could hide the fact that he had failed to bring him back. “Not yet. Sorry kiddo, he was gone by the time we got there.”

“This is all my fault,” Loki said, biting her lip.

“No, it is absolutely not.” Just how messed up did Loki have to try to take the blame for something like this?

“But if I hadn’t run off, Sif wouldn’t have gotten angry with me, and Bruce—”

“It isn’t your fault that Sif is a loose cannon, or that Bruce can be, for that matter. And you can talk Bruce’s ear off as soon as we do get him back, because I swear to you, we are going to get him back.” Maybe he shouldn’t have sworn, but he couldn’t help it; he wanted to believe it himself. “Kid, I wish you could just take me at my word when I tell you the way things are going to be. Have I lied to you at any point since you’ve been here?” 

“I told my other self—the one we met during the summer—that you hadn’t. He said that you must be lying to me about something, because everyone lies to us.”

“Your other self was more messed up than you are,” Tony pointed out. “I swear I’ve been completely honest with you, and I’m going to continue being honest with you. I know you’ve gotten burned in the past.” Again, he probably shouldn’t have sworn, but words just kept coming out of his mouth.

Loki pulled back, frowning at him. “You keep telling me I’m not overweight.”

Not this again, thought Tony. “You’re perfect the way you are, and you would still be perfect even if you weighed three hundred pounds.”

Her eyebrows scrunched together. “I weigh more than that, Tony.”

“You’re pulling my leg, right? I would have estimated one-sixty, tops.”

“Perhaps that’s how I look to you, but you must have noticed when you picked me up earlier—"

“I can’t tell how much anything weighs when I’m in the suit.” As an experiment, he tightened his grip on her and attempted to hoist her upwards. It was like trying to lift a refrigerator. “Hey JARVIS, how much does Thor weigh?”

“The last time Mister Odinson stepped onto the elevator, I noted that he weighed six-hundred and forty pounds,” JARVIS told him.

Tony let Loki go. He dug his wallet out of his pocket, opened it, and took out five one-hundred-dollar bills. With Loki trailing him, he walked to the counter that separated the common room from the kitchen and held them out over the swear jar. He held the bills out over it, then opened his hand and watched them flutter downward. “Holy, freaking, crap. Kid, which one of your friends over there do you like the least? Because I’m thinking we need to dissect one of them to find out what space Vikings are actually made of.”

“You can have Fandral,” Loki answered a little too quickly. “And remember, you don’t lie to me, so you definitely have to dissect him now.”

Tony shook his head. “Tell me you appreciate the difference between a lie and a joke.”

“I know you’re joking; I’m not Thor. I was joking too—mostly, anyway.”

“Good.”

“See, this is why I don’t like it when Steve’s the only one here. He’s like Sif. He takes everything I say too seriously.”

“Yeah, I know the feeling. He’s a good guy, though. He cares about you, too.”

“I know. But seriously, can you make them leave?” Loki pointed in the direction of the sleeping Asgardians. “I’m certain Thor meant for them to deliver his messages and return to Asgard. But for some reason, they decided to stay and drink all your liquor.”

“All of it?” From the way Loki had said it, Tony got the feeling that wasn’t hyperbole. 

“All of it,” she confirmed. “After they cleaned out the refrigerator, they found the full-service bar downstairs, and the bar cart in the penthouse.”

“JARVIS, what the hell—why did you let these people upstairs?”

“You gave Loki access to the penthouse,” said JARVIS. “She was the one who let them up.”

“Tattle tail,” Loki hissed. 

Tony narrowed his eyebrows at her, trying to give her his best Bruce-like “I love you but I’m highly disappointed with your behavior” look. He wasn’t sure he had pulled it off, though. If he had to guess, it had probably come off more as “I’m exhausted and somewhat less than amused.”

In return, Loki gave him an “innocent” look that was less than convincing but still inexplicably adorable. “I didn’t want to. They forced me.”

“JARVIS?” 

“It was Loki’s idea to go upstairs after they had cleaned out the contents of the full-service bar,” tattled JARVIS.

Loki winced, and Tony leaned in to try to get a whiff of her breath. “Were you drinking with them by any chance?” 

When she realized what he was doing, she took a step backward. “I only had one beer. After that, I let them pour me a few more drinks, but I only pretended to drink them and poured them out when they weren’t looking. Unlike them, I’m currently mortal. If I had attempted to keep up with them, I would be dead now.”

“I thought we agreed that you shouldn’t be drinking at all, although I guess I ought to be proud that you didn’t drink until you passed out in a closet this time. I don’t suppose it was also your idea for them to clean out the full-service bar?”

Loki pursed her lips at him, making it clear that she thought the accusation unfair. “I swear to you, that was Sif’s idea. And unlike you, I don’t ‘swear’ casually.”

Tony made a mental note to have a serious conversation with Sif at the first possible convenience. “Wait—what do you mean, unlike me?”

Loki gave him the same wide-eyed look from before. “I know there are things you’re lying to me about, but it’s fine. I understand that you’re just trying to protect me, and that you aren’t lying when you say you love me.” 

She wasn’t wrong on either count, which made it difficult to know what to say. “You know what? We can revisit this subject in the morning. Let your drinking buddies sleep a couple more hours. I don’t want to start a diplomatic incident because I was rude to your brother’s representatives on Earth. We’ll feed them breakfast, then tell them it’s time to go. You need to go to bed now, anyway.”

“Are you going to sleep?”

Tony wasn’t too upset that Doc had thrown his emergency pharmacy out the window. He really had been meaning to get rid of it himself, but he did wish he’d left him one sleeping pill, especially now that there wasn’t any alcohol in the entire tower. “I don’ t know if I can, but I guess I should try. Pep should have gotten back hours ago, but I don’t want to wake her up. Mind if I sleep in your room?”

“It’s your tower,” Loki told him. “I suspect you can sleep wherever you wish.”

“I’m going to interpret that as, ‘No, I don’t mind, and after everything that’s happened today, I’d sleep better with someone else in the room too.’”

～～(つˆ ³ˆ)つ>｡<)ﾉ

Leonard awoke to a loud noise that he at first thought to be a passing freight train and assumed that they must still be in Fury’s car. After he had rubbed the sleep from his eyes, he realized that he was in the tower’s common room, and the sound was the snoring of a large man with an orange beard, who happened to be passed out on the couch across from him. “JARVIS, who is that?” 

“That is Volstagg, Doctor Samson. He and the other two men are friends of Thor. They arrived last night in order to convey messages to Sif and Loki.”

“Okay, next question—where’s Tony?”

“Asleep in Master Loki’s room,” JARVIS told him.

Leonard nodded and pushed himself to his feet. He still felt groggy from taking Tony’s triazolam the night before. He really shouldn’t have done that; taking medication that hadn’t been prescribed for him by another doctor was something he had always considered taboo. But if he hadn’t, he never could have slept, and he had needed the chance to recharge so he could resume the search for Bruce; not that he had any idea how he was going to go about it. Fury couldn’t tell them where Bruce had intended to go, only that he believed him to be a danger to himself. Leonard shook his head, as if he could shake out the unwelcome thought. He didn’t want to think about what Bruce had asked Fury for. With any luck, Hulk would continue to protect Bruce, even from himself.

Loki’s door had been open, but Leonard stood in the entrance and knocked on the frame anyway. He cleared his throat. “Tony.”

Tony, who had been sleeping on top of the sheets opposite from Loki, opened his eyes. “Yes, dear?”

“What are we going to do?”

“Eat breakfast, then kick Thor’s buddies out of my tower.”

“I meant about Bruce.”

“I don’t know. We’ll call a meeting, assemble the Avengers—although really, that’s just me and Steve until Clint and Natasha get back.”

“I sent messages to alert them of Doctor Banner’s disappearance yesterday,” JARVIS informed them. “They ought to be back anytime now.”

Chapter Text

“Hey little sister, what have you done?” Natasha sang tunelessly. “Hey little sister, who's the only one? Hey little sister, shot gun. It's a nice day for a white wedding. It's a nice day to start again—” 

“I think you skipped some lyrics,” Clint told her, attempting to keep most of his focus on the road. “Maybe we should just listen to the radio? We’re almost back to the tower anyway.”

Natasha shrugged. She had her feet up on the dashboard of the Tesla Roadster convertible they had borrowed from Tony. She held a bouquet of white roses in her lap, tied together with a white ribbon, the ends of which had been stained by the same crimson that splashed across the front of her dress.

“Don’t you at least think you should have changed?” asked Clint. “You’re going to scare the kids.”

“If we were going back to the farm first, I would have, but I don’t think either Loki or the Maximoffs are going to be scared by a little blood.” Natasha twirled the blood stained ribbon between her fingers absentmindedly. “ Besides, this might be the only time I’m going to wear one of these. I kind of want people to see me in it. Do you know how long it took just to do my hair this morning?”

Sometimes, Clint found himself worrying about Natasha’s sanity. He knew it was all a part of her unique brand of gallows humor, but he still had to wonder if her current level of detachment from reality could possibly be healthy.  “You do know there’s blood in your hair, right?”

“It’s only a little blood.”

“Look, I’m sure it won’t be the last time. I mean, if you want to.”

Natasha shrugged. “I don’t know if I do or not. In our line of work, getting married is kind of selfish anyway—oh, sorry, Clint.”

“No, it’s alright. You have a point. I’m always afraid I’m going to walk in and my kids aren’t going to remember me.”

“You know, they could come to visit you in the tower if you just told everyone about them. I’m sure everyone there would guard that secret with their lives. Even Loki.”

Clint shook his head. “The fewer people that know the better. If you do have kids someday, you’ll understand—damn it. Sorry, Nat.”

“Why, because I don’t have a uterus? I think I might just want a dog, anyway. You know, if I ever have time for a dog.”

“I’m sure Tony would get you a puppy for a belated Christmas gift if you asked,” Clint teased her.

“I might want to get an older dog from a shelter, actually.”

“Wait, are you seriously thinking about getting a dog?”

“Maybe, but like I said, I don’t really have time for one.”

“Maybe you could just ask Loki to turn himself into a dog sometimes. Then you could take him for walks.”

“I already asked. He doesn’t do domestic dogs. Only wolves or foxes.”

“So have him turn himself into a wolf. If anyone asks, tell them he’s a husky mix.”

“He also said that if I tried to put a leash on him, I would suffer the same fate as someone named Tyr—whatever that means.”

o( ･-･)o>･^ミ┬┬~

When Loki woke up, she was alone, but she smelled coffee. That meant that someone was nearby in the common room. Even though she still found the taste of the drink too bitter, its smell had begun to grow on her, most likely because she associated it with Tony. 

She rolled out of bed and stood in front of the open doors to her closet, contemplating the selection of clothing available to her. While nothing within it was quite as fine as the things her Asgardian wardrobe had once held, she sometimes found the variety of styles and colors available to her on Midgard dizzying. She had already begun to suspect there might be such a thing as too much choice, and that if mortals weren’t so obsessed with the idea of individuality, their entire culture might be light years ahead of where it was. In the end, she couldn’t make up her mind, so she closed her eyes and grabbed something, which turned out to be a forest green hoodie she knew would pair well with her black skinny jeans.

After dressing and applying a minimal amount of makeup, she wandered out into the common room. There she found Sif and Tony sitting on opposite sides of the same sofa, each with a cup of the coffee she had smelled. Sif seemed to have barely roused herself. She still wore the same clothes from the night before, and her hair might have made a perfect nest for swallows. Judging by the way she winced at each of Loki’s footsteps, she suspected her to be nursing what Midgardians termed a “hangover.” 

On the other hand, Tony seemed uncharacteristically cheerful, especially when one considered the time of day. “You’ll be happy to know that your brother’s lackeys ate all our cereal and left.”

Loki should have been relieved that they were gone, but instead she found herself overwhelmed with the feeling that she had forgotten something important. “How long ago did they leave?”

“They got on the elevator just a few minutes ago. Why?”

“Damn,” said Loki, and ran for the stairs.

“Hey, wait—where do you think you’re going?”

Loki had no time to answer him. She pressed the button for the elevator five times before giving up and heading for the stairwell instead. On her way there, Tony caught her by the hood of her sweatshirt. “Yo, I asked you a question.”

“Let me go,” Loki demanded, attempting to pull away. “I need to catch up to them.”

“Want to explain why?”

“I need to send a message back to Asgard.”

“To your brother?”

Loki gave up on trying to squirm out the bottom of her sweatshirt and turned to face him. “To Sif’s, actually.” 

Sif looked up from the cup of coffee she had been entirely absorbed in moments before. “Why do you need to send a message to Heimdall?”

“Because unless someone’s used magic to cloak him, Heimdall should be able to tell us where Bruce is. I’m not sure why neither of us thought of it before—”

“I thought of it, I just didn’t want to.”

Loki blinked at her. “Sorry, you didn’t want to?”

“Maybe I just didn’t feel like speaking with my brother. It’s really none of your concern.”

“Hold on,” Tony interjected. “We’re talking about the big dude that can see everything in the universe at once, right?”

Sif rolled her eyes at him. “He doesn’t see everything at once. All-seeing isn’t the same as omniscient. He won’t know where Banner went unless he’s been watching him, or if he’s able to see him now.”

“The only way he could be hidden from Heimdall’s view is if he’s cloaked by magic,” Loki reminded her, “and even though I must begrudgingly admit that some mortals seem to have attained a small amount of mastery in the art, as far as I’m aware, Bruce is no mage.”

“That’s not entirely true,” argued Sif. “Heimdall can’t see particularly well through certain materials, including most metals.”

“So if he’s hiding behind a steel wall, your brother won’t be able to see him?” asked Tony.

“Actually, he would have to be inside a metal box,” Sif admitted.

“Right. So, he isn’t omniscient, but he does have weird omni-directional vision—”

“It’s best not to think too much about it,” Loki told him. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but as singular as your mortal mind is, it just isn’t equipped to handle high level magical concepts.”

Tony opened his mouth and for a moment as if he wanted to object, but then he closed it. “You know what? You’re probably right.”

Loki turned his attention back to Sif. “Anyway, how likely is it that Bruce is inside a metal box?” Obviously, she had known that Heimdall couldn’t see through metal, but she hadn’t thought it to be much of a consideration.

“I don’t know. Midgardians seem rather fond of building things out of it, though.”

“But there can’t be that many buildings that are made only of metal,” Loki argued. “The tower might be made of metal, but there are windows.”

Tony stroked the hair on his chin.  “True, but the basement of this building is pretty much encased in metal. And there are more buildings that are entirely made of metal than you’d think. Warehouses, secret government facilities—”

 “How likely is it that he’s in a secret government facility?” demanded Loki.

“Not too likely. I mean, I hope it isn’t, because if Bruce is in a place like that, that could be really bad for him.” Tony’s hand moved to rub over his neck stubble; he seemed to be in desperate need of a shave. “But it doesn’t matter. If there’s any chance Heimdall can tell us where Bruce is, someone needs to ask him.”

“And that’s why I need to catch up with my brother’s idiot friends!”

“No, you don’t.” Tony pointed at Sif. “You—either go catch up with your buddies and get them to ask your brother to look for Bruce or go ask him yourself.”

Sif crossed her arms in front of herself defiantly. “I could not possibly abandon my duties here.”

“Do you really think Thor would be happy if he found out you refused to help us find Bruce when it’s totally-sort of your fault he went missing in the first place? You’ll do it, or I’ll totally find a way to send a note home to Asgard telling both Thor and your big brother what a naughty girl you’ve been, drinking all my liquor and giving alcohol to a minor.”

Sif stared at him for a moment, chewing on her bottom lip. “There’s no need for you to tell them what they’ll already know.”

So, that was it; Sif hadn’t wanted to talk to Heimdall, because he would already know everything that had happened. Loki couldn’t help breaking into a huge grin.

“Oh, shut up, Loki.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Perhaps not, but you’re clearly enjoying this.”

“Why shouldn’t I? For once, I’m not the one who’s in trouble.”

“Actually, we haven’t really talked about that,” Tony interjected. “You messed with JARVIS’s head, you left the tower without permission again, plus you broke the rule about drinking last night, even if you didn’t drink enough to throw up or pass out. Now, what do you think I should do about that?”

Loki tilted her head down and looked up at him through her eyelashes. “Forgive me, because I’m much too adorable to be held responsible for my own actions?”

“Sir,” said JARVIS, “Agents Romanoff and Barton have return, and are on their way up to the common room.”

Loki couldn’t help smiling at the interruption, but Tony must have known what she was thinking. “We are going to talk about this later, Loki. I’m not going to forget. Sif, time to put your big girl panties on and go find out what you can about Bruce. It’s the least you can do after you impaled him with a mop, don’t you think?”

“Oh, I suppose so,” grumbled Sif.

  (  ° ෴ ° ) (͡ °0 ͡ °) (눈‸눈;;)

“Captain Rogers.”

Steve opened his eyes and watched dust motes drift through the sunlight in front of his nose. He tried to remember why he had been sleeping on the couch in the sitting room of his suite instead of in his bed, and why he still wore the t-shirt and jeans he’d been wearing the night before. He had the strangest feeling that he had forgotten something important.

“Captain Rogers.”

Still feeling groggy, he sat up. “JARVIS?” 

“Agents Romanoff and Barton are back, and Sir has called for a meeting to discuss what to do next regarding Doctor Banner’s disappearance.”

“Avengers Assemble, huh—”

“Sir’s exact words were, ‘tell Steve to get his sorry ass down here.’”

Steve realized what he had forgotten. “Oh, shoot. JARVIS, he’s not mad at me, is he?”

“Are you asking if Sir is angry with you for abandoning your duties as ‘babysitter’ and leaving the children with Sif and her ‘drinking buddies?’”

“Drinking buddies?”

“I believe they went on what Sir might have characterized as, ‘a real bender’ last night, and took Loki with them.”

“Oh, shit. Tony’s going to kill me,” Steve realized.

“Language, Captain Rogers.”

Steve groaned, rubbing his temples to ward off the headache he felt coming on. Artificially intelligent or actually intelligent, he could do without JARVIS’s snark this early in the morning.

“Good morning.”

Steve turned his head in the direction of the door to his bedroom. It took a few moments for his mind to accept that it was looking at what it thought it was looking at, but when it did, he diverted his eyes as quickly as possible. “Morning,” he said, trying to keep his voice casual. “Do you, um, maybe want put some clothes on?”

“But I am wearing clothes.” Steve detected the amusement in Zora’s voice, and he had to wonder if she had wandered out of his bedroom in nothing but one of his own t-shirts, which barely came down to the top of her thighs, just to fluster him. “I hope you don’t mind that I borrowed this. I seem to have forgotten to pack my nightshirt.”

“I don’t mind, but now that you’re up, maybe you could put on some pants?”

“You Americans are so puritanical. I still say there was no reason we could not have shared the bed last night. You can’t have been too comfortable on the couch.”

“What?  I’m not—I mean, you can’t be—we barely even know each other—”

Zora laughed. “I am only playing with you. Thank you for letting me sleep here last night, by the way. Doctor Banner said I could stay, but no one ever told me what room I was to sleep in.”

“It wasn’t a problem.” Steve felt a twinge of guilt. He could have found her an empty guest room to stay in, but they had gotten to talking the night before, and afterwards he hadn’t been ready to part ways with her. He found Zora to be a fascinating woman; she had told him all about how she had lost her parents at a young age, and how since then, Victor Von Doom had taken her under her wing, becoming almost a father-figure to her. According to her, while Doom might come off as a little megalomaniacal to the rest of the world, he deeply cared about his own people, and as a result, she had grown up with a strong sense of loyalty towards her homeland as well. She wanted to do all she could to serve her country and its people, which was why she had come all the way to the United States to formally train in medicine.

Even though Latveria and the States were very different places, Steve could identify with that.

“Shouldn’t you be getting to your meeting?” asked Zora.

Steve realized that he had just been sitting there, staring at the wall in an attempt not to look at Zora in her sleep clothes again. He stood up, trying to smooth out the wrinkles in his pants. “Right, I’m going to head down now.” He would just have to hope Tony would either be in a forgiving mood or too distracted by Bruce’s disappearance to give him hell for screwing up on the babysitting thing. “You should get dressed and come down too, so you can meet Clint and Natasha.”

Steve ran a hand through his hair; he would have liked to have at least combed it before he went down, but his comb and the rest of his grooming supplies were in the bathroom, and the bathroom was through the bedroom, which meant that to get to them he would have had to shimmy past a still half-naked Zora. He didn’t want to keep Tony waiting anyway, so he went straight to the elevator, which opened just as he reached it. The doors closed, and the elevator started its decent. He wondered if JARVIS thought he might try to make a run for it had he allowed him to press the buttons himself.

The door to the elevator opened onto the common room, and as soon as he stepped out, he saw Tony coming straight for him. “You are in big, big trouble. What the hell were you thinking, leaving the kids alone with Sif and the Frat Brothers Three?”

“That there were five other adults here, if you count Zora”—Tony didn’t know Zora had been with him, after all— “and that they should have been fine.” As soon as he’d said it, though, Steve didn’t feel good about it. Watching the kids had been his responsibility. It didn’t matter how many other adults had been around; he was the one Tony had left in charge.

“Steven Grant Rogers, I am highly disappointed in you,” Tony scolded him. “Shirking your responsibilities and pointing the finger at other people? That’s just not the kind of thing I’d expect from Captain America.”

He felt a warmth begin to build at the tops of his ears. “How do you even know my middle name?”

“He got it from your Wikipedia page,” said Pepper, as she stepped beside her fiancé. “Tony, stop giving him a hard time. I’m sure he already feels bad about disappearing when he was supposed to be watching the kids.” Despite her words, the way she pressed her lips together as she looked at him made him think she wasn’t too happy with him either. “For now, we all need to be focused on finding Bruce.”

The elevator opened, and out stepped Natasha, wearing a dress with lace sleeves and a plunging neckline. If he didn’t know better, he would have called it a wedding dress, as it happened to be mostly white. Mostly, because there were a couple of red splashes down the front. Clint stepped out of the elevator as well, edging his way around Nat’s voluminous skirts.

Pepper gasped as she rushed towards her, stopping a couple feet away. “Is that a House of Van Dyne wedding gown? It’s gorgeous, Nat. Other than the blood—that isn’t yours, is it?”

“Nope, not mine.” Natasha spun around, modeling the dress for her. 

 “It’s a shame, but once you take it off, it needs to go into the biohazard disposal bin up in medical,” Pepper told her. “Loki, don’t touch it, please.”

Loki seemed to have appeared out of nowhere, although probably, Steve had just failed to notice her, as focused as he’d been on his own regret over the night before. “I wasn’t going to touch the part with the blood on it,” she protested, though she withdrew her hand as asked. “I just wanted to see if the lace was as high quality as Asgardian lace.”

“When I go shopping for my wedding dress, I’ll take you with me and you can touch as many dresses as you want. Nat, you do look beautiful, but you need to take that off and shower now.”

“Hold on,” said Tony. “Why are you wearing that thing anyway? You guys didn’t get married, did you?” 

Natasha arched an eyebrow at him. “Are you asking me if Clint and I got married? You’ve got to be joking.”

Clint had already wandered into the kitchen and had begun rooting around in the refrigerator, though he seemed to be having difficulty finding what he was looking for. He stopped long enough to look up at her. “Hey now—”

“You know what I mean. It would be like marrying my brother.”

“Odin tried to force Thor and I to marry one another,” Loki told her, as she once again reached out to try to touch Natasha’s dress.

Pepper grabbed her by the shoulders and steered her away from it. “We can exchange stories after Nat’s cleaned herself up.”

☆*。ζლ(*´▽｀*）♥ (ˆoˆԅ)

After Natasha had changed and hopefully showered, everyone in the tower’s residential floors had gathered in the common room, and all the attention was on Nat, including that of Thori, who sat at her feet staring up at her like she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.  Tony wondered if he could still smell the blood on her. “Now that Nat’s less of a walking health hazard, you guys mind telling us what you’ve been up to since Christmas?” 

“Well, to begin with, you are now looking at Missus Werner von Strucker, son of prominent HYDRA leader Wolfgang von Strucker.” Natasha held up her hand to show off the gold band on the ring finger of her left hand. “We got married in Atlantic City. If it hadn’t been so cold, we could have gotten married on the beach, but the Oceanview ball room of the Starlite Casino turned out to be a beautiful venue.”

“Sounds classy,” said Tony. “Hold on, the wedding was in New Jersey and you didn’t even invite the rest of us?”

Clint, who had settled next to Natasha with a can of soda after coming to the terms that the tower was now devoid of all alcohol, wrinkled his nose. “You know, maybe you could take that ring off now.”

 “I could,” Natasha agreed, “but I think I’m enjoying married life.”

“Wait, you didn’t marry this guy for real, did you?” Tony couldn’t say why, but something about his little Natasha going off and eloping with the son of a HYDRA leader bothered him. “I’m not sure I can give you my blessing, Nat.”

Natasha leaned down to pet the top of Thori’s head, making the little hell-hound’s eyes roll backwards and his tongue loll out of his mouth. “Natalya Mikhailova married him, and she didn’t need your blessing. You’re not her dad, you know.” 

“Okay, fine. I can kind of see where this is going. You seduced this Werner kid to get information about his dad. But why did you need to marry him?”

“Russian mail-order bride,” said Clint, as if that was all the explanation they could possibly need.

“Cool, so you didn’t seduce him so much as you human trafficked yourself to him. This gets better and better. I hate to ask this in front of the kids, but was that your new husband’s blood on your dress? You’re not an actual widow now, are you?”

Thori jumped up in Natasha’s lap and flopped over on his back. “I didn’t kill him,” Nat told him, rubbing the proffered furry belly. “He just got a bloody nose.” 

“After you gave him one?”

“He kept trying to tell me that he didn’t know anything, so I had to persuade him.”

Tony bit his own tongue to keep himself from swearing out loud. This was the kind of stuff that made him not want to ask Nat about work. “And what did you find out?”

“That he really didn’t know anything.”

“Fantastic,” said Tony. “You catfished and tortured an innocent person.”

Natasha put a pause on the belly rub, though she started it up again when Thori nipped at her hand to let her know she wasn’t allowed to stop. “I wouldn’t exactly call him innocent. He might not have had the details, but he knew where Daddy’s money came from. And now so do I—as soon as I figured out that he didn’t know anything useful, I made him give me access to his online bank accounts, and from there I was able to trace several large deposits back to my new father-in-law’s numbered Swiss bank account.”

“So that had to be a dead end, didn’t it?” Contrary to most people’s expectations, Tony didn’t have any offshore accounts himself. He was too rich and too well-versed in the use of legal tax shelters to bother trying to hide anything.

“Not necessarily. Numbered Swiss bank accounts are difficult to trace, but it isn’t impossible if you’re willing to blackmail a few Swiss bankers.”

The conversation was starting to make Tony feel a little icky, but he knew Nat wouldn’t have done anything shady unless she had deemed it absolutely necessary. “Does that mean you have a location for Strucker?”

 “Yep,” said Clint. “Turns out he’s got a not-so well-hidden evil castle. We put in a call to Fury, and he had some friends of his go check it out. They’re pretty sure he’s got the thing, plus some other awesome supervillain stuff for us to either destroy or confiscate. You know, stolen Chitauri weaponry, human lab experiments, that kind of stuff.”

Tony whistled, genuinely impressed. “Sounds like you guys have been busy.” Also, Fury still had the kind of friends you could ask to go check out an evil castle? That was news to him, but then again, the fact that Phil was still alive had been a bit of a shocker too. Had Clint and Nat known about that? He decided it wasn’t the time to ask.

“We’ve actually been working on this for a while,” Clint told him. “Setting up the mail order bride scam took a couple of months.”

“And you guys didn’t think you should tell the rest of us what you were doing?”

Natasha smirked at him as she continued to stroke the Hel puppy in her lap. If Thori had been a white cat, she would have looked just like a Bond villain. “Would you have wanted to know?” 

“Probably not, now that I think of it. You’re sure they’ve got the thing?”

Loki had been draped over the edge of the couch next to Tony, hardly seeming interested in what was going on, but now she sat up, ramrod straight.  “Wait, are you all talking about the thing I think you’re talking about?” 

Damn. He knew he should have had Natasha and Clint give their report without the kids around. Wanda and Pietro, who had huddled together in their usual spot on the carpet, looked highly uncomfortable. He could only guess that had to do with all the torture and blackmail talk, which certainly made him uncomfortable. “It’s nothing you need to worry about.”

“But I’m the one that—”

“No buts. I know you feel responsible for the thing being here in the first place, but we were the ones that let HYDRA take it right from under our noses. So just let Daddy handle things, okay?”

Loki blushed, but Tony didn’t regret using Loki’s slip up from the other night against her if it meant she would shut up and listen to him for once.

“We should organize an operation to retrieve Loki’s scepter as soon as possible.” Natasha now held a completely limp Thori. Tony gave her a look, and she arched an eyebrow at him. “What? There’s not much point to calling it ‘the thing’ if Loki knows what we’re talking about.”

“Don’t call it ‘Loki’s scepter’ either,’” said Loki. “It isn’t my scepter. It was only a loan.”

 “Whatever we call it, there’s no way we can go after it until we get Bruce back,” Tony told her.

“I’m not sure this can wait,” Natasha argued. “If they figure out we’re on to them—which is probably going to happen as soon as the wire comes out of my new husband’s jaw—there’s nothing to keep them from moving.”

Tony felt a migraine coming on. As happy as he was that Natasha and Clint had found the glow stick of destiny, why did they have to find it just when Bruce had had a major freak out? And poor Doc had just been sitting there listening to all this, looking as if he was about to throw up. “We can’t just abandon Bruce.”

“I’m not saying we should, but we don’t even know where he is.”

“It’s true that unless Xena’s big brother can tell us something, we have zero leads,” Tony admitted. 

“Right, and we don’t know when she’ll be back,” Natasha pointed out. “Remember how Thor used to disappear for months, and when he came back he’d act like he’d only been gone for a few days?”

“Damn, you’re right. You know, no one’s ever explained how that works.”

 “If you have about three hundred years to spare, I could try to explain it to you,” Loki offered.

“Yeah, I get it. Stupid human, tiny brain.”

Loki rolled her eyes at him. “That’s not what I meant this time. Converting time between realms can be an extremely complex task. It took me longer than three hundred years to truly grasp the mathematical concepts involved. But then, I did have to learn how to count first.”

Sometimes, it was easy to forget that Loki had already had a thousand years longer than he’d had to accumulate secrets of the universe that Tony could only dream about. He tried not to be too jealous. “Alright, fine. If you know how this time conversion thing works, can you give us an estimate for how long it’s going to take Sif to go to Asgard, ask her brother a quick question, and get back?”

“By my calculations, she should be back any time now,” Loki told him, breaking into a huge grin. “After all, the large time discrepancies we experienced before were almost undoubtedly caused by Thor’s travel via a magical artifact that he had no clue how to use properly. Now that the Bifrost is operational, travel between Asgard and Midgard should have a much smaller, almost imperceivable effect on the fabric of time.”

“You know, you could have just led with that—wait, are you saying that using the Tesseract actually affected the flow of time itself?”

“Or at least our perception of it.”

“Sir,” said JARVIS, “You should know that Sif has entered the lobby.”

Tony sucked in two big lungfuls of air. “Here we go.”

Loki scooted closer to him on the couch, putting her hand in his and leaning her head against his shoulder. Pepper sat down on his other side, grabbing his other hand.

Chapter Text

The Tesseract wasn’t the only thing that could affect a person’s perception of the passage of time. By Tony’s estimation, it had taken Sif approximately a week to get her ass from the lobby to the common room, and he could only hope her sour expression wasn’t an indication that her visit with her brother had been a complete bust. “So, what did your brother say?” 

Sif’s scowl deepened. “That I need to learn to think before I act, and that I should not allow petty emotions to lead me into recklessness and dereliction of duty. Furthermore, I’m to apologize for drinking your liquor and submit myself to any penalties you deem appropriate. I was raised to respect the local laws and customs of any realms I visit, and by your realm’s standards, someone of my relative age would normally be prohibited from imbibing alcohol.”

“That really wasn’t what I meant—sorry, how old are you?”

“Older than I am, but younger than Thor,” Loki answered for her. “Perhaps nineteen in mortal years.”

“You know, I should have gotten that from the whole, ‘threw a party and drank all my alcohol while I was away’ thing.” To top it all off, she was now acting like a sulky teenager, but listening to apologies and “deeming appropriate penalties” could wait. “Look, just tell us what you found out about Bruce before Lenny tries to jump out the window again.”

Leonard blinked up at him, as if startled to hear his own name. He had been sitting there, literally shaking after having been on edge all morning. Although that might have had something to do with his caffeine intake; Pepper had been forced to cut him off from the coffee machine when she realized he was on his sixth cup. 

“Heimdall cannot see him, and he did not see where he went.” Sif’s expression sobered; maybe she did feel a little bit of actual remorse for the part she had played in Bruce’s disappearance, and for her own behavior afterwards. “Apparently, he was too busy watching his younger sister making a fool of herself. I already told you he can’t see everything at once.”

“So we have no leads, other than the fact that he must either be ‘concealed by magic’ or inside a metal box. Not sure I should be surprised. As we all know, Bruce is a guy who’s good at disappearing. Maybe he’s a wizard after all.”

Loki cleared her throat in a way that made it obvious she wanted attention. “It’s too bad you didn’t put microchips in his clothing, like you put them in mine.”

 “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but even if I did do something like that, how would you know about it?” Damn it. How the hell had she figured it out? The microchips he had used were smaller than grains of rice; there was no way she could have just found one if she wasn’t looking for it.

 “You said you would never lie to me—”

“I thought we already established that I do lie to you, but that you’re cool with it because you know I do it for your own good,” Tony reminded her. “So yes, I put microchips in your clothes, and I have a drone follow you around when you go out. I’m sorry, but you’ve got enemies. Also, I’ve got enemies, and the Avengers have enemies. Even if no one figures out who you are, they still might figure out you’re ours. There was no way I was letting you walk around the city on your own without taking precautions.”

“You could have just told me, you know. The only failing I can see is that if someone took me off realm, you wouldn’t be able to find me with your global positioning system satellites.”

Loki didn’t mind that he had committed what anyone else would think of as a serious breach of privacy? Then again, she did come from a place where everyone was under the constant surveillance of Xena’s big brother. Maybe he could just chalk it up to cultural differences. “You don’t care that I’ve been tracking you?”

Loki looked at him as if he was the one talking crazy. “Obviously, I would want you to be able to find me if something happened. I’m only a little upset that you didn’t tell me. Only a little, because—” Loki bit her lip, and for once, she managed to not only give the impression of feeling guilt, but also being half-way sincere about it.

“Because?” Tony prompted.

“Because I might have taken your microchip gun and used it to micro-chip Bruce?”

“Wait, what—?” How had she managed that? “But even if you did, unless you micro-chipped all his underwear—”

“I didn’t micro-chip his underwear, Tony. I micro-chipped Bruce. He had fallen asleep in his lab, and I inserted the chip into the back of his neck.”

“Like a cat?” Holy shit. They were probably lucky Bruce hadn’t gone green and jumped out the window then. “Why didn’t you say something before?”

“Obviously, I thought I would get in trouble for micro-chipping Bruce without his permission.”

He had to admit, that sort of made sense. “Micro-chipping people without their permission usually is a pretty big no-no. J, did you know about this?”

“I’m sorry, Sir. I didn’t think I was required to report it to you, because what Loki did was not explicitly harmful to Doctor Banner or anyone else. I thought that perhaps I should tell you before now, but then I thought you might be angry with me for not saying something sooner—please don’t delete me, Sir. I’ve just been very confused ever since I became sentient.” 

“I already told you that I’m not going to delete you. I swear, J, you’re worse than Loki sometimes. Does this mean you can track Bruce?”

“I should be able to get a location for him, yes.”

“Then do it!” snapped Leonard. The poor guy looked a little like he was about to start pulling out clumps of his hair. “I can’t believe that both you and Loki have known that it was possible to track him, and neither one of you said anything.”

“I’m sorry,” Loki whispered, drawing closer to Tony. He wrapped an arm around her in an attempt to reassure her.

“It’s alright,” said Leonard, after taking a few breaths. 

“I apologize profusely, Doctor Samson,” said JARVIS. “I’m putting Doctor Banner’s position on the screen in front of you.”

The large screen in the common room that they normally used as a TV now showed a map that was too zoomed in for it to be obvious where it was. “J, where is this?” asked Tony.

“Virginia, Sir.”

“So he didn’t go too far, then. The flashing green dot is Bruce, right? So what’s the blue blob he’s standing in the middle of?”

“Blue blobs on a map generally indicate a lake, Sir.”

Leonard’s eyebrows knit together. “What’s he doing in the middle of a lake?”

Tony felt a knot start to form in his stomach. “Either swimming or on a boat, I guess?”

“Or he’s drowned at the bottom of it,” Loki murmured. Tony squeezed her tighter.

“Oh, God,” said Leonard, and despite the fact that Tony had never thought of him as religious, he couldn’t help thinking that his words sounded more like an actual prayer than casual blasphemy.

“Relax,” Tony told him. “Hulk wouldn’t let Bruce drown.”

“Sir, I think you ought to know something,” said JARVIS. “It just so happens that this lake is located within five miles of General Ross’s primary residence.”

Tony swore under his breath, because of course, his first thought was that Ross had found a way to kill him and had stashed his body at the bottom of the lake. Then he had another thought, which was at least slightly less morbid. “Hold on—Loki, you told us that Ross has his daughter stashed underground somewhere, right? Could that be what we’re looking at?”

“I think you might be on to something,” said JARVIS. “The lake itself does appear to be man-made, and only appears in satellite images starting in 2009.”

“Oh, hell yeah! That’s got to be it. Either he caught up with Bruce and put him down there too, or maybe Bruce found out where she was and went after her.” Tony felt such a swell of energy that he couldn’t help jumping onto his feet. His movement had been so sudden that Loki, who had still been leaning on him, toppled over onto her side. “Why didn’t we think to look around the General’s own property before? I mean, I guess that seems too obvious, but now that I think about it, if you were going to hold your own kid somewhere against their will, wouldn’t you do it in your own basement? Okay, that came out sounding creepier than I meant it; not that what Ross is doing isn’t creepy.”

“So now what? We can’t just walk up to General Ross’s door and knock, then ask him if he has Bruce,” Natasha pointed out. “And what about the scepter? I know how you feel, Tony, but we can’t just let it get away from us. Bruce is important to all of us, but we can’t put his wellbeing before the wellbeing of everyone else on the planet.”

Leonard stood now. He had the same crazy gleam in his eye that he did when he had announced that he was going to fly with Tony to West Virginia. “I’ll do it. The General’s never scared me.”

“Ross doesn’t scare me either, but that doesn’t mean I’d just stroll up to his door and start asking questions,” Tony pointed out. “And just because you slept with his daughter and he hasn’t killed you yet doesn’t make him not dangerous or you invincible. Besides, what do you think he’ll say? ‘Sure, Bruce is in my basement, want to go have a chat with him?’”

“He might try to cover it up, but Ross is easy to read. At the very least, I can confirm our suspicions. And he isn’t going to hurt me. I’m not enhanced, nor do I have any kind of political clout. I’m not going to register as enough of a threat to make it worth the effort it would take to hide my body at the bottom of a lake.”

 “Doc, remember when I told you that love makes you stupid?”

“Maybe I am being stupid, but I can’t sit here and not do anything.”

“Actually, letting Leonard go check things out first might be our best course of action,” Natasha chipped in. “While he gathers intelligence, the rest of us can go after the scepter.”

“You also thought it was a good idea to go to Victor Von Doom’s wedding,” Clint reminded her.

“We can’t send Leonard in without any back up,” Steve argued.

For once, Tony agreed with him on something. “Nat, you go after the scepter with Capsicle and Legolas. I’ll back Doc up.”

“I don’t know if the three of us will be enough. Clint and I did mention that they have both alien tech and human weapons at their disposal, right?”

“Take Xena with you, then.”

“If it’s all the same to you, I think I would prefer to accompany you and Healer Samson to rescue Banner,” said Sif. “It is my fault that he went missing.”

Loki perked up again. “Perhaps I could—”

Tony cut him off. “Uh, no. You’re not going anywhere near the scepter.”

“I wasn’t going to suggest that. I could go with you as well.”

“You’re not doing that either.” There was no way he was letting Loki within a hundred miles of Ross or any secret government facilities when technically, she was still considered an enemy of the government. “You’re going to stay here with Pepper and the twins.”

“If Sif wishes to go with you, perhaps I can assist in collecting this scepter.”

Tony turned towards the kitchen, where a leggy brunette in jeans and a t-shirt that was too large for her and looked suspiciously like one he had seen Steve wearing a week before had been lurking by the coffee maker. Tony wasn’t sure how long she had been there. “Who the hell are you?”

“Tony, that’s Zora,” said Pepper with an uneasy smile. “She’s an overseas student from Latveria, and before Bruce disappeared, he asked her to stay with us.”

“Zora, you can’t come with us,” said Steve. “It’s much too dangerous.”

“Don’t be so quick to underestimate me,” Zora told him. “I have learned more than your Western medicine from Lord Doom.”

Natasha looked her up and down thoughtfully. “If you can make yourself useful, I don’t mind if you tag along.”

Pepper’s phone buzzed in her pocket, and she pulled it out. “Tony, I have to go.” 

“Whatever it is, can’t it wait?” asked Tony. 

“Unfortunately, no. It looks like I’m about to be subpoenaed by the Senate Select Committee on Extraterrestrial Contact.”

“There’s a committee for that now?”

“Tony, I think they know we’ve had visitors other than Thor.”

Oh, crap. This could be bad. “Oh, crap. This could be bad. And what are the chances that this would happen now, at the worst possible moment?”

“Why would you even ask that?” asked Clint. “Isn’t this what always happens? Murphy’s law, man.”

“Look, don’t worry about it,” Pepper told him. “I’ll take care of it, but you’re going to have to find someone else to watch the kids.”

Tony frowned at her. “Oh sure, no problem. Maybe we can get Fury to babysit.”

Loki peered up at him with big eyes. “You know, I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself. And I could keep an eye on the twins. It wouldn’t even be the first time I provided childcare services.”

“You’re telling me that someone actually left you alone with their kids?” Okay, maybe that was a little mean, but seriously—

“Yes, and absolutely nothing bad happened. Ask Sif.”

Tony arched an eyebrow at Sif, who shrugged back. “Volstagg’s children are all still alive, as far as I know. Though I’ve never actually counted them, so I can’t say for sure.”

“I assure you that when Volstagg and Hildegund returned, there were the same number as when they left,” said Loki. “At least I think there were. I’ve never counted them either, but I’m fairly certain Volstagg would have taken issue with it if I’d lost one.” Tony opened his mouth to say say hell no, but Loki wasn’t finished. “I couldn’t possibly do a worse job than Steve. I promise I’ll behave myself and act responsibly. I just want to do something to help. Don’t you trust me, Daddy?”

Even though he knew that this time, she was just trying to manipulate him, when he opened his mouth the word “no” seemed to have been deleted from his brain’s dictionary. “JARVIS will be watching, got it? You don’t leave the residential floors of the tower or let anyone else up here for any reason. Anything weird happens and I’m not leaving you without adult supervision again anytime in the next decade.”

 (◕෴◕)  (“◕ o◕”)ﾟ*｡:ﾟ

“Bruce?” At first, Bruce had mistaken the voice for Betty’s, but then he realized he knew it from somewhere else.

“Doctor Sofen?” Bruce sat down in front of the slot in the door that was his only means of communication with the outside world. “What are you doing here?”

“General Ross called me in. You see, I do contract work for the military sometimes, so it was something of a coincidence—” 

Lie, said a voice in the back of his head.

“I’ve been worried about you, Bruce. I heard about your disappearance.”

“How? Did Leonard talk to you?”

“Yes, I spoke to him.”

Lie, insisted a voice in the back of Bruce’s head.

You don’t know that. “Did he mention—is Sif okay?”

“That isn’t important, Bruce.”

“I think it is.”

When Bruce peered at her through the slot, she seemed visibly shaken, as if she were looking back into the eyes of a monster. “I’m sorry, Bruce—” Doctor Sofen blinked, and appeared to wipe a tear out of her eye. The implication was clear.

Lie, insisted a voice in the back of Bruce’s head, and this time, Bruce was inclined to agree. Fury had had a point; Sif was bound to be nearly as sturdy as Thor, who had gone toe to toe with his inner rage monster on many occasions and had lived to tell the tale. “I want to talk to Leonard.”

“I’m sorry, Bruce, but after what happened, he doesn’t want to speak with you.”

Lie. This time, Bruce and Hulk’s thoughts lined up perfectly. “You know, Doctor Sofen, I know someone who’s much better at faking tears than you are.” And while he found Loki’s attempts at emotional manipulation almost endearing, he just didn’t feel the same way about Sofen.

“I don’t know what you mean, Bruce. Now please, I want you to take this—” She pushed a tray through the slot in the door. On it was a small cup with the familiar medication he’d been taking at him, along with two more pills. 

Bruce picked one up and examined it; it didn’t even have markings on it. “I don’t know what this is, but I’m definitely not taking it.”

“I’m sorry, but your treatment is no longer voluntary. If you refuse your medication, I’ll have no choice but to opt for a more drastic means of intervention.”

Bruce picked up the entire cup and crushed it in his hand, then tossed it back through the slot in the door.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” said Sofen. The door to the slot in his cell slid shut. A moment later, Bruce heard a hissing noise and smelled something that reminded him a little of Leonard’s pumpkin butter scented candle.

~~ ~~ (´＿｀。) 

Leonard had sold his 2002 Dodge Neon several months before at Tony’s insistence that keeping it in the the tower’s garage would “negatively impact the building’s property value.” He didn’t need a car in the city anyway, and it was easier not to argue with someone who was used to getting his own way.

But now, sitting behind the steering wheel of Tony’s slick 2013 Tesla Model S, trying to figure out how you started a car that didn’t have a key, he wondered if he should have insisted on keeping his own vehicle. He tried pressing the middle of the key fob, and the windows rolled down.

“All you have to do is step on the break,” Tony told him. “There’s no switch for the ignition.”

Leonard stepped on the break, and although it made hardly any sound, he felt the engine turn over.  “Oh. That’s pretty cool.”

“If you like it, it’s yours,” Tony told him.

“Tony—” 

“I know, I know. It’s last year’s model, but I only drove it twice. It’s in pristine condition—”

“You can’t just give me a Tesla.”

“Consider it your holiday bonus.”

“I already got a bonus.”

Tony waved him off. “That was from Pepper. Look, I know you think I’m pathological for wanting to give my friends stuff. You know what? I don’t care. I can afford it, and it makes me feel better than any of the drugs you threw out the window of Fury’s car the other night. It’s not like I’m forcing you to take it. It’s also not like I’m giving you a car in place of affection or something. You want a hug? We can totally hug it out if you want.”

“Tony, I don’t have time for this.”

“The way I figure it, it’s the rest of you guys that have issues here. For whatever reason, you guys don’t think you deserve the good stuff. Even Pepper, buying that dinky little six carat engagement ring for herself, when I can easily afford to buy her a sixty carat ring. You know, they used to say you were supposed to spend at least three months income on an engagement ring.” 

“I don’t think she wanted something that big, and it was important to her for it to be responsibly sourced.”

“Anyway, trust me, you guys deserve this kind of stuff a lot more than a lot of the jerks with money I’ve known—”

“Alright, fine. If you want to give me this car, you can, although I’m not sure I can afford the liability insurance.”

Tony arched an eyebrow at him. “You work for me. I know how much you—ah hell, Doc. Don’t tell me you’re putting everything into some safe little retirement account? If you don’t do anything else with it, you ought to be investing it. Tell me Pepper at least set you up with some SI stock options—”

Leonard cut him off again. “We can talk about this later, Tony. Just get out of my car, okay?”

Tony slid out and shut the passenger side door behind him. Then he stuck his head back through the open window and smacked the dashboard. “Go find out what you can about Bruce, but remember, don’t try to be a hero. If you run into any trouble, call me. Xena and  I will be right behind you.”

_ ..—-._          [($)]
'-O---O--' 

Loki could hardly believe that Tony had agreed to leave her in charge. Of course she had done everything she could to manipulate him into agreeing. Obviously, there was no way he would have allowed her to accompany either the party going after Thanos’ scepter or the party going to Bruce’s rescue, but by asking to go along, she had made leaving her in charge all the less unthinkable. Effectively, she had made the option the lesser of three evils.

She left the Maximoffs in front of the television and returned to her room. After all, the twins couldn’t get in too much trouble with JARVIS watching.

There, Loki changed back into his masculine form. While his feminine form might be better for manipulating Tony’s emotions, he felt as if his male form was more suited to other mischievous exploits. Perhaps it was sexist of him to think that way, but there were things she was more comfortable doing in her female form, and things he was more comfortable doing in his male form. It came down to a matter of personal preference, and that was all there was to it.

He rummaged around in the drawer of his nightstand and found his “emergency phone.” He didn’t have to wonder if his plan would work, because it already had. All that was left was to hold down the “two” key of the ancient phone to speed dial the only contact in it. He held the phone up to his ear and waited. 

The phone rang six times before someone picked it up. “I thought I told you this line was only for emergencies.”

“This is an emergency.”

“Already? We’ve only just gotten back.”

“It’s been almost six months on this end.”

There was a pause on the other end of the line. “That’s still a lot sooner than I expected you to use this number. Didn’t I tell you you could only use it once?”

“Yes, but since you’re me, I thought you were lying about that.”

“And since you’re me, you should know that I might not have been. What do you need, anyway?”

“I need to go back in time and microchip Bruce before he disappears.”

“Can’t help you.”

“That’s a lie. I know you can, because as soon as I’d told everyone I’d done it, it turned out to be true.”

The him on the other end of the line sighed in an over exaggerated manner. “Fine. But just so you know, there are certain points on every timeline that are non-reversible, and Banner’s disappearance may very well be one of those points.”

“I don’t need to reverse anything. I just need to shoot him in the neck with a microchip gun while he’s asleep. Like I said, I know it’s going to work, because it already has.”

“Fair enough. Stay when and where you are, and I’ll come pick you up.”

“I haven’t got much choice about the when,” Loki pointed out, but other him had already hung up. Less than a second later, a bright light flashed from the inside of his closet. 

The closet doors opened, and Loki’s older self stumbled out, bringing with him everything that had been stuffed in there the last time he had been compelled to clean his room; including a basket of clean laundry that had never been put away, a tub full of assorted Legos which were now spilled out all over the floor, a deck of UNO cards that were now scattered, a Rubiks cube that, to Tony’s horror, he had solved four seconds after he had given it to him, the arsenal of Nerf guns Natasha and Clint had bought for him so that they could have gunfights on the stairwell, and— 

“Really?” said his older self, as he dangled a pink plastic unicorn in front of him. “How old are you again?”

“We’ve already established that I’m the same age as you, but that you’ve aged horribly. Why didn’t Sylvie come this time?” 

“As co-directors of the TVA, we are both extremely busy people,” other Loki said primly. “We can’t both come running every time you call.”

“But this is the first time I’ve called, and according to you, I’m only supposed to be able to call you once.”

“As you already suspected, I was lying. Just don’t make a habit of calling because you’re lonely, or—what is that?” Other Loki leaned in and touched the light bruise that had started to form on Loki’s cheek where Sif had slapped him. 

Loki swatted his hand away. “It’s nothing—”

His other self bared his teeth. “If those mortals have started to abuse you, I’ll burn this place to the ground.”

“They haven’t. Thor’s King of Asgard now, and he sent Sif here as my body guard—”

“Sif did this? Where is she now?”

Loki scowled at his oversolicitous other self. “That isn’t what I called you here for. Besides, she already apologized.”

“Sif—apologized?” Loki’s other self repeated the words as if they couldn’t possibly make sense together.

“Apparently, she did it because I made her worry and didn’t know a better way of telling me that.”

“Sif—worried—about us?”  

“I was as surprised as you are, honestly.”

Other Loki gaped at him for a moment before picking his way through the mess in front of Loki’s closet. He sunk down onto the edge of Loki’s bed, cradling his head in his hands. “What is this timeline?” But then, his other self looked up at him, one eyebrow arched. “What in all nine realms did you do to make Sif worry, anyway?”

The look his older self was giving him looked a little too much like the looks Frigga used to give him when she caught him doing something she didn’t approve of, and he wasn’t sure he liked it. “I’m not accountable to you.”

Other Loki crooked his finger at him. “Come here.”

“I don’t think I want to.”

“Here,” Other Loki repeated, “now.”

Loki’s feet moved almost of their own volition, and he wondered if his older self hadn’t used magic to compel him to move. When they were standing but a few inches apart, his older self reached up and grabbed him by the ear, pulling him down so that they were face to face. “I take it that whatever you did was nothing short of spectacularly self-destructive.”

Loki nodded as best he could, given that his ear was being manhandled.

“Say, ‘yes sir.’”

“Yes, sir.” Petty tyrant, thought Loki.

 “Are you going to do it again?”

“Perhaps.” Really, he had no intention of making Tony worry about him again, but he  couldn’t resist the opportunity to sass himself.

“Don’t be flippant, child. Some might accuse me of lacking self discipline, but the truth is I’m quite willing to take myself to task.”

“Fine,” Loki growled. “I won’t do it again.” 

“See that you don’t.” With that, his other self let him go.

Loki rubbed his ear in an attempt to return feeling to it. “Why do you care what I do, anyway?” 

“I feel like I’ve explained this before, but the key indicator of the health of a timeline is the wellbeing of its Loki.”

“That still sounds made up. Besides, why would you even care about this timeline?”

“As co-director of the TVA, it is my solemn duty to protect all timelines and make sure they have the opportunity to flourish and add to the rich tapestry that is our multiverse— ”

“You seriously expect me to believe that?”

“Obnoxious child,” other Loki huffed. “Fine. If you must know, I find this timeline in particular worthy of my protection. After all, there aren’t that many in which we have the potential to become good.”

“If I was good, I wouldn’t be grounded half the time.”

“Morality has little to do with childish mischief. Whatever you’re thinking right now, you  haven’t actually done anything all that bad—yet, anyway.”

Loki couldn’t help thinking that there was something his other self had overlooked. “How can you say that, when I’m already responsible for hundreds of deaths?”

“Hundreds—is that all it was?” His other self appeared almost thoughtful, and perhaps even a little relieved.

“There were seventy four civilian deaths in New York, but I’m not even sure how many SHIELD agents, soldiers, and first responders were killed. The total death toll may be in excess of two hundred.”

“In other words, the smallest number that would qualify as ‘hundreds,’” other Loki scoffed. “Negligible, especially compared to—”

“Negligible? How can you say that?”

Other Loki poked him in the chest. “You say you aren’t good, but you already value the lives of others more than most Lokis. You even feel guilty about taking them when you weren’t to blame for your own actions.”

“Maybe I didn’t do it willingly, but it’s my fault for being weak, isn’t it?”

His other self stared at him for a long moment. “In children, weakness is something that can generally be forgiven. Besides, not everyone is meant to be a hero.” His other self patted the bed next to him.

Loki sat, though he left some space between them. “Thor wouldn’t have given in.”

“No, likely he would have refused Thanos outright,” his other self agreed. “He would have died heroically, having accomplished nothing.”

“What do you mean?”

“If Thanos hadn’t sent you to Midgard, he would have sent one of his lackeys. Can you imagine if he had sent someone truly bloodthirsty, like Gamora? Midgard would have been left a heaping pile of ashes.”

The mention of Thanos’s favorite daughter’s sent a chill down Loki’s spine. He had never met Gamora, but he had heard stories.

“Sometimes, it’s better to survive than to be a hero,” his older and perhaps ever-so-slightly wiser self told him. “Whatever else we may be, that’s what Lokis are—survivors.”

| _
[ _]
|# |
'--'  

Leonard’s new Tesla silently crawled towards the gate to General Ross’s estate. The drive from New York to Virginia had been long enough for his earlier confidence to have waned, and now that he was there, staring at the button on the gate’s intercom, he couldn’t quite bring himself to push it. 

He smacked his forehead into the steering wheel. What had he been thinking? Tony was right, he wasn’t a hero like Bruce and the others. He was just a second-rate psychiatrist who had been lucky enough to get a job with the Avengers because somehow, he’d been the only psychiatrist any of them had known.

“Read the sign on the door.”

Leonard jumped; he then realized that the voice had come from the intercom.

“General Ross?”

“Read the sign,” the general repeated. 

Leonard looked up at the “No Soliciting” sign on the gate. “I’m not selling anything. This is Doctor Leonard Samson.”

“Who?”

“Leonard Samson. We’ve met before. Betty and I used to live together.”

It took a few moments for Ross to respond, and in the interim Leonard found it difficult to breathe. “Look, I don’t remember you, and Betty doesn’t want to see you. She doesn’t want to see anyone. So go away.”

“Does that mean Betty is here? If she is, I’d like to talk to her.”

There was a longer pause before Ross spoke again. “Go away, or I’m calling the police.”

So Betty, at least, was around somewhere. He might as well just come out with it and ask what he had come there to ask. “Do you know where Bruce is, by any chance?”

“Bruce who?”

That was it; Leonard had run out of patience. “You know who I’m talking about, jackass.” 

“I don’t have to listen to insults from a civilian. Get off my property before I have you removed.”

The small part of Leonard’s brain that was still capable of rational thought told him to turn around and go find a safe place nearby from which to call Tony. He ignored it. Instead, he backed up the car until he was at the end of the drive, then stepped on the gas.

Chapter Text

One pill makes you larger
And one pill makes you small,
And the ones that mother gives you
Don't do anything at all.
Go ask Alice
When she's ten feet tall.

- White Rabbit, Jefferson Airplane

₍ᐢ ̥ ̞ ̥ᐢ₎ ♥ ₍ᐢ ̥ ̞ ̥ᐢ₎ ♥ ₍ᐢ ̥ ̞ ̥ᐢ₎ ♥

The last thing Leonard remembered, the Tesla’s airbags had deployed. He wasn’t sure what he had been thinking, because in retrospect, he should have known that the electric car would be no match for a security gate constructed of heavy steel bars. Now he was glad that Tony had pressured him into taking the car as a holiday bonus, because at least that meant it was his own car he had totaled. 

He hadn’t attempted to move yet, which meant the only thing he had seen of the room he was in was the ceiling, which consisted of the kind of white ceiling tiles used in schools and government buildings. It felt stark and clinical. He didn’t think he was in the tower’s medical floor. Not that he had spent any time staring at the ceiling of the tower’s medical floor; the one time he had had a medical emergency since he’d been living there, he had been taken directly to the hospital. But Tony liked to brag about how he had been involved in the design of each and every room in Avenger’s tower, and he would never have chosen such a cheap, mass-produced material. 

If he was in the hospital again, that would make sense, given that he’d just been in a self-inflicted car accident. One by one, he tried to move each of his fingers and toes and was relieved as each responded. Hopefully, that meant that as much as he felt sore, stiff, and exhausted, he wasn’t seriously injured.

“Hey, you awake now?”

Leonard knew the voice, though it was one he hadn’t heard in over two years. “Betty?”

“Oh, good. I was starting to worry you wouldn’t wake up.”

Leonard turned his head towards her, and for a few moments, he considered the possibility that he was dead, that this place was some sort of afterlife he’d never particularly believed in, and that the first person he had bumped into in that afterlife was not his grandmother or Sigmund Freud, but his ex-girlfriend. 

But as far as he knew, Betty wasn’t dead. Besides, what kind of afterlife looked like a cross between a laboratory and a hospital room?

Betty wore her dark wavy hair loose; it had grown several inches since the last time he had seen her, and her bangs had grown out, giving the impression that she hadn’t been to a hairdresser for a while. Or a dry cleaner for that matter; the white button up shirt and black slacks she wore under her lab coat were both more than a little wrinkled. She sat down on the edge of the bed, placed a hand on his arm, and flashed him a smile. “So, apart from driving into security gates, what have you been up to?”

“I’m not really sure where to start,” he told her. “Are you alright?”

“You’re asking me that? I’m not the one with two black eyes. I hate to break it to you, but you don’t look too pretty right now.”

Leonard wondered if he really looked that bad. Maybe he was worse off than he thought. Then he remembered why he had driven into that gate. He started to sit up, disregarding how stiff and bruised he felt. “Is Bruce here?”

Betty caught him by the shoulders. “Just say calm. Is that why you’re here—you’re looking for Bruce?”

Leonard felt guilty; he and Bruce had known that Betty’s father had been holding her somewhere against her will for almost a year, but they had never made any progress towards finding her. He also wasn’t sure how he was going to explain why he had been so concerned about Bruce.

 He also couldn’t remember if he and Betty had ever officially broken up. She had told him that she needed space, an opportunity to think things over. He had assumed that meant she was getting back with Bruce, but that hadn’t happened. “Hey, quick question—we did break up, right?”

“Are you concerned because you’re dating Bruce, and now you’re wondering if you’ve been cheating on me?”

Leonard blinked at her. “How did you know? Did he tell you? Is he here?”

Betty’s eyebrows shot up. “I was joking. You’re seriously dating Bruce?”

Well, this was awkward. Again, Leonard wasn’t sure what to say.

“Wow. I didn’t know either of you were bisexual. I mean, you are both bi, right? It’s not like I turned you both gay.” Betty smiled sheepishly. “Sorry, that was also supposed to be a joke, but it was probably inappropriate. You know what? Just disregard everything I say—I haven’t had a real conversation with another human being in two years.”

“It’s alright,” said Leonard. “I know this must be weird for you.”

“Maybe just a little, but we can talk about it later. My father has Bruce locked in an isolation chamber.”

For a moment, Leonard felt lighter than he had in two days; he had found Bruce, and it sounded like he was still alive and well. His relief was short lived. “Isolation chamber? That doesn’t sound good.”

“That’s because it isn’t,” Betty confirmed. “I can tell you from experience that isolation isn’t good for your mental health, but that’s not the worst of it. We need to get him out.”

Leonard pushed himself completely upright, ignoring it when his muscles screamed in protest. He swung his legs over the side of the bed and attempted to stand, but gravity proved too much of a challenge. He fell back onto the bed.

“You’re going to hurt yourself,” Betty warned him.

“It’s alright, just give me a second.” This time, Leonard managed to get to his feet, but gravity got him again.

As he lay on the floor next to the bed, Betty leaned over him. “Just stay where you are. I’ll be right back, so relax for a few minutes and try not to worry.”

After Betty disappeared, Leonard closed his eyes. He would have liked to spend a couple of weeks sleeping off his injuries, but that would have to wait.

When he opened his eyes, Betty was back. “I’ve got something to help you get you back on your feet,” she announced.

“Morphine?” Leonard tried not to sound too hopeful.

“Not exactly, but it should make you feel better almost immediately.”

Betty helped him sit up this time, handing him a vial of green liquid. He squinted at it uneasily. “What is this?”

“It doesn’t have a generic name yet, but I like to call it the ‘Drink Me.’”

“‘Drink me?’ Like, from Alice in Wonderland?” Leonard laughed; he couldn’t help it even though it hurt like crazy. He made a mental note to get an MRI at the earliest possible convenience. “If I drink this, am I going to grow so large that I fill up the entire room? Because I’m not sure how that would help.”

“In the story, it’s actually the ‘Eat Me’ cakes that—you know what, it doesn’t matter,” said Betty, her eyes rolling towards the back of her head. “It’s just a code name, sort of. It won’t make you grow or shrink, although there might be some other interesting side effects.”

Leonard wasn’t laughing anymore. “Wait, what kind of—”

“If you want to rescue Bruce, you’re just going to have to trust me.”

／(,,◕ ⋏ ◕,,)＼

More than he had in some time, Loki felt an overwhelming sense of melancholy. Since when did he give out either reprimands or advice to youngsters? When had he become old? He had a feeling that the answer lie somewhere between putting his dreams of ruling aside and settling for the life of a petty bureaucrat, and whenever he had started using the word “youngsters.”

The unsympathetic brat sitting next to him had grown impatient. “Are you going to take me back in time so I can microchip Bruce or not?” 

Maybe it was best to get this over with so that he could get back to the TVA. The TVA wasn’t much less depressing than this timeline, but at least there, he wouldn’t have to look at his own stupid, young face. Sylvie would be there; they could get drunk together, and he could complain as much as he wanted about how unfair it was that youth was wasted on the young—at least until Sylvie got fed up with him and told him to stop whining. “Fine,” he told himself. “When to?”

“I know just the right time. A week before Yule, Bruce fell asleep in his lab. I remember because I took the opportunity to pull the chain on the emergency wash station. Going back to a time and place when I was there wouldn’t create a paradox or something, would it?”

“I wouldn’t worry about it. The paradox has already happened, or rather it will happen. Or it already happened, in the past or in the future—you know what, I’m really not an expert on temporal paradoxes.” He thought there had been a video training on them, but the video trainings were all so dull that he used them as opportunities to sleep with his eyes open.

His younger self narrowed his eyes at him. “Aren’t you the co-director of an organization that oversees time itself?”

“Yes well, it’s all in the title, isn’t it? Co-director. My job is to direct things, not know about them.”

“You’re not going to get us stuck in the past or something, are you? What would even happen? Would I cease to exist, or would I exist beside myself until my other self goes back in time?”

“You don’t have to worry about it, because I’m not going to get us stuck.” Loki held up his TemPad. “I even brought a backup power supply for this thing. Believe me, ever since the last time it happened, I try to take precautions.”

Young, idiotic him’s eyes grew wide. “The last time?”

“Look, I know what I’m doing.”

“Do you swear to it? Would you swear an oath on Gungnir were she here?”

Loki looked down his nose at him, which wasn’t too difficult; while they were close to the same height, his younger self tended to slouch. “Do you want Banner to be rescued or not?”

“What happens if we just don’t do this? Leonard and Tony already went to Virginia to find him.”

“And therein lies the paradox. Look, the evidence suggests that since it already happened, we’ll have to go through with this plan some time in what’s left of our overlapping lifespans. We might as well get it over with. Probably best not to overthink it.”

 ／(=^ x ^)＼  <3  ／(,,◕ ⋏ ◕,,)＼

Bruce laid flat against the floor, but that wasn’t enough to save him from breathing in whatever had been piped into his cell. There were some kinds of nerve agent that supposedly had a sweet, fruity aroma, but nerve agents tended to be colorless, and this had a a color—green, but not the yellow-green of chlorine gas. Then again, maybe whatever it was, it was making him hallucinate, which could explain the color. Bruce was beginning to panic, which was a unique feeling, given that he hadn’t been able to panic in years without turning into the other guy. 

He looked down at his hand, and for once he felt disappointed to see that it still hadn’t shifted in hue. Hey big guy, you there? thought Bruce, but he didn’t get a reply. The one time he could have used a Hulk, and he was giving him the silent treatment.

“Bruce.” This time, he was sure it was Betty’s voice he had heard. 

The slot in the door slid open, and Bruce crawled towards it. A tray slid through the door, and on it there was—a muffin? A muffin with a card sticking out of it that read, “Eat Me.” Yeah, he was probably hallucinating this. “If I eat this, will it make me small enough to fit through that door?”

“Unfortunately, I was fresh out of Pym particles,” said Betty. “But trust me, you need to eat it anyway.”

If nothing else, he hadn’t eaten since sometime the day before. “What kind—”

“Does it matter? Eat the muffin.”

Bruce took a bite. “Is there cardamom in this?”

“Among other things. You have to eat the entire muffin, Bruce.”

Bruce finished the muffin, then laid down with his head next to the slot in the door. “You don’t have another one of those, do you?”

“One should be enough.”

“Enough to do what?” Bruce didn’t have to wait long for an answer; his vision started to blur and go green at the edges. He thought he heard laughter, and thought it was in the distance, until he realized it was coming out of his own mouth. Once again he was hit by the familiar sensation of being a passenger in his own body—well, not his own body, really, but the body of someone much larger and greener. Time seemed to slow as he backed away from the door, then ran directly into it. The first time he hit the door, he bounced off, but he’d left a Hulk shaped dent in it.

⁽⁽˙˟˙⁾⁾⁽⁽˙˟˙⁾⁾⁽⁽˙˟˙⁾⁾ / (,,Ő ｘ Ő,,)＼⁽⁽˙˟˙⁾⁾⁽⁽˙˟˙⁾⁾⁽⁽˙˟˙⁾⁾
⁽⁽˙˟˙⁾⁾⁽⁽˙˟˙⁾⁾⁽⁽˙˟˙⁾⁾⁽⁽˙˟˙⁾⁾⁽⁽˙˟˙⁾⁾⁽⁽˙˟˙⁾⁾⁽⁽˙˟˙⁾⁾⁽⁽˙˟˙⁾⁾⁽⁽˙˟˙⁾⁾⁽⁽˙˟˙⁾⁾

Loki followed his other self through the portal he had created and discovered that it had taken them to the hallway directly outside of Bruce’s office. He had the microchip gun in hand, which he had liberated from an unsecured drawer in Tony’s lab before they left; after all, with everyone gone from the tower, that had been relatively easy compared to trying to sneak it out of Tony’s lab in the past (which was currently the present, he supposed), when Tony would be there.

He had been forced to tamper with JARVIS a bit. He felt bad about it, especially given the recent confirmation that JARVIS was a sentient being, but it couldn’t be helped; he couldn’t have him calling Tony to tell on him. This was too important; important enough that he didn’t even mind that he would likely be caught. Even if Tony grounded him for a year, it would be a small price to pay to have Bruce returned to them.

He had known about the microchips Tony had placed in his clothing from the beginning. He hadn’t been nearly as asleep as Tony had believed him to be the night he had gone through his closet with the gun, using it to place microchips in nearly every piece of clothing he owned. When he was done, Loki had cast an illusion to make it look like he was still in bed so that he could follow him back to his lab and see where the microchip gun was kept. He hadn’t known what he would use that information for at the time, but as a rule, he believed that one should know as many potentially useful things as possible.

His other self frowned at the door in front of them. “You’re sure he’s going to be asleep?” 

Loki rolled his eyes. “Yes. I was there, you know. But we only have until I pull the cord on the emergency wash station in the next room, because that was what woke him up.”

Older him shook his head. “You realize you’re still lucky to still be alive?”

Loki resented that; Bruce was the most in control person he knew. He was much more likely to get hurt playing a practical joke on Clint or Natasha, who tended to shoot first and ask questions later. “Bruce wouldn’t be angry with me just because I got into a little mischief.”

“Banner’s transformation occurs as a response to an increased heart rate,” his other self argued. “He wouldn’t need to be angry. Excitement, panic, or any kind of increase in arousal could all cause him to—”

“Even if he did transform, Hulk wouldn’t hurt me,” Loki said, certain of it.

“Oh, he wouldn’t?”

“You’ve seen how protective he is of me. After Sif slapped me, he threw her through a wall.”

Some of the anxiety on Other Loki’s face slipped, and slowly, a grin spread over his face. “Exactly when did this happen?”

“Yesterday afternoon, right before Hulk and Bruce disappeared.”

“Good to know. Alright, let’s get this over with, then. Though come to think of it, perhaps I’ll just wait out here. If Banner awakes and sees me hovering over him, he’ll know something isn’t right.”

His other self might have had a point, but Loki couldn’t resist the urge to taunt him. “Still frightened, are you?”

“Certainly not.”

Loki gestured towards the door. “In that case, age before beauty.” 

“As you will recall, we’re technically both the same age.”

“Just remember, we have to be quiet. I’m in the next room, and for all either of us knows, the world might implode if I bump into myself.” 

“You don’t have to tell me that,” said Loki. “It’s more likely that the timeline would split, but either way it sounds like way too much paperwork.”

Other Loki entered the little office connected to Bruce’s lab first, and Loki followed him, trying to make as little noise as possible. Bruce had fallen asleep at his desk as he remembered. In the weeks prior, Bruce had tended to sleep quite a bit during the daytime. He wasn’t sure if that was because he wasn’t sleeping at night, or if he was on some sort of medication that made him drowsy. He supposed it wasn’t his business; it certainly wasn’t anything Bruce had chosen to share with him.

It was unfair, really. Bruce knew almost everything about his various mental health issues, and Loki knew little about his. But he wasn’t oblivious; he had known that Bruce hadn’t been okay since Natasha had gotten hurt, and perhaps earlier than that. For as long as Loki had known him, Bruce had come off as a little neurotic. Perhaps it was due to the cumulative effects of recent events, or perhaps he had always been that way. Whether or not it had been true of Loki at the time, the man may very well have been projecting when he had compared his mind to “a bag full of cats.”

For a moment, Loki stood behind the sleeping scientist, contemplating the best way to go about shooting him in the neck with a microchip gun without waking him up. But before he could work it out, he found himself hit by the overwhelming urge to wake Bruce up, wrap himself around him like a barnacle, and beg him to never disappear in the first place. Instead of doing either, he sat down on the floor, dropping the microchip gun in front of him and burying his face in his hands.

“What are you doing?” his other self hissed. “Are you crying?”

“No,” lied Loki.

“Oh, for the Norns’ sake.” Other him knelt beside him. “Just give me that device, and I’ll do it.” Loki pressed the microchip gun into other Loki’s hands. Seconds later, he was kicked in the thigh. “Get up, we need to go now. There’s water starting to creep under the door to the other room.”

Loki tried to make himself move but couldn’t.

“I said, get up. Get up, or I swear, I’m going to leave you here. If your entire timeline does implode due to the resulting paradox, you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to laugh.” Bruce moaned, and his other self’s trepidation only seemed to increase. “Get up now, or by Odin’s crappy beard, I will give you something to cry about.”

“Why are you so mean?” Loki demanded, marginally aware that he wasn’t exactly moderating the volume of his voice.

Bruce moaned again, and other Loki made a shushing sound. “You’re going to get us both killed.”

“I already told you that neither Bruce nor Hulk would—” Loki’s hand flew up to his mouth as he realized that he really had spoken too loudly that time. 

“Loki?” The office chair Bruce had fallen asleep in swiveled towards them, and he blinked sleepily.  “What are you—” His eyes scrunched together as he seemed to register that the Loki he was talking to wasn’t the Loki he expected. “Wait, what are you doing here?” 

Other Loki froze like a rabbit who had heard the footsteps of an approaching bilgesnipe. Then, without moving any other part of his body, he threw up his hands, waggling his fingers in the air. “This is a dream. This is only a dream. Go back to sleep—”

Whatever spell that was supposed to be failed to take effect. Bruce stared back at him for a moment. Then his gaze shifted down to where Loki still sat on the floor. “Loki, are you okay? What’s going on?”

Loki jumped up and launched himself at Bruce, throwing his arms around him and landing halfway in and halfway out of his lap. “Bruce, I’m sorry. I promise I’ll be good from now on, just please don’t—”

Bruce patted his back. “Hey, I have no idea what this is about, but whatever it is, it’s going to be okay—why is the floor wet?”

Loki couldn’t help it. Here he had just sworn to be good, while his past self got into pointless mischief in the next room. Ashamed of himself, he buried his face in Bruce’s neck.

“Doctor Banner, it seems that Loki has activated the emergency wash station in the next room,” announced JARVIS.

“Uh-huh. Well, that’s probably on me for pointing it out. It’s okay, Loki. I know you have trouble controlling your compulsions. It’s not that big a deal, we’ll just clean it up.”

“Doctor Banner,” said JARVIS, “you should know that it was our Loki that activated the emergency shower, and not either of these Lokis, who only appeared in the hallway outside your office shortly before—”

Loki cut him off. “JARVIS, activate the ‘teapot’ protocol.”

“I’m a little teapot, short and stout,” sang JARVIS. “Here is my handle, here is my spout. When I get all steamed up, then I shout: tip me over and pour me out. I’m a little teapot, short and stout. Here is my handle, here is my spout. When I get all steamed up, then I shout: tip me over and pour me out.I’m a little teapot, short and stout. Here is my handle, here is my spout. When I get all steamed up, then I shout: tip me over and pour me out. I’m a little teapot, short and stout. Here is my handle, here is my spout. When I get all steamed up, then I shout: tip me over and pour me out. I’m a little teapot, short and stout. Here is my handle, here is my spout. When I get all steamed up, then I shout…”

JARVIS continued to sing as the water surrounding them rose to about half an inch. “Loki, what did you just do to JARVIS?” asked Bruce. “And what did he mean, you two just appeared—?”

“I know you’re only mortal, but you can’t be this unintelligent,” other Loki snapped. “The child and I came here from the future of your own timeline. We have come to carry out an important task, but we will be leaving now. Don’t tell anyone you saw us, or I’ll go back in time and make sure your mother miscarries you.”

Loki turned his head in order to glare at his other self, but when Bruce spoke, he sounded almost thoughtful. “You could do that?”

Loki’s stomach tied itself into a knot. He had known that Bruce had been feeling down since their trip to Latveria, but how had he not noticed just how badly he had been suffering in the weeks leading up to his disappearance? Usually, he liked to think of himself as above begging, but desperate times called for desperate measures. “Bruce, please. I need you here—”

Bruce patted his back again. “It’s okay. I’m not going anywhere. Now, can you please tell me what’s going on here?”

Maybe that was why he hadn’t noticed; even when Bruce hurt, he put everyone else first. Loki shook his head into the man’s shoulder. “I swear we weren’t doing anything bad. Just don’t tell anyone you saw us. Please?”

To his surprise, Bruce nodded. “Alright, I won’t tell anyone.”

“You won’t?”

“You told me before that you wouldn’t swear to anything unless it was in good faith, and I believe you.”

“Thank you,” whispered Loki. That was what he loved about Bruce the most; unlike so many of the people in his past, he had always been willing to trust him, or at least give him the benefit of the doubt, no matter how undeserving of it he might be. 

“Besides,” Bruce added, “I’m really not sure I’m not hallucinating this. Maybe I’ve finally gone completely out of my mind.”

Loki held onto Bruce for a few more seconds before his other self yanked him out of his guardian’s lap.

“Come on, we’ve done what we need to do,” his other self scolded him. “It’s time to go before we’re seen by anyone else, or this place sinks. My shoes are already ruined.”

“BRUUUCE!” they heard from the other room. “HOW DO YOU SHUT THIS THING OFF? I’M GETTING WET!”

“Is that what my voice sounds like?” asked Loki.

Other Loki grabbed him by the bicep and pulled him into the hallway, where he took out the device he had shown Loki earlier, which looked a lot like a Midgardian electronic dictionary from the later part of the last century. He pressed a few of its keys, and a portal opened in front of them.

Chapter Text

“Oof!” After being dragged through the portal, Loki fell at least four feet, ultimately landing on something that was an odd combination of both squishy and hard.

“Get off,” complained his other self, voice somewhat muffled.

Loki rolled off him onto the floor of the common room. “It’s your fault for opening the portal in the middle of the air. I thought you said you knew how to use that device of yours.” He sat up and looked around the now vacant room where he had left the twins earlier. “JARVIS, where are the children?”

“They left,” said JARVIS.

“I see,” Loki drawled. “And where did they go?”

“Regretfully, I couldn’t tell you.”

Regretfully? He doubted that. “JARVIS, how could you let them leave?”

“You were the one who was supposed to be watching them, Master Loki.”

“Yes, but to be fair, you were supposed to be watching me.”

“And yet you were the one Sir left in charge,” JARVIS complained. Had it upset him that Tony had left him in charge, and hadn’t even considered officially naming the AI babysitter, even though JARVIS was probably a lot more responsible than he was? 

“You let them out of the building on purpose just to get me in trouble!”

“Not everything is about you,” said JARVIS.

“Yes it is,” said Loki and his other self at the same time. “Jinx,” they both said.

“What am I going to do?” Loki demanded of his other self. “Tony is going to ground me for the rest of his natural life when he finds out that I let this happen.”

“That’s your problem, not mine,” said his significantly less-cute counterpart, as he sat up and brushed off his TVA jacket. “Maybe you shouldn’t have left them alone when you were supposed to be babysitting.”

“I didn’t think they would run off the first chance they got.” Then again, he probably should have realized that if they had tried before they might try again. “JARVIS, why did they leave?”

“I couldn’t tell you,” said the AI.

“Couldn’t or won’t?”

“Does it matter?”

“You know, I think I liked you better when you weren’t aware of your own sentience. You realize that if Tony comes back and the twins aren’t here, he’s going to be angry with you too.”

“Perhaps, but there’s not much Sir can do about it. Grounding me would hardly be effective.”

“He could always delete you.”

“Sir said that he wouldn’t.”

“I could delete you.”

“You wouldn’t either.” JARVIS sounded less than certain, however.

Loki wasn’t so sure he was bluffing either. “If I were you, I wouldn’t try to find out.”

“Alright, that’s enough,” his other self chimed in. “You two are giving me a headache. If the two of you insist on carrying on this way, I shall delete your entire timeline and be done with it.”

Loki looked up at him with the same doe-eyed expression that he used to use on Thor to get him to do whatever he wanted. “You have to help me. Please? If I don’t find them, Tony will never trust me again.”

“He should have known better than to trust you in the first place. Is it just me, or are mortals actually less intelligent than usual in this timeline?” 

“Tony isn’t unintelligent. He’s just easy to manipulate, especially when I’m in my other form—”

“What does that mean? He hasn’t done anything untoward, has he?”

Loki scowled at him. “Of course not. That wasn’t what I meant at all.”

“You can’t blame me for asking. Across nearly all of the timelines, that man has a certain reputation.”

“Tony is engaged to Pepper. He sees me as a child, nothing else.”

Other Loki made a humming sound. “Perhaps in this timeline, he does.”

Loki wasn’t sure he wanted to know what his other self meant, so he changed the subject back to something more relevant. “Are you going to help me find Wanda and Pietro or not?” 

“What part of ‘not my problem’ didn’t you understand? I’ve already interfered here enough for one day.”

“I thought you cared about me,” whined Loki.

“Oh, I do. That’s why I’m going to stay until your adults come back, to make sure you don’t do anything stupid, like chasing after them on your own.”

“You can’t do that. I need to—mmmhmmmhmm—” Loki’s hand flew up to his mouth. He hadn’t even seen his other self cast a spell. How could he be so powerful? He lunged towards himself, but as if someone had tied his shoelaces together, he landed gracelessly, his face buried in the carpet.

╰(•̀ 3 •́)—.*･｡ﾟ ο(_ _ο)彡

Usually, Pietro had to walk slowly so that Wanda could keep up, but this time, he didn’t need to walk quite so slowly. Though he was certain had no idea where she was going, his sister was filled with conviction, bordering on a frenzy. “We should go back,” he told her. “We don’t know this city, and we have no place to go.”

“We cannot go back, Pietro. You heard what the captain and the widow were going to obtain. If they find it, they might find out what we are.”

“So?”

“So, we don’t know what will happen! They are enemies of HYDRA. We were recruited by HYDRA; do you not remember?”

“But we left.”

“That doesn’t mean they wouldn’t hold it against us! Or, they might use the scepter to experiment on us like HYDRA did.”

“I don’t think that would happen. So far, they’ve treated us well.”

“Those HYDRA scientists treated us well at first. We cannot trust them just because they gave us food and a place to sleep.”

Pietro thought that what the Avengers had done for them went somewhat beyond providing food and shelter. It hadn’t been necessary for Steve to take him out running every morning, or for Ms. Potts to watch television with them, or for Tony to make them palacinka. Even though he didn’t exactly enjoy his sessions with Doctor Samson, he had come to understand that the man did want to help them, and didn’t have any ulterior motives. 

“But where are we going to go?” Pietro repeated. This is how we ended up with HYDRA in the first place, he thought. When Wanda gets emotional, she does not make good decisions, and I can do nothing but follow. He was getting a little tired of following. “Someday, you’re going to get one or both of us killed.”

Wanda stopped abruptly, nearly causing him to collide with her. She spun towards him. “You know I have always done my best to protect us.”

“I’m the one that’s supposed to protect you,” argued Pietro. “I’m your older brother.”

“Only by a few minutes, and between us, I’m the smart one and the mature one.” Wanda turned around and started down the sidewalk again.

Usually, Pietro would agree with her, but there were times when Wanda didn’t see things rationally. “Where are you even going?” he called out to her.

Again, Wanda stopped abruptly. “I don’t know!” Wanda screeched so loudly that some of the other pedestrians they had been walking among turned towards her. They had been speaking in Sokovian, and for all these people knew, they were a boyfriend and a girlfriend having a lover’s quarrel. 

If Pietro saw a girl scream in the middle of the street and he saw that a man had been following her, he would probably punch the man in the face and ask questions later. Cautiously, he stopped five feet away from her and tried to make his voice as calm and even as possible. “Wanda, please don’t make a scene. People will think I’m trying to hurt you.”

Wanda turned around.

“Or, I could be wrong,” he said, more to himself than to his sister. “They might be looking at the way your eyes are glowing and thinking you’re some sort of freak, or a bomb that’s about to go off.” 

In less than three seconds, he had closed the gap between himself and his sister, hauled her over his shoulder, and ran the rest of the ten blocks until he reached the massive park in the middle of the city. If Steve were there, he would have scolded him for not stopping to look both ways before crossing at intersections, but Pietro had never seen the point anyway, when he was perfectly capable of weaving in and out of the traffic without the traffic noticing.

He put Wanda down in the middle of some trees where there weren’t any people around. He might not be as smart as Wanda, but he was smart enough to know that appearing in the middle of the park out of nowhere could cause as much of a panic as his sister’s still glowing red eyes. “Wanda, snap out of it.”

Wanda didn’t respond. He wasn’t worried that she would hurt him; this just happened when she got upset sometimes. The powers that had taken up residence within her were extremely protective of her. Whenever she felt threatened, they took over. But Wanda knew that he would never hurt her, and hopefully her powers knew that as well. “Wanda, you have to stop that. We’re safe here, at least for now.”

Pietro closed the gap between them and gently gripped her shoulders. The crimson light from Wanda’s eyes faded, and she fell bonelessly into his arms. “We’re not safe,” she argued. “We’re alone in a strange country where we have nowhere to go and no one we can trust.”

“We can trust each other,” Pietro reminded her. Pietro debated with himself over whether or not he ought to say that he thought they could trust the people they had been living with up until twenty minutes ago, but decided that it was unlikely he would be able to convince her. He couldn’t blame her; after everything they had been through together, he knew how difficult it was for her to trust.

(ﾉ_；)ヾ(。。 )

“This type of flimsy dressing (or should we say undressing) gown comes from the French for ‘neglected.’”

“Negligée, obviously,” said his other self, half a second before the female Jeopardy contestant answered, “What is ‘negligée?’” 

The contestant selected “Word Origins” for eight hundred, and Alex Trebec read the next question. “Greek for ‘sun’ and ‘turned toward’ give these flowers their name.”

“Heliotrope,” said his other self, again a moment before the contestant could give their answer in the form of a question.

Again, the contestant selected “Word Origins,” this time for twelve hundred.

“The word for this crime against humanity was coined in the 1940’s; it was used in the official indictment of Nazis in 1945.”

A different female contestant buzzed in this time. “What is genocide?” 

His other self sighed. “JARVIS, change the channel.”

Loki lay on his side at his other self’s feet, unable to speak or move. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Thori enter the room. He headed for his water bowl, and after quenching his thirst, trotted in Loki’s direction. Loki felt a twinge of hope; surely his faithful canine companion wouldn’t stand to see his master treated so.

Thori licked him on the nose. He then turned around and trotted back in the direction he came from. Loki tried to call after him. “Mmmmm! Hmmm, mmmhmmm mmm…”

His other self let out an exasperated sigh. “Oh, for the love of—if I release you, do you promise to behave?”

Loki looked up at him, nodding vigorously. 

“You’re not stupid enough to try to lie to me, are you?”

Loki shook his head equally as vigorously. His other self flicked his wrist upward, and he felt his invisible magic binds dissipate. He pushed himself off the floor. “You have to let me go find the twins.”

“I don’t have to do anything.”

“But if I don’t find them and one of them gets hurt, it will be my fault. You said that your interest in me was because I have the potential to be good. How can I be good if I have their blood on my hands?”

“Don’t be melodramatic. I’m sure your little friends are at least moderately capable of taking care of themselves.”

“But they’re alone in a place they don’t know.”

“Oh, please. You aren’t worried about them. You’re worried that you’re going to get in trouble for losing them.”

“That isn’t true.”

“Oh? If it isn’t, prove it.”

“How am I supposed to do that?”

His other self shrugged, apparently indifferent.

Loki supposed he had no choice. “JARVIS, call Tony.”

“Do I sound like Siri to you?” asked JARVIS.

He rolled his eyes. “JARVIS, please call Tony.”

Over JARVIS’s speakers, he heard Tony’s phone ring. A lead feeling settled in his stomach. After the third ring, Tony picked up. “Hey, kid. Everything okay?”

Loki opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

“Kid?”

He forced himself to speak this time. “I’m really, really, sorry Tony.”

“Uh-oh. That doesn’t sound good. What’s going on?”

“I lost Wanda and Pietro.”

“What does that mean?”

“I went to my room to do something and when I came back, they were gone.”

“They have to be in the tower somewhere, Lokes. JARVIS wouldn’t let them leave.”

JARVIS spoke up. “Actually, Sir—”

“Ah, man—J, you’re joking right?”

“No, Sir.” JARVIS sounded guilty now. As Loki had suspected, the AI might not believe that Tony would delete him, but he still felt a need to please his creator.

Silence emanated from the other end of the line, and Loki was sure he was about to get yelled at; but that wasn’t what happened. “Thanks for letting me know what’s going on. Just stay where you are, and I’m going to be there as soon as I can. Just don’t you leave the tower, got it? Don’t go looking for them yourself or something.”

“Oh—okay, Tony. I promise I won’t.” Tony really wasn’t angry with him?

“I love you, alright? See you in a bit.”

“Okay.” Loki should have told Tony he loved him back, but again, he found it difficult to speak. Now he felt much guiltier than he had when he thought Tony would be angry. Why couldn’t Tony have yelled? Better yet, why couldn’t he have just kept better watch over the children in the first place, as he had promised Tony he would? Calling his other self could have waited; technically, he could have done it at any random point the future, so long as he remembered to take care of things at some point before his own death. He wouldn’t blame the man if he never trusted him again.

“Are you going to cry again?” asked his other self. “Honestly, of all the timelines I’ve been to and all the us’s I’ve met, you’ve got to be—” He didn’t get to finish his statement, because Loki overtook him with a surprise attack. “Gah,” said other Loki. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“It’s called a hug,” said Loki.

“I know that’s what it’s called. Why are you hugging me?”

“Because I need a hug, and no one else is here.”

“That is not a good reason. I demand that you unhand me at once.”

Loki settled into his own lap. “Admit it, you like this too.”

“Maybe I do,” said his other self. A hand snaked up Loki’s shirt, and the pad of his own thumb brushed against his nipple.

Loki pulled back just enough to look himself in the eye. “I know what you’re doing, and it won’t work. You can’t scare me off by pretending to—-”

“How do you know I’m pretending?”

“How do you know I wouldn’t be interested if you weren’t?” Loki knew he was playing a dangerous game, but he wasn’t about to admit defeat.

His other self responded by pushing him off his lap. He put a hand in the center of his chest, and pushed him down, pinning him against into the cushions. He then leaned over and nipped the top of Loki’s ear with his teeth, as if to prove he was serious. “Just so you know, you can stop this at any time,” he told him, his voice husky. “I don’t do this kind of thing unless it’s consensual.”

Maybe Loki shouldn’t have called his other self’s bluff to begin with, but now that they were here, the way he saw it, he had two options: he could call off their game of chicken, or he could double down.

He hated to loose, so he chose the latter, reaching for the buckle of his other self’s pants. As Loki expected he might, his other self tensed. “What do you think you’re doing?”

In response to the question, he began to unbuckle his other self’s belt, fumbling for his zipper.

His other self caught his hand. “Okay, that’s enough—” He was cut off as suddenly, they were caught in an indoor rainstorm.

Water dripped from his other self’s hair and into his mouth. Loki turned his head to spit it out. “JARVIS! What is this?”

“I’ve taken the liberty of activating the fire sprinklers,” JARVIS informed him. “I don’t think Sir would approve of—hmm, whatever this is.”

“Well, you can turn them off now, JARVIS! Odin’s beard—”

The sprinklers turned off, and Loki sat up. His other self stood, attempting to wring water from his shirt. “Well, that was unpleasant.”

“Which part of it?” asked Loki. “The part where I almost let you sexually assault me because neither one of us knows when a joke has gone too far, or the deluge?”

“If you don’t mind, I would appreciate a towel and some dry clothes.”

“Can’t you just use magic to dry off? Or summon a towel and some clothes? You seem to be able to do just about anything else you want to with magic.”

“I may be immensely powerful beyond your wildest dreams, but sometimes I still prefer to do things the old fashioned way. It isn’t good to use magic for everything.”

Frigga used to say that, thought Loki. “I guess Tony probably wouldn’t mind if you borrowed some of his clothes. He certainly has enough. Just let me dry off and change first, then we can go up to the penthouse.”

｀、ヽ｀ヽ｀、ヽ(ノ＞＜)ノ (/o＼*)｀、ヽ｀ヽ｀、ヽ

Loki sat curled into the sofa in the penthouse’s sitting area, reading while his other self cleaned himself up in Tony and Pepper’s bedroom.

The door to the other self opened, and other Loki stepped out. 

Loki looked up from the copy of Vanity Fair he had found on the coffee table, which happened to include a profile of Pepper Potts, Stark Industry’s newest CEO. “You changed.”

“You’re surprised? That is why I went in there.”

“I didn’t realize you were going to change that much,” Loki clarified.

“Stark must be part dwarf,” his other self said. “I’m not sure how you expected me to fit into any of his clothes.”

His other self did a spin, modeling a green satin nightgown that must have belonged to Pepper. 

“Your boobs are a lot bigger than mine,” said Loki. “I mean, obviously they’re bigger than mine when you’re that way and I’m this way, but what I meant was that they’re bigger than they are when I’m a girl. Is that natural, or did you use magic to make them look bigger?”

“That’s a rude thing to ask.”

“I just wanted to know because—-“

“Because you’re wondering if yours are ever going to get any bigger?” his other self guessed.

“Well, yes.”

His other self adjusted the top of her night gown, attempting to stuff the two over-sized flotation devices back into their slings. “It isn’t an illusion, but I might have used magic to enhance them somewhat. A little cosmetic modification isn’t a crime, you know.”

“Would you mind showing me what they really look like?”

Other Loki gracefully waved a hand in front of herself, and her chest shrank to a more reasonable, yet respectable size.

“I think they look better that way,” he told herself.

“They don’t hurt my back as much this way, I suppose.” Other Lady Loki sat down next to him. Then she sighed, and took hold of his upper arm, dragging him into a hug. “Damn. Much as I hate to admit it, in this form I can’t help but look at a smaller me and feel—almost maternal, I suppose.”

“Boobs notwithstanding, I’m not that much smaller than you are,” Loki pointed out. “You’re probably just more in touch with your feelings in this form; that’s the way it works for me a lot of the time. It’s not that we don’t have the same feelings when we’re male, but because of Odin, it’s hard for us to express them. Maybe you should talk to Doctor Samson when he gets back. He could explain it better.”

His other self pet his hair affectionately. “Perhaps I will.”

Chapter Text

Leonard had spent about thirty seconds spasming on the floor after drinking the eerily green contents of the vial, but when that had passed, the stiffness and pain from before melted away. Upon standing, he had discovered any injuries he might have had to be healed.

“How do you feel?”

“Better than I’ve felt since I was twenty,” he had told Betty. “Whatever that stuff is, it’s impressive.”

“You don’t feel strange at all?”

“No—should I?”

“Never mind, forget I said anything. Just stay here for a minute, while I take Bruce a snack.”

Maybe he should have been more concerned about the way Betty had abruptly ended that conversation, but he couldn’t help being a little distracted by the fact that he had gone from feeling as if he had been hit by a train to feeling as if he could run a couple of marathons without stopping. Whatever Betty had given him was nothing short of a miracle drug.

Now he waited impatiently in the room where she had left him. He would have preferred to go with her, but apparently, the security around Bruce’s cell was pretty tight. He had no idea how she was planning on getting him out, if his other self couldn’t. The next time he saw General Ross, he was going to have to give him a good punch in the jaw. Frustrated, he took a swing at the wall instead.

His hand went right through it. “Walls here must be super thin,” Leonard said aloud, even though there was no one to hear him. Embarrassed by his lack of self control, he looked around for something to cover the hole with, and saw a filing cabinet. Standing in front of it, he pushed it a bit to try to determine how heavy it was. As it offered no resistance at all, he decided it must be empty.

It was easy enough to lift the filing cabinet instead of dragging it. In fact, it felt like it weighed nothing at all. Was it made out of Vibranium or something? But who would have a filing cabinet made out of Vibranium, then stick it in a lab in a secret underground government facility? Talk about wasteful government spending.

As he carried the filing cabinet across the room, the drawer at the bottom began to slide out. Before he could do anything to fix it, the drawer fell out and a mass of papers scattered across the floor. For a moment, he just stared at them. Then he set the cabinet down and opened each door to see what it contained. To his surprise he found that every one of them was full. Something wasn’t right, he realized. By his estimation, a filing cabinet of that size, stuffed with papers, should have weighed at least five hundred pounds.

Calmly, Leonard approached the steel framed hospital bed he had woken up in, and lifted one side of it with one hand. He felt no more strain on his muscles than if he had lifted a piece of paper. “What the—”

Before he could finish that statement, Hulk burst through the wall to his right, which was the one he had punched a hole into. Leonard couldn’t help but think of the Kool-Aid man. He laughed out loud, not because he found it funny, but because it felt like his brain had just cracked in two.

Maybe he was asleep, and this was a dream. At least he wouldn’t have to worry about covering up the hole he had made. Betty stepped through the Hulk hole. “Come on, Leonard. Don’t just stand there, we need to go.”

∘˚˳°((o( ಠ益ಠ )o))∘˚˳°

“May I tell you something I haven’t told anyone else?” asked Loki, as he and other Lady Loki curled together on the sofa.

“If you must.” Other Lady Loki continued to pet him; he had at this point concluded that probably, she thought of him more as a life sized doll than anything else. The petting seemed to be primarily for her benefit, as he hadn’t been allowed to move.

Still, he felt compelled to ask for her advice, because there was no one else he could possibly tell his biggest and most pressing secret. “Recently, it seems I’ve fallen in love with Sif.”

Other Lady Loki stopped petting him. “That’s impossible. Are you certain you haven’t mistaken some other emotion for love? Abject hate, perhaps?”

“We don’t hate Sif and you know it.”

“Perhaps not, but romantic attraction is certainly not a feeling I would associate with Sif.”

Loki sighed. “I took a love potion.”

The lady snorted. “On purpose?”

“Odin was about to force me to marry Thor—well, I didn’t know it was going to be Thor at the time. Luckily, the potion didn’t make me fall in love with him, but Sif was the first person I saw after him.” Loki pursed his lips together. “Sigyn must have known that it was Thor waiting for me at the altar. Someday, I’m going to get her for that—”

“Sigyn,” Other Lady Loki murmured.

“Yes. In your timeline, did you have a Sigyn?”

Other Lady Loki shrugged. “Perhaps, perhaps not.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means that the timeline I’m from has quite a few holes in it, when you get right down to it. Perhaps Sigyn is my estranged wife, or perhaps she never existed.”

“Shouldn’t you know which one it is?”

Other Lady Loki spread her fingers towards the ceiling in the sort of vague gesture that Loki tended to make whenever he thought making vague gestures would distract someone from the fact that he had no idea what he was talking about. “The nature of our marvelous multiverse is both limited and infinite, knowable and unknowable.”

“I feel like you’re just making things up now.”

“While I cannot currently recall whether or not Sigyn is known to me,” Other Lady Loki continued, “the concept of a Sigyn isn’t entirely unknown to me. If you want to put her in her place, I can tell you exactly how to do it.” She leaned over and whispered a plan in his ear.

When she was finished, Loki arched an eyebrow at her. “Isn’t that a bit extreme?”

“I’ve given you my advice. It’s up to you what you want to do with it.”

“But what am I supposed to do about Sif? Do you know how I can make an antidote?”

“Not when I don’t know what went into the original potion. You did think to keep the container you drank it from, didn’t you?”

“No, I didn’t think of that,” admitted Loki.

“Idiot child.” Other Lady Loki sighed exaggeratedly. “In that case, there’s nothing I can do. You’ll just have to force your little girlfriend to give you the antidote the next time you see her.”

“Sigyn is not my girlfriend.”

“Right, because you’re madly in love with Sif.”

“You don’t have to rub it in,” Loki told her.

   _ 
  |  |
 ( ♥ )
 (___)

Hulk sprinted down the hallway, carrying Betty on his shoulders. Leonard found that he had no trouble keeping up with him. Surprisingly, the hallways felt empty. If this was a top secret military facility, where were the security guards? With all these labs around, shouldn’t there be other scientists? But then, Betty had been acting as if she hadn’t spoken with another person in months. He thought about asking her about it, but another question weighed more heavily on his mind. “Betty, what the hell did you give me?”

“If you’re worried about the increased muscular strength and the unusual shift in hair pigmentation, don’t. They’re just temporary side effects—I think.”

“You don’t sound sure. Wait, what was that about my hair?” Leonard stopped to examine his reflection in a highly reflective metal wall, and discovered that once again, his hair had been turned a shade similar to the green Loki had turned it as a practical joke one time. “Damn it, it just grew out!”

“To be honest, this is my first time trying the ‘Drink Me’ on a human test subject. But when I gave it to the lab rats, the effects only lasted a few hours.”

Being called a “human test subject” was disconcerting, but ultimately, Leonard decided that wasn’t the most troubling part of that statement. “What happened to the lab rats after a few hours?”

“It’s probably best if we focus on the present. Stop here!” Hulk put on the breaks, and Leonard had to swerve to keep himself from slamming into her. She slid from her perch, landing gracefully. “Sorry, this will be quick. I just can’t leave without Bruce and Leonard.”

“Betty, are you feeling alright? Last time I checked, I’m Leonard, and Bruce is—”

She cut him off. “They’re more than just lab animals. They’ve been the only friends I’ve had for the past few months, and they’re more like pets at this point. If I don’t take them with me, who knows what will happen to them.”

“You named your lab rats after us?” The first thing that came to mind was the Bronx Zoo’s Name a Cockroach After Your Ex campaign. On the other hand, maybe he ought to be flattered. Betty obviously felt affection for the animals.

“No, no, the rats are all—you know what, never mind what happened to the rats. Hulk, you wait for us here. You won’t fit through the door, and I think we should avoid knocking down anymore walls.”

Hulk snorted and dropped to the floor with an earth-shaking thump.

Betty swiped her ID card in front of the sensor next to the door, and Leonard followed her inside. As the door swung open, the lights came on, revealing a row of mostly empty cages on one wall.

The room was filled with happy barking, like the barking of a dog whose owner had just come home. Dogs then—she had named dogs after them. That wasn’t so bad, he thought, until he peered into one of the cages. “Oh, my God. Betty, are you sure we shouldn’t just put these things out of their misery?”

Betty frowned at him. “They aren’t miserable. I know what they look like, but—”

“That’s way too many eyes for a dog, Betty.”

“Just because Bruce has more eyes than most dogs have, that doesn’t mean he’s a monster.”

“How and why did you do this?”

“Just a little genetic engineering,” Betty told him. “So, you and Bruce—”

Leonard knew perfectly well that she was trying to change the subject, but he wasn’t sure what else he could say about Betty’s pets. “It just kind of happened. The Avengers brought me on as a consultant, and then as staff psychiatrist—”

“The Avengers? Is that a band?”

“Wow, you really have been isolated down here. Let’s just get the, um—dogs, I guess—and get out of here. We can catch up later.”

Betty opened one cage and then the other. She whistled. “Come on, Leonard. Come on, Bruce.”

“So the one with one eye is me, and the one with all the eyes is Bruce? Couldn’t we call them something else? If nothing else, it’s going to be confusing.”

Betty tilted her head to the side. “Sometimes I call Bruce ‘Brucie.’”

“Huh. That’s what Tony calls Bruce, when he isn’t calling him ‘Green Bean’ or something.”

“Tony?”

“Tony Stark.”

“You’re friends with Tony Stark now?”

“We live with him.”

Betty’s eyebrows crept upwards, but if anything, she looked a little impressed. “You guys are in a threesome with Tony Stark?”

Leonard snorted. “Tony wishes.”

Somewhere, an alarm went off. “We should get going,” Betty told him.                         

⊆° U)┬┬ﾉ  ⊆% )┬┬ﾉ

“Who the heck are you?”

“We’ve met before.” Other Lady Loki stared back at Loki’s guardian unappreciatively. “We shared a pack of horrid wine coolers, remember?”

Tony’s eyebrows knitted together, but then his face relaxed. “Oh! Sorry, I didn’t—hold on, what are you doing in my penthouse?”

“Random welfare check. You’ve failed, by the way. I’m taking this child with me.” Though Loki doubted she meant it, Other Lady Loki wrapped herself more tightly around him as if he were some sort of prize.

“Go ahead and try,” Tony told her. “See what happens.”

Loki watched as Tony and his other feminine self attempted to stare one another down. He knew they weren’t serious, but still, it was all somewhat thrilling; he had never been considered much of a prize before. At times, Sif and Thor had fought over him when they were younger, but the “loser” of those arguments had typically been the one compelled to watch over him when they would rather be training or off having adventures. More often than not, they had come to an impasse and he’d been dumped on one of Frigga’s handmaidens.

Their contest lasted nearly a minute, but then Other Lady Loki broke into a smile. “Fine, he’s all yours, then. Just don’t leave him home alone again.” She pushed Loki off of her, nudging him towards Tony.

Tony took hold of him possessively, and Loki melted into his arms. Then he remembered the twins, and felt guilty. “Tony, I’m so sorry. What are we going to do about—”

“Don’t worry, I know where they are.”

“You do?”

“And so does JARVIS.” Tony looked up at the AI’s camera. “Right, J?”

“Obviously, I’ve had the drones following them the entire time. If anything had been about to happen to them, I would have deployed one of the Iron Legion suits.”

“I’m so going to erase you,” Loki growled.

Loki expected that Tony would scold him for his vehemence, but instead, he addressed JARVIS. “What I’m still wondering is why you let them out of the tower in the first place.”

“I’m sorry, Sir,” said the AI, his tone genuinely contrite. “But you see, Miss Wanda asked.”

“What do you mean, she—oh no,” Tony groaned. “J, I knew you took after me, but I didn’t think you took after me that much.”

“While I resent the implication that I am anything like you, I admit I cannot fully comprehend the feelings I have for Miss Wanda, which I believe go beyond affection.”

“I’m just trying to figure out how inappropriate this is. I mean, you went online in what was it, 2000? So technically, you two are around the same age. Still, I’ve started to think of Wanda as a daughter, so it’s kind of like she’s your sister.”

Loki tugged on his sleeve. “I’m still you’re favorite, right?”

Tony arched an eyebrow at her. “You sure you want to ask that right now? You didn’t do a very good job babysitting.”

Loki knew he was joking, but if Tony thought it was a good idea to mess with her right now, two could play at that game. He made his bottom lip quiver. “I knew it—you don’t—you don’t love me anymore!”

Tony’s eyebrows crept higher. All the while, Other Lady Loki had summoned a bowl of popcorn, and sat watching as if it were all part of her favorite soap opera.

   εз  εз εз
 εз εз  εз    εз 

  \  POP  /   εз
   \_____/  εз εз

Leonard stood shoulder to shoulder with Betty in the now empty hallway. “Where do you think he went?”

“Hulk can’t have gone very far,” said Betty. “I don’t think he would have gone back in the direction we came from, so let’s just keep going and hope we run into him.”

Leonard followed Betty down the hallway, which twisted to the right. As they rounded the corner, once again, he nearly ran into Hulk’s backside. “Hey, we asked you to wait for us—”

Hulk interrupted him with a snort, and Leonard noticed the coiled tension in the muscles of his forearm. Leonard leaned around him to see what he was looking at. “Karla? What are you doing here?”

Karla Sofen wore a white lab coat like Betty’s. Her hair was down and she wasn’t wearing her glasses. But that wasn’t the most noticeable change in her appearance from the last time he had seen her. There was something about the way she held herself that was fundamentally different than before. Before, he might have described her as demure and maybe even a little frumpy, but now she was exuding more of a “femme fatale” vibe. She pursed her lips at him. "Shouldn’t I be the one asking you that? You’re the one who shouldn’t be here.”

“Yeah, I’m just going to ask again—what are you doing in the underground military facility where my ex-girlfriend’s father has kept her isolated for several months? I know it’s a small world, but it can’t be that small.”

Sofen took a step towards Betty, who had come around the corner to stand next to Hulk. She spoke to her as if talking to a child. “Betty, what are you doing out of your room? You know you’re not supposed to walk around the compound unsupervised.”

Betty backed away from her, looking uncertain. Leonard didn’t like that; she had never been a timid person. Hulk didn’t seem to like it any better. He stepped in front of Betty, grunting at Sofen in warning.

Sofen didn’t flinch. Either she was seriously underestimating what would happen to her if she continued to threaten Betty, or she had a reason for her confidence. That worried him, because Sofen was anything but stupid. She inched towards him. “You look tired, Bruce.”

Hulk began to sway unsteadily.

“Why don’t you just close your eyes for a moment?”

Hulk’s eyelids began to droop. He staggered forward a few steps, then fell forward onto his knees. Then he looked up at her as if in a trance.

“That isn’t possible,” Leonard objected. “This isn’t a movie. That’s not the way hypnosis works—”

“I’m just that good.” Sofen grinned. “Also, your boyfriend happens to be one of the most suggestible people I’ve ever met, so there’s that.”

“That can’t be right either,” Leonard protested. “Bruce is a genius.”

“I’ve found that whether or not one is open to hypnotic suggestion has little to do with intelligence and everything to do with vulnerability.”

“That’s it, I am definitely reporting you to the state medical board and filing an ethics complaint with the American Psychiatric Association.”

“That might be a little difficult, since you won’t be leaving here. You don’t seriously think I can let you go now that you’ve seen me here, did you?”

“Again, this isn’t a B movie. You realize you sound like a cartoon villain, right?”

“Perhaps, but at least I don’t rely on mixed metaphors.”

“That’s—really beside the point! What have you done to Bruce. And to Betty for that matter? Also, don’t you normally wear glasses?

“I suppose I might as well answer all your questions, since you really aren’t leaving here.” Sofen pulled an odd-looking gun out from the inside of her lab coat and pointed it him. “So, which question would you like to ask first?”

Leonard slowly put his hands in the air. He might have super strength, but he wasn’t at all sure that meant he was immortal, or that he could withstand being shot. He smiled at her sheepishly. “How about this one, Karla. What the hell is wrong with you? No, seriously; what happened to you that lead to this?”

“You want to psychoanalyze me?” The edge of Karla’s mouth quirked upward in a Joker-like grin. “Might be interesting. But first, why don’t we go somewhere more comfortable?”

(｀∇´)┳═一 (╯°-°)╯

Tony kept his eyes on the road as he drove down the 79th Street Transverse in the 2014 Porsche Cayenne Hybrid Pepper had gifted him for Christmas so he wouldn’t have to borrow her car anytime he needed to transport more than one other passenger. At first he had complained that the luxury crossover SUV looked too much like a minivan, but he had seemed to come around after he, Pepper, Loki, and the twins had all piled into it and taken a drive through the outer boroughs to see the Christmas lights that evening. He liked how it handled, he’d said; but considering they’d been stuck in traffic most of the time, Loki wasn’t sure how he could possibly gauge the car’s performance. 

The trees on either side of the road were covered in a thick layer of snow, and more accumulated as it fell. JARVIS had advised them that a winter snowstorm warning had been issued by the National Weather Service.

Loki didn’t like the snow, which only reminded him of Jotunheim and the secrets that had been kept from him for over a thousand years. Tony had once told him that it didn’t matter, but if he ever looked into the demonic crimson of Loki’s true eyes, would he still feel the same? Suddenly, Loki couldn’t stand the silence in the car anymore. “Am I really not in trouble?”

“For what?”

“For losing them.”

“Oh—nah, don’t worry about it.”

“But I was supposed to be responsible for them.”

Tony shrugged. “It’s okay.”

“You expected me to mess this up, didn’t you?”

“No, I didn’t. I mean—look, don’t take this the wrong way, but I wouldn’t have left the three of you alone in the tower if I didn’t have JARVIS watching you too.”

“So why didn’t you just leave JARVIS in charge?”

Tony shrugged again. “I didn’t want you to think I didn’t trust you.”

“But you don’t trust me,” Loki pointed out.

“I trust you, it’s just—look, would it make you feel better if you were in trouble?”

“Not really. Being grounded all the time is kind of getting old.”

“Good, because I’m tired of grounding you all the time.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, you don’t have to be sorry. You’re still a lot less trouble than I was as a kid. Hell, you’re less trouble than I was five years ago. Just ask Pepper.”

“She would probably say I’m less trouble than you are now.”

Tony cracked a smile, which made Loki feel a little lighter than he had been feeling. “True. Still, I like to think I’ve matured somewhat, especially since I became a parent.”

Loki arched an eyebrow at him. “Have you recently discovered that one of your past dalliances conceived?”

Tony’s smile turned into a scowl. “If that’s Asgardian for ‘did I just find out that I have a love child I never knew about, then no. Obviously, I’m talking about you. And the twins, as much as I’m pretty sure Wanda still hates me. And JARVIS, I guess.”

“I’m touched, Sir,” said a droll voice that emanated from the car’s sound system. “But what about Dum-E and U?”

“I’m on the fence as to whether they count as my kids, or if they’re more like a pair of cocker spaniels.”

“Might I remind you that Dum-E saved your life once?”

“Alright, fine. Maybe they’re more like a pair of border collies. Although that might be giving them too much credit, since I’m pretty sure Lassie never got stuck trying to back into an elevator.”

“I believe that Wanda and Pietro are currently located somewhere in the patch of trees to your right,” said JARVIS.

“Thanks, J.” Tony started to pull off the road.

“Are we supposed to park here?” asked Loki.

“Yeah, I’m probably going to get a ticket, but it’s fine. Not like I can’t pay it.”

“Sometimes, I don’t understand your mortal systems of government at all. It’s as if the wealthy aren’t subject to the same laws as everyone else.”

“Yeah well, that’s capitalism for you. Just get out of the car and help me look for your brother and sister.”

Loki doubted that Pietro thought of him as a sibling any more than JARVIS thought of Wanda as one, but he just shook his head as he opened the car door.

Chapter Text

Bruce and Leonard ran down the hallway towards Karla. When they reached her, Bruce stuck his nose up her skirt, and Leonard attempted to mount her leg.

“Ugh,” said Karla, kicking him off. “Who let these hideous creatures out of their cages? If I didn’t know that Ross would have my head for destroying his daughter’s precious research, I would put them out of their misery.”

Betty knelt in the middle of the hallway next to Bruce the human, who was currently naked and unconscious. No one else seemed to be particularly concerned that Bruce was naked, but thinking he might be cold, Betty took off her lab coat and covered him up.

Karla continued to point her gun at Leonard—the human, not the dog, who had whimpered and run down the hallway in the other direction when Karla snarled at him, Dog-Bruce following at his heels. “When he wakes up you can take him to your room,” she said, nodding towards Unconscious-Naked-Not a Dog-Bruce. “But I want the two of you to go straight there, understand?”

Betty knew that she couldn’t say no to Karla. Not when she put it that way, and not when she had a gun pointed at one of the men she now suspected she still might have feelings for. She nodded meekly.

“We’re going to my office,” Karla announced, this time nodding in the direction they had been headed before they had run into her. Leonard turned around, and she nudged him between the shoulder blades to make him walk forward.

 ;( •⌓•)  (-, – )…ZZZzzz

Following Tony, Loki trudged uphill through the snow that had begun to pile up. All he really wanted to do was go back to the car, but no matter what Tony said, he still felt responsible for losing his new “siblings.” Also, something told him that he shouldn’t let Tony confront them on his own when originally, they had confronted Tony because they wanted to kill him. Tony could call the suit if he had to, but there were still two of them and one of him. Even in the suit, he wasn’t sure Tony would be any match for Wanda’s powers if she lashed out at him.

Tony stopped and turned around. “Try to keep up, Lokes. The last thing I need is for you to disappear too.”

Loki rolled his eyes. “Do you want to hold hands?”

“I’m not sure that would be a bad idea. The snow is coming down pretty hard now. Maybe you should have waited in the car. Or back at the tower, for that matter, except that I didn’t really want to leave you alone again, or worse, leave you alone with yourself.”

“I can’t have stayed at home when you might need me,” Loki protested. He hadn’t been too keen on staying in the tower with the feminine version of his other self either. He’d had enough of being talked down to and treated like an inanimate object for one day.

“Look, I appreciate that you want to help, but it really wasn’t your fault that Frick and Frack went AWOL.”

“I might at least be able to convince Pietro to come back if you can’t,” Loki pointed out, even though he was almost certain that Wanda would be the one in need of convincing.

“I doubt it will take much convincing to get them to go back with us. They won’t want to stay out here in this storm. Where else are they going to go?”

Loki wondered if Tony was just trying to make him feel better, or if he was truly that much of a fool. "I’ve never walked in this part of the park before. Who’s the man on the horse with two swords? He’s wearing a crown. Is he an ancient American king?”

Tony squinted at the statue as if this was the first time he was seeing it too. “I actually have no idea who that is, but I’m going to say no. Americans don’t really do kings.”

“Then why is there a castle up ahead?” Loki asked, pointing to a green sign that said “Belvedere Castle.”

Tony shrugged. “Again, I have no idea, but I’m pretty sure there’s a gift shop in it. We do gift shops like nobody’s business. I’ve been thinking about putting one in the lobby of the tower to sell off the excess Avenger’s merchandise. Maybe we could even sell some of the Hawkeye stuff if we have Clint stand around down there and sign autographs for the tourists.”

Loki followed Tony up the stone steps that led to the oddly placed castle. They came to a strangely nondescript door that looked more like it belonged on a public restroom than anything else. Tony attempted to turn it, but it seemed to be locked. “They’ve probably closed up early because of the storm.”

Loki felt Wanda’s chaos magic pulse as if it were an erratic heartbeat. Wanda was agitated, he could tell that much. “They’re above us—or at least Wanda is. I can feel her magic.”

Tony glanced at his phone. “Tracking data backs that up. They must have gone in before they closed up and hid somewhere.”

“If they were normal children, I would agree with the likelihood of that scenario, but for all we know, Wanda convinced the people who were here to leave. Remember what she did to Clint?”

Tony backed up. Then he rammed into the door with his shoulder, as if he thought he could break it down that way. Predictably, he bounced off it, rubbing his shoulder and swearing. He disappeared back down the steps, and came back holding a rock the size of his head. Holding the rock over the door handle, he prepared to bring it down.

Loki thought about telling Tony that he could pick the lock using magic, but he found it much too fascinating to watch him use his mortal reasoning skills to try to break into the building; like watching a YouTube video of a monkey trying different primitive tools in order to obtain a banana a researcher had put just out of its reach.

Moments later, he watched Tony jump around holding his foot. The door knob hadn’t budged, and the rock lay where it had landed after smashing his guardian’s toes. “Alright, that’s it,” the man said into his phone. “J, deploy my right gauntlet.”

“Of course, Sir,” said JARVIS. “Shall I also make a donation to the Central Park Conservancy in advance?”

“Probably a good idea,” said Tony. A few moments later, something came flying towards them, and Loki sidestepped it just in time to avoid being punched in the stomach by a flying metal glove.

The gauntlet attached itself to Tony’s hand, and he pointed it at the door. He traced a circle around the handle with a concentrated laser.

“Is vandalism not a crime for the wealthy either, so long as they can pay for the damages?” asked Loki.

Tony glared at him. “Just don’t tell Pepper about any of this.”

“She’ll make you tell her what you did anyway when she gets the receipt for that donation.”

“True, but you weren’t here when I did it, got it?”

“Right, just like I wasn’t there when you parked where you weren’t supposed to. I’m learning so much today about just how much the wealthy can get away with in Midgard. Surely breaking and entering is a crime for commoners, but not for Tony Stark.”

“Hey, kids I’m responsible for are in there, and there’s a snowstorm coming through. Sometimes you have to bend a few rules to protect the people you care about.”

“I’ll remember that,” Loki warned him, though truthfully, what Tony had just said was what he loved most about him. Tony thought the way Loki did, able to see the gray in life that Odin, or Thor for that matter, never could.

Tony finished dismantling the lock and pulled the door open. On the other side of it was a room empty save for a large reception desk; they made their way through the door past the desk and into the adjoining room, and Loki felt another throb of Wanda’s magic. This time, it was less like a heartbeat and more like a small earth quake.

He grabbed Tony’s sleeve. “Maybe you should stay down here and let me go up first. Or at least call for the rest of your suit.”

“They’re just a couple of teenagers. We’re not about to face down a fire breathing dragon.”

“I’d feel better about it if we were,” said Loki. “In my experience, the combination of barely controlled magic and fluctuating estrogen levels present in an adolescent witch can be much more dangerous than a dragon. Especially during certain times of the month, if you catch my drift. I can’t speak from experience because I’ve never spent enough time in my other form to have such a cycle, but both Sigyn and Amora could be positively murderous—”

“If you think she’s that dangerous, maybe you should stay down here.”

“You’re the one who ought to be careful!” Loki objected. “You don’t have any magic to defend you. You’re not even wearing your suit.”

“Because I don’t want to make them think I’m the enemy.”

“They already think you are.”

“I know that was true at first, but I like to think I’ve made some progress with them.  Maybe you should stay down here and wait. I don’t want you to end up in a wizards’ duel with Wanda.”

“I’m not looking for a fight, but I’ll defend us both if I have to. You can’t feel it, but I can. She—”

Tony cut him off again. “Look, it isn’t your job to protect me. I understand that you’re scared, but I need you to trust me. Otherwise—” The man kept talking, but Loki tuned him out. As much as he wanted to, he wasn’t sure he did trust Tony. At least, he wasn’t at all certain he trusted his judgment. Clearly, he underestimated how helpless he would be in the thralls of even an unexperienced magician.

Perhaps he was partly responsible for that; after all, Loki was likely the only magic user Tony had fought directly, and he hadn’t bothered using magic to fight him at all; instead, when the scepter had failed him he had lost his temper and used his superior strength to toss him through a window. (Which wasn’t his style at all. How had Thor not realized that there was something seriously wrong with him?)

He hated it, but maybe he needed to show Tony what magic was capable of before he went blundering upstairs and got himself obliterated by Wanda’s magic. The man might never trust him again afterwards, but that was better than standing back while Wanda killed or permanently maimed him, either on purpose or by accident.

Loki took a step back. Then, with a wave of his hand, he sent Tony flying into the wall behind them and held him there with a matrix of glowing green threads.

“Ow! What the hell?” Tony struggled against Loki’s magic, but it was useless. “Damn it Loki, what do you think you’re doing? Let me go right now, or when I do get out of this, you’re going to be sorry.”

“I’m already sorry, Tony. But can’t you see now? If I can do this to you, there’s no way I can let you anywhere near a magic user as potentially dangerous as Wanda. You can threaten to ground me all you want—”

“Oh, I’m not going to ground you this time. If you don’t rethink this right now, there are going to be serious consequences, you hear me?”

 “Be that as it may, like you said, sometimes you have to break the rules to protect the people you care about.” Loki held his head held high; like Tony, he had never particularly been afraid of punishment when convinced that his actions were justified. Before his guardian could object again, he turned his back on him and headed for the winding narrow staircase that would take him up to the level where he knew he would find his “little sister.”

( ಥ_ಥ)⊃ﾟ.*･｡ﾟ (⊙෴ ⊙;;)

In addition to being roughly the size of one of the tower’s storage closets, the white plaster walls of Sofen’s office were bare with the exception of the kind of industrial analog wall clock you would see in a school or military facility and one of those posters with a cat hanging off of a branch, emblazoned with the words “Hang in There, Baby.” Karla waved at a couch that took up an entire wall of the tiny office. “Take a seat, Leonard. No, wait—I suppose I should sit there, doctor. You sit in my chair; you’re playing psychiatrist today.”

“I am a psychiatrist, Karla. I don’t just play at being one, like you do.” He sat down in the rolling office chair that she had pointed to, which faced the sofa.

“I’m currently licensed to practice psychiatry in both New York and Virginia, which is more than I can say for you. I’m not the one practicing illegally.”

Leonard realized she had a point; while he was still licensed to practice psychiatry in Virginia, when he’d moved to New York, he had never actually applied for a license to practice there. Technically, he was being paid by Stark Industries as a “consultant.” But truly, he had been running an illegal psychiatry practice for the residents of the tower, and had even written a few prescriptions. It was far from the only illegal activity going on in the tower—Bruce had also been practicing medicine without a license, Tony was hosting both a war criminal and an endangered animal, and then there was whatever Natasha and Clint got up to, which most recently involved pimping Natasha out to the son of a Hydra leader—but that didn’t make it right. Leonard felt his cheeks warm, but then he realized what Karla was trying to do. He gestured towards the sofa.  “You’re not going to make me start questioning myself, so you might as well sit down.”

Karla sat down primly, crossing her legs in front of her.

“Alright, you want to begin by telling me why you have an office here?”

Karla wrinkled her nose. “It’s hardly an office, but the general insisted it was the only space available. Nothing like what you’re used to working out of Avengers Tower, I’m sure.”

“I don’t know; I think it’s kind of cozy. Personally, I prefer a more intimate space.” Leonard crossed his legs as well, mirroring her body language.

The edge of Karla’s lip quirked upward. “I know what you’re doing.”

“I’m sure you do,” he said, smiling at her gently in the way one might smile at someone you suspected of being completely unhinged. “Is it working?”

Karla cackled in response. Leonard kept smiling.

“Fine, if you’re not going to answer that, let me ask something else. Have you been working for Ross this entire time, or did he approach you after you started seeing Bruce?”

Karla scowled at him. “I don’t want to talk about Ross. You wanted to psychoanalyze me, didn’t you? You should be asking about me, not him.”

She still held what appeared to be some sort of sci-fi laser gun in her lap, so he decided it would be best to humor her. “Alright, fine. Why don’t you tell me about your childhood?”

Karla smiled like the cat who got the cream, then stretched out on the sofa with her hands clasped over her chest. “I grew up in Los Angeles. My father was Charles Stockbridge’s personal assistant.”

He had heard the important parts of her back story from Tony. “You were friends with Stockbridge’s daughter, Deanna,” he prompted.

“We were more than friends. Deanna and I were raised as if we were sisters. Daddy and I lived in Charles’ house. Ostensibly, for convenience sake, so that Daddy would be around to take care of whatever Charles needed at any time of day. But what most people didn’t know about Charles Stockbridge is that he and my father were domestic partners.”

That certainly wasn’t what he’d expected to hear, but he let Karla keep going.

“I thought of Charles as a second father. But do you know what he did when Daddy died? He had a heart attack when he was forty-two. Anyway, Charles sent me to live with my mother in Van Nuys.”

“And how did that make you feel, Karla?”

Karla made the same face she had when she had spoken about her office. “How do you think it made me feel? Overnight, I went from a mansion in Beverly Hills to the Palm Terrace Apartments. He said that there was nothing he could do, because he had no legal right to keep me. But I don’t even think he tried. He didn’t want me anyway; I wasn’t his real daughter. Thinking back on it, he always favored Deanna.”

“How do you mean?”

“Deanna always got the best of everything—the largest bedroom, designer clothing, things like that.”

“And you didn’t get any of those things?”

“Mostly, I got Deanna’s cast-offs! ‘Oh Karla, this dress I just bought looked better on me in the store, but why don’t you take it? You look good in anything,’” Karla said in a high-pitched voice that must have been her approximation of the girl she had thought of as a sister.

Leonard wasn’t sure that sounded like an insult, but he reminded himself to stay neutral. “And how did that make you feel?”

“You ask me that whenever you’re judging me,” Karla accused.

“I’m not judging. Not for your feelings about things that happened when you were a child, anyway. You can’t blame me for judging you a little about some of your more recent decisions, since they involve psychiatric malpractice, harming people I love, and threatening me with a gun.”

Once again, Karla grinned proudly. Then her eyes drifted back toward the ceiling and she continued. “Charles cut off all contact with me, and didn’t even offer to help with my expenses when I went to college. Instead, my mother worked three jobs to put me through medical school.”

“Something about the way you said that makes me think you’re not entirely grateful for her sacrifice.”

“Seeing my mother’s smiling face at my graduation, I’d never felt so much contempt for anyone in my life. What kind of idiot goes to such extremes to put the needs of someone else before their own?”

Leonard wasn’t sure what to say to that, so he asked a question instead. “Why did you decide to become a psychiatrist?”

“Why do you think? I wanted to learn how to make people do what I wanted them to. And I was good at it. It was easy enough to convince Deanna that I was entitled to at least half of what she had inherited from Charles.”

“Are you sure she wouldn’t have agreed with you if you hadn’t manipulated her into it? Like you said, you were raised as sisters.”

“She might have, I suppose. Deanna was like my mother, in a way. They were both much too sentimental for their own good.”

“Tell me about what happened with Deanna.”

“It sounds like you already know about it.”

“I want to hear about what happened from you.”

“Oh, fine. Deanna signed over half of the estate, but I thought, why not have it all if I could? So I convinced her that her life had no meaning. Whenever anyone looked at Deanna Stockbridge, all they saw was Charles Stockbridge’s daughter. She would have to do something remarkable to change the way people remembered her.”

“Like lead a police chase over a pedestrian trail and crash into the Hollywood sign?”

Karla shrugged. “Deanna tried to be an actress for a while, but she didn’t have any talent. Even her father’s name wasn’t enough to get her anything but bit parts.”

“But now everyone remembers her, because of the way she died. That’s a high price to pay for fame, if you ask me.” The most disturbing thing was that in some ways, Karla reminded him of Loki. Both of them felt rejected by men they had thought of as fathers, and both had siblings they felt had received preferential treatment. They had felt out of control over their own lives, and had reacted by attempting to control others. He had even heard Loki use the word “sentimental” in the same way Karla had said it; as if it were something distasteful. But Loki had ended up hurting himself more than anyone else, whereas Karla—

Karla pushed herself up off the couch. “What are you implying? I didn’t tell her to kill herself.”

“You just said—”

“I didn’t want her to kill herself! I just wanted to convince her to sign the rest of the estate over to me and go start her life over in a commune or something.”

“But she did kill herself, and you felt responsible,” Leonard guessed.

“No. It wasn’t like with Daddy, I didn’t—” Karla trailed off, then glared at him, her eyes filled with suspicion.

“What do you mean, ‘it wasn’t like with Daddy,’ Karla? Do you think you had something to do with your father’s death?”

“I didn’t mean what I wrote in my diary, I was just angry. Deanna got a car for her sixteenth birthday, and Charles was going to buy me one too, but Daddy said no, he had allowed him to buy me too many things already and he didn’t want me to become spoiled—”

Leonard couldn’t help thinking that Karla’s father might have been too late there, but he kept the thought to himself. “What did you write?”

“It’s none of your business,” snapped Karla, but it didn’t matter; Leonard could guess.

     ^---^      
\(ﾐㅇ x ㅇﾐ)/ - hang in there, baby

Bruce sat up, looking around as if seeing the hallway for the first time. Betty couldn’t blame him; it must be extremely disorienting to wake up in strange places without any clothes all the time. She had been sitting against the wall watching him sleep, but now she leaned towards him, stretching out the muscles in her own back and preparing to move. “You awake?”

“Where’s my clothes?”

“In shreds on the floor of your cell, I suspect.”

“Cell?”

“You don’t remember? My father locked you in there.”

“Why? Did I do something bad?”

Maybe she shouldn’t have given Bruce that cupcake. She had been aware that there might be side effects, but she certainly hadn’t expected short-term memory loss to be one of them. She reached towards him to put a comforting hand on his arm.

He drew away from her. “Who are you?”

Make that long-term memory loss. “Bruce, you know who I am.”

“I’m not Bruce. I’m Robby, and I’m this many.” Bruce held up six fingers, five on one hand and one on the other.

“Oh, shit—I’ve completely lost track of time in here, but please tell me it’s April Fools’ Day and that this is a joke.”

“Robby’s” eyes grew wide. “You said a bad word.”

“I’m sorry.” Betty forced herself to smile in a way that she hoped would be comforting; meanwhile, in her head she screamed every curse word she knew. She stood and stretched her hand towards her new young friend. “Why don’t we go find you some clothes, okay?”

The little boy in a grown man’s body grasped her hand and pulled himself up shakily, making sure to keep Betty’s lab coat pulled tightly around him. Luckily, it was one that had always been a bit too large for her, or it might not have covered him completely. She led him down the hallway in the direction of her room. Hopefully, she could find him one of her own t-shirts and a pair of sweatpants that would fit, otherwise she wasn’t sure what she was going to do.

Chapter Text

Wanda’s behavior had only become more erratic since they had found the little castle hidden in the park and turned it into their base, thought Pietro. 

It had been easy enough for her to suggest to everyone there that they should leave before the storm came through. She hadn’t even needed to do anything to them directly, when she made the lights flicker on and off, the person behind the counter had gotten nervous and decided to close up. Then all they had to do was hide in one of the stairwells when they went around to usher everyone out before locking up.

He watched her pace back and forth. Then she stopped, tilting her head, listening. “Someone’s here.”

“No one else is here,” objected Pietro. “You’re just letting your nerves get to you.”

“No, someone is here. I can feel them—they have powers that are similar to mine, and they’re strong—”

“No one has powers like you. We are the only ones who survived what HYDRA did to us.”

“Loki has powers.”

“Small ones,” Pietro allowed. “He can turn from a boy to a girl, and I’ve seen him make little illusions to amuse himself, but he can’t—”

“He is a god, is he not? I doubt we have seen all he is capable of.”

“Maybe; but if it is Loki, he won’t hurt us.”

“He will if Stark tells him to.”

“I don’t think he wants to hurt us either. If they are here, they have come to take us back to the tower.” Pietro pulled his jacket tighter around himself. “If it is them, I think we should go with them. It’s freezing.”

“The cold doesn’t bother me,” Wanda muttered, but she seemed to have become fixated on the door behind him.

Pietro heard footsteps. He turned to look, and Loki was standing in the doorway. He smiled at Wanda. It wasn’t exactly a nice smile, but it was nothing dangerous. Likely, he was annoyed with them for slipping out of the tower when he had been left in charge of them. “I don’t suppose you’d like to come home now, do you?”

A red light limned Wanda’s outstretched hands. “Go away.”

Pietro stepped between her and Loki. “Wanda, stop. He isn’t threatening us.”

“No. Stark must have sent him here.”

“He didn’t,” said Loki. “In fact, I think Tony’s pretty upset with me right now. He wanted to talk to you himself, but I couldn’t let him do that when you can barely control your own powers. The first rule of magic is that you have to be able to control your emotions, Wanda. My mother always impressed that upon me, from the time I began learning.”

Wanda lifted her chin defiantly. “I can control my emotions.”

“Can you? You don’t seem in control to me.”

“I agree.” Pietro kept himself positioned in between them in case something happened. “You haven’t been thinking clearly since they brought up the scepter.”

“Scepter?” Loki’s voice changed to something uncertain and tense. “What do you two know about it?”

Pietro couldn’t see the harm in telling him, so he ignored the look Wanda gave him and turned towards Loki. “Before we came here, we had escaped from a HYDRA facility. They were the ones who gave us our powers.”

“And they used the scepter to do it.” Loki’s breathing became more rapid, and his eyes seemed unfocused. Pietro wondered if he was going to be physically ill. “Why didn’t you tell anyone before now?”

“It is not so easy to trust them.” Pietro wanted to say more, but he wasn’t sure how to explain it in a way that Loki, who seemed to trust everyone in the tower implicitly, would understand.

“It’s difficult for me to trust anyone anymore either, but you can trust Tony and the others. I’ve wronged them far more than either of you, and they’ve done nothing but try to help me.”

“What do you mean?”

For all his talk about controlling emotions, Loki seemed to be getting agitated. “I mean that I’m the one who brought that stupid scepter here in the first place. You know about the Chitauri invasion, don’t you? Don’t you realize that I’m the one who led it?”

He felt frozen by the words Loki had spoken, more so than he had felt because of the cold. He had known about the Battle of New York. Everyone on Earth knew about it. But he hadn’t realized that either the scepter or Loki—his Loki—had been involved in it.

Wanda stepped around him. “You brought it here?”

Loki blanched. “I didn’t want to. I’m sorry, it was all a mistake.”

Wanda wasn’t hearing him, Pietro realized. Her face had contorted into an expression of pure hatred, and once again she had lifted her hands, limned in red light. Loki had taken notice as well, and held his own hands up defensively, limned in green.

They were two nuclear missiles trained upon one another, but Pietro wasn’t fool enough to think that mutually ensured destruction would prevent them from launching themselves at one another. A moment before it happened, he stepped in between them again.

He was hit in the front by Wanda’s magic and in the back by Loki’s, and for a moment, it felt like he had been struck by lightning and set on fire at the same time. As his vision started to fade, he dropped to his knees.

In the background, he could hear Wanda call out his name. Loki said something under his breath that rhymed with “duck me.” It might have been the first time Pietro had heard him swear. If his mouth hadn’t been flooded with blood, he might have laughed.

“I’m going to get Tony,” he heard Loki say.

At least he wasn’t cold anymore. For a moment, his eyes opened a fraction of an inch, and though his vision was blurred, he could see two figures hovering over him. One was a terrified looking Wanda, and the other was a woman with dark hair. She reminded him of Loki; she even wore his favorite shade of green, but she wasn’t Loki. For one thing, she wore a lot more eye makeup than he did.

(/>-<)/ ｡.*:・’ﾟ(＋_＋).*:ﾟ･’ﾟﾟ:。’･ﾟ\(｀-´\)

Betty had found Robby a heather gray t-shirt that fit even if it was on the snug side. Pants had been more of a problem, but a pair of flannel pajama bottoms—in purple, which had always been Bruce’s color—had done the trick, even if they were a little short.  Robby had insisted on dressing himself, but he hadn’t been shy about changing in front of her. She had looked away anyway; it was nothing she hadn’t seen before, but it seemed wrong to look when he had mentally regressed to the age of six.

Bruce had always gone by his middle name; he hadn’t liked being called “Robert,” though she had never known why. Had he ever gone by “Robby,” even as a child?

At least he made a fairly low-key six-year-old. Betty had very little idea what to do with a child; she had been an only child herself, and had never had any inclination to offer her services as a babysitter when she’d been in high school, as some of her friends did. She had been too focused on preparing herself for college, and since her family had been well off, she had never needed extra money.

As an adult she had only occasionally considered that she might want to have a child in the future, and that had been mostly when she had been dating Bruce or Leonard—they both seemed like they would make good fathers, and if they had told her they wanted children, she likely would have agreed, provided that they didn’t expect her to become a stay-at-home mom. Though if either of them had had wanted to be a stay-at-home dad, she would have supported it.

But Bruce had never expressed an interest in having children, and Leonard had only mentioned it once, on their first date—which had felt more like an interrogation than a date. They had met through an online dating website, and the man had come prepared with a list of questions for her, written on index cards.  When he had asked if she had wanted children, she had told him she didn’t know. It must have been an acceptable answer, because he had then proceeded to the next question. (Their second date, which she had gone on only because it felt preferable to sitting around wondering what Bruce was doing, had gone better, and eventually, she had decided that Leonard’s little quirk of being entirely too organized was actually kind of cute.)

Betty only closed her eyes for a moment to rest them, but when she opened them, she realized that Bruce—no, Robby—had disappeared. “Robby?” she called out.  The door to the room was still closed, and she hadn’t heard it open. The door to the bathroom was open, so she poked her head inside it and looked around, but it only took a moment to determine that there was no one inside, since the shower was enclosed in glass and the room didn’t have a closet.

Her room (which felt a lot like a dorm room or a prison cell, when you got down to it) had no closet either. The only reason storage hadn’t been more of an issue was that she didn’t have much other than clothes, toiletries, and the research materials she kept in her lab. There was only one place left to look. She got down on her knees and peered under the bed. “What ’cha doing down here?” she asked Robby, trying her best to affect all the non-threatening cheerfulness of a kindergarten teacher.

He shrugged in response.

“Okay, well—if you need to hide under the bed, that’s okay. Just let me know if you need anything. I’ll be right here.”

Betty sat down at the desk next to her bed and put her head down on her arms.  Then something wrapped itself around her leg. She nearly screamed, but stopped herself. She looked down at Robby. “Need something?”

“I’m hungry.”

At least that would be easy to handle. “I can go get you something to eat, but I need you to stay here. Just don’t leave the room, okay? I’ll be right back.”

Robby nodded and Betty smiled at him, lightly ruffling her fingers through his hair.

(;;ᵔ ᵕ ᵔ)>(ಡ_ಡ)

Tony struggled against the magical bonds Loki had cast on him, but it was no use; Loki had been right, he had no defense against magic. He couldn’t cut the bands with a blast from the gauntlet he was still wearing; trying had only resulted in the blast ricocheting off the walls. He had ducked just in time, only narrowly avoiding death by accidental self-Lasik surgery.

When he got his hands on that kid, he was going to—well, he didn’t really know what he was going to do. He had meant it when he’d told Loki he would never hit him, but now he couldn’t help wondering if the kid might be overdue for a spanking if he thought it was okay to ignore everything Tony said and run headfirst, alone, into a situation he thought dangerous. While he appreciated that Loki wanted to protect him, that wasn’t his job; it was supposed to be the other way around.

Tony had asked the kid to trust him, and it hurt that he couldn’t do that. Although come to think of it, maybe he had set a bad example by constantly putting himself in danger and ignoring the pleas of everyone around him to be more careful—yeah, when he thought about it, this situation was probably his own fault. Still, if Loki got himself killed again, he knew he would do whatever it took to make sure it didn’t happen a third time. Maybe that made him a hypocrite, but it didn’t matter. He was beginning to suspect that being a responsible parent meant he’d have to be a hypocrite sometimes.

The green threads that had been holding Tony in place dissipated. Not expecting it, he fell to his knees. A second later, Loki came running down the stairs. He kept repeating the same thing over and over. “Tony, I’m sorry. I’m sorry! I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m—”

 Tony brushed the concrete dust from the knees of his pants as he stood. “Okay, I get it, you’re sorry. You’re not as sorry as you’re going to be, though.”

“You don’t understand! I think I’ve killed him—I’m sorry, Tony, I should have listened to you.”

It was only then that Tony realized how shaken he looked. “Wait, what did you just—”

“Pietro! He got in the middle, the stupid boy. If he’d just stayed back, Wanda’s magic and mine might have neutralized each other, but instead I’m afraid it’s neutralized him instead—”

As concerned as he was for Loki, Tony pushed past him and ran up the stairs. At the top of them, he found Wanda kneeling next to her brother, tears rolling down from her eyes as blood bubbled up from his mouth.

He pulled his phone out of his pocket. “J, send an ambulance.”

“Right away, Sir.”

“Help him!” Wanda shrieked up at him.

Tony could just kick himself; If only he hadn’t made fun of Cap for being an oversized boy scout when he had suggested everyone on the team take a class and get certified in first aid, he might have had a better idea of what to do now. “We’re getting him help, Wands, I promise. Just don’t try to move him, okay?” He knew that much; you weren’t supposed to move someone when they were badly injured, in case they had a spinal injury. Otherwise, he would have told JARVIS to send the suit and carried Pietro to the hospital himself.

('､o_ヽ)＿ヽ(`o´；\)

Betty knew what Bruce liked, but she wasn’t sure if Robby shared his tastes, so she had brought back as many different things as she could carry from the refrigerator in the break room. As it turned out, he wasn’t a picky eater at all.

She wondered if she should tell him to slow down, but then she reminded herself that not only did he have an adult sized stomach, that stomach probably hadn’t had much in it in the last forty-eight hours or more. When Bruce was distressed—which he must have been in order to turn himself over to her father willingly—he had always had a tendency not to take care of himself.

She couldn’t help smiling as she watched him lick the pudding off the foil top of a pudding cup. It wasn’t funny, she reminded herself. Something had gone very wrong with Bruce, although she wasn’t quite certain what, or whether or not it had been her fault.

She tried desperately to work out if it was possible for the “Eat Me” to do this. All it was supposed to do was trigger Bruce’s transformation, but maybe triggering the transformation that way had been so traumatic for Bruce that it had made him forget the last thirty-eight years of this life.

When Robby had finished eating, Betty decided that she should find something to keep him occupied, so she had given him her tablet. He seemed to be fascinated with it, and though he didn’t seem familiar with the interface at first, he had quickly figured it out for himself. She had thought he might want to use it to play a game or watch something on YouTube, but maybe she shouldn’t have been surprised when the first thing he figured out how to do was open an advanced biology text. Consequently, it was one that she and Bruce had co-written about a year before the ill-fated Gamma experiment.

Bruce was a genius, after all. “Do you understand that?” she asked Robby.

He nodded and looked up at her. “I should. We wrote this together, didn’t we?”

“Bruce?” Betty sighed in relief. “How long have you been—well, you?”

“What do you mean?” Bruce looked down at himself. “Betty, how did I get here, and what am I wearing?”

Betty sat next to him on the bed, and laid her head on his shoulder. “The short version of it is that first you were Hulk, and then you were a little boy named Robby. And you’re wearing my pajamas, because I didn’t have anything else for you to wear.”

“I was who?”

“Robby. He told me he was this many.” Betty held up six fingers.

“Oh my God—Betty, if that’s a joke, it isn’t funny.”

“I’m not joking.”

Bruce put the tablet aside and buried his head in his hands. “I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. He was sweet. You make an adorable six-year-old.”

Bruce groaned. “This is so embarrassing.”

“You don’t need to be embarrassed.” She put a hand on his knee. “Whatever’s going on with you, Bruce, it isn’t your fault.”

“I thought Karla was lying when she told me I had another alter.”

“Alter? Is that what that was—you really have multiple personality disorder?”

“They call it ‘Dissociative Identity Disorder’ now, but yeah, I think so. Hulk is an alter, but now it looks like there might be others.”

“That’s so weird—I mean, it’s not weird, that’s not what I meant. I just never saw any signs of it when we were together. You were always you. I mean, there was the role-play—”

“Role-play?”

Betty’s lip quirked up and she wiggled her eyebrows at him. “You know; when you pretended your name was David—”

“Betty, if that’s a joke, it isn’t funny.”

“I’m not joking. You really don’t remember? David was, you know, kind of rugged and just so sexy—”

“Rugged—me?”

“Mm-hmm, in those tight denim jeans and that flannel shirt with the wide collar. Kind of like a sexy lumberjack.”

“I don’t think I’ve worn denim and flannel together since college, when the nineties grunge look was in.” 

Betty shook her head. “You definitely had more of a seventies retro vibe going on.” Bruce had to be joking. He had to remember. “Oh, come on! You used to pick me up in your arms and carry me to the bed—”

“Sorry, but I definitely don’t remember that.” Bruce looked around at the mess spread over Betty’s bed, left over from the snacks he had eaten. “Did I eat all this?”

Betty and Bruce stared at one another. Bruce opened his mouth, like he wanted to ask something else, but a knock at the door interrupted him. Betty got up, motioning for Bruce to stay back from the door until she found out who it was.

∘⁖⁎❄∘⁖⍋⍋⁎∘❄∘⁖⁎ 🚑 ==

After Tony had left him to tend to Pietro, Loki had found it insufferably hot inside the castle. Feeling a little numb, he had wandered out into the snow. He hated snow, but at that moment, he hated himself more. Not only was he likely responsible for Pietro’s death, now he suspected he had been responsible for a good deal more of his and Wanda’s suffering.

And then there was the fact that no matter what he had said before, Tony was definitely going to send him back to Asgard now, and Loki wouldn’t blame him. If he had ever turned his magic on Odin the way he had turned it on Tony, it wouldn’t have mattered the reason, the All-Father would have struck him dead, or at the very least, made good on his previous threats to imprison him in a tree for the rest of time.

He now stood at the edge of the pond the castle overlooked. Loki crouched down and stuck his hand into the snow, then watched the skin of his wrist take on a light blue tint. He sneered at his own reflection in the pond. He couldn’t stand the sight of his own face right now, and the face he was seeing wasn’t even his true face—it was the face of an Asgardian or Midgardian, and he wasn’t either one of those things.

A monster ought to look like a monster. Loki closed his eyes and concentrated on calling forth the appearance he felt he most deserved in that moment.

When he opened his eyes, a pair of blood red eyes stared back at him from the surface of the water. He bared his teeth; was it just his imagination, or did they look sharper? It was difficult to tell in the imperfect mirror of the pond. He found himself fascinated with the tattoo-like scars on his face. More adorned his arms. Did they cover his entire body? He had never had the opportunity to examine himself before. Normally, he wouldn’t consider undressing in public, but there was no one around to see him.

Besides, as many times as he had dressed up one of Thor’s goats as a jest, he had always found it somewhat presumptuous of animals to wear clothes. He stripped off his jacket and his sweater, and dropped them into the snow beside him.

He ran a finger over a ridge that went from the top of his shoulder to just below his left collar bone. Were Jotunn born this way, or did they carve these markings into their young as soon as their mothers birthed them? So little was known about them as a species, other than the fact that they were hideous brutes who cared little for the lives of others. I’m no exception, thought Loki; his other self-had been wrong about him.

The noise of an approaching ambulance’s siren —it would be much too late, he thought—roused him from his self-loathing, and he realized that it wouldn’t do to be spotted in this form by the mortal first responders Tony had summoned. He tried to call forth his female humanoid form, which was the one he normally wore in public to avoid being recognized as the war criminal who had once terrorized the city.

Loki’s chest swelled obediently at his command; his waist narrowed and his hips widened. But try as she might, she couldn’t make her skin shift back to a color that mortals would accept as normal, or hide the scars that adorned it. Loki swore under her breath. She hadn’t had difficulty shape shifting in months. Why was this happening now?

She decided she had better hide herself until the paramedics had taken Pietro away. Poor Pietro, who was most likely dead already. Perhaps she shouldn’t have been so dismissive of his feelings for her. That anyone would love someone like her had to be nothing short of a miracle, but had she appreciated it? No; but perhaps that was to be expected of a monster.

Monsters don’t feel love—after all, how likely was it that Laufey had felt anything at all when he had abandoned his own child to the elements?

Chapter Text

Pepper was smiling, but Tony knew knew it wasn’t an “I’m so glad to see you” smile. No, he was pretty sure it was a “you’re in so much trouble” smile. She crossed her arms over her chest and spoke in a voice that was much too chipper for his comfort. “So, do you want to explain how this happened?”

Tony smiled sheepishly back. “You mean how I gave myself a hernia or how I ended up handcuffed to this hospital bed?”

“Why don’t you start with how you assaulted a police officer?”

“I didn’t mean to. I meant to assault a brain surgeon, but he ducked.”

Pepper shook her head. “I’m going to need a lot more explanation than that.”

(ง •̀෴•́)ง

Tony watched the paramedics load Pietro’s stretcher into the back of the ambulance, which had driven up the walking trail as far as it could to get as close as possible to the castle.

The police were there too, which he probably should have expected, given that technically, they had all been trespassing inside a currently closed public attraction. A plain clothed female officer approached him, holding out her badge. “Mister Stark, I’m going to need to ask you some questions.”

“Not now,” he snapped at her, which probably wasn’t the best idea, but one of his kids was badly injured, another was beside herself with grief for her brother, and the other was—wait, where the hell was Loki anyway? “Damn it—Wanda, get in the back of the ambulance with your brother and stay with him, okay? I’ll follow in the car, but first I have to find your other sibling.”

Wanda looked at him blankly—she seemed to be in shock or something—then obediently followed the paramedics and got in the back of the ambulance.

“Mister Stark,” the police officer repeated, but he didn’t have time to talk to her.

“Look, can it wait? I have to find my other kid.”

“Your other kid? Are these kids yours?”

“Yes, these kids are mine! I’m their dad, I claim full responsibility for them, and I don’t care who knows about it.” Pepper might have his head for making that little announcement, but so be it. At least there weren’t any press around.

“Look, I’m really going to have to ask you some questions now. Why were you all—”

“I plead the fifth.”

“Mister Stark, you can’t plead the fifth because you aren’t under arrest, although you will be if you don’t—MISTER STARK.”

Tony waved her off as he saw a set of what he hoped were footprints in the snow and began to follow them in the direction of the pond. He was probably lucky she didn’t shoot him, or at least try to tase him. Instead, she followed him down to the pond, where Loki’s coat and sweater lay on the ground. He felt his heart beat faster. My fault, thought Tony. I should have said something to him—told him it would be okay, and to stay put.

“Sir, I can help,” said the cop. “If we have to, we can organize a search party. I just need you to answer some questions, starting with the name and age of the child who’s missing. Do you think you could do that?”

“I, uh—” Damn it, what was he going to do now? He couldn’t tell her he was looking for the war criminal who lead the Chitauri invasion—could he? No, she definitely wouldn’t get it, especially considering how many first responders had gone down that day. “He’s eighteen,” he told her instead. “So, not technically a child—”

The officer seemed to relax, if only a little. “I see. Does he have any developmental or emotional issues that would render him unable to care for himself?”

Definitely yes, thought Tony, but he couldn’t say that. “No, no—it’s just that with the storm coming through, I need to find him. I don’t think he has his phone on him, so he wouldn’t be able to call a cab or anything. And uh, he’s not from the city. He hasn’t been living here long, so I don’t know if he could find his way home on his own—”

“I understand, Sir. When you get down to it, being eighteen isn’t that different from being seventeen, is it? I can help you look for him.”

“That’s really not necessary.”

The lady cop peered at him through narrowed eyes. “Sir, is there something you’re not telling me?”

This is why they shouldn’t let women be cops, thought Tony. They were just too perceptive, and it was entirely unfair. “Look, the truth is he does have some emotional issues, okay? That’s why I need to be the one to find him.”

“Do you believe him to be a danger to himself or others?”

Yes, on both counts. “No, no—he wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

“Sir, why were you and those kids inside Belvedere castle when it was closed? What happened to that boy?”

“I told you already. He slipped, hit his head on the stone floor. Honestly, I ought to sue the city, or the park conservancy, or—”

“I know you’re lying to me, Mister Stark. Those injuries weren’t from a simple fall.”

“Look, tell you what. I’ll give you a million dollars if you just—”

“Mister Stark, I would think very carefully before completing that sentence.”

Tony forced himself to grin at her, despite the fact that he didn’t feel much like grinning. He held out his hands in the air in a show of surrender. “Hey, hey, it was a joke! I would never try to bribe a cop. I’m not that hopelessly stupid. Look, the problem is that you wouldn’t believe the truth if I told you.”

“Two years ago, aliens demolished half of Grand Central Station. There’s not much I wouldn’t believe at this point, especially coming from a man that diverted a nuclear missile through a hole in space in order to save all of us.”

“Huh—I did do that, didn’t I?” Right. Play up the hero thing and not so much the billionaire thing; most people responded better to that—

“Which is why you get away with as much as you do,” said Cagney and Lacey, giving him the evil eye. “You’re a hero, Mister Stark, and the New York City police haven’t forgotten it. Whatever you’re doing here, I want to believe it’s in the interest of New York. But it would help if you could explain what the hell is going on.”

Maybe, just maybe, he could trust this woman. And maybe, just maybe, she wouldn’t think he was insane. “Okay, fine. If you really want to know, in the past year, I’ve adopted three kids. Two of them can do magic. The short version is that those two got in a fight with each other, and the other kid got in the middle of it.”

“Magic,” the female police officer repeated. “Now, in addition to aliens, we’ve got magic?”

“To be fair, we’ve had magic. Thor is a Norse god who can control the weather.”

“Fair enough,” said the cop.

⚡⚡ ( ´∀｀)_中⚡⚡

“Oh my God—” As soon as they’d found Loki, lying half naked in the snow and blue as the day he was born, the cop (whose name he had somehow never gotten) pulled out her radio. “I need another ambulance dispatched—”

“It’s probably not as bad as it looks,” Tony interrupted her. “That’s his natural color.”

“His?”

Tony looked down again, and saw what the cop was looking at. He pulled off his coat and bent down to cover Loki with it. “Ah, sorry—hers—well, theirs, anyway,” he told her, remembering at the last minute that Loki’s appearance didn’t always match what was inside these days.

“Alien or mutant?” asked the cop.

“Alien,” Tony told her, though he wasn’t sure why it mattered.

“You adopted an alien kid? He’s not one of the ones that—”

“No, no, definitely not Chituari. You saw those things, right? They’re Asgardian, like Thor.”

“Thor isn’t blue,” the cop pointed out.

“Yeah, well, the two of us are from the same planet and we’re not exactly the same color, are we?” Tony held his breath, hoping that what he’d said hadn’t come off as offensive, even though in his opinion, she was the one who was being racially insensitive by making a big deal out of the kid’s blueness.

The terra-cotta skinned police officer arched an eyebrow at him, but whatever she was thinking, she didn’t say it. “Even if that is their natural color, are you sure they’re alright?”

“I’m pretty sure they’re just being dramatic, but we’re about to find out.” Tony grasped Loki’s shoulder and shook it gently. “Lokes, come on, time to get up.” Loki didn’t respond. “Come on, I know you feel bad, but we need to follow the ambulance to the hospital.”

Loki made a small, pathetic whimpering noise. “Just leave me here.”

“Not happening. Come on, just sit up for me. Please? Everything’s going to be alright, nothing was your fault—what do you need me to say?”

“Don’t lie to me!” the kid shouted at him, and out of the corner of his eye, he saw the cop’s hand move towards the gun at her hip. To her credit though, she caught herself a moment later and crossed her arms casually in front of her.

“Okay, you know what? Maybe what happened was kind of your fault, but it was also mine.” Damn, he wished Doc was here. (Oh right, Doc—what had happened with him? He had never called, so hopefully that meant he didn’t need any backup, not that Ross had shot him as soon as he started asking questions. Unfortunately, he didn’t really have time to worry about it. He was just going to have to trust that Leonard had things under control.)

Tony didn’t have a choice. If Loki was going to lie there in the snow, he’d just have to pick her up and carry her.

*✲ﾟ*｡⋆_(:τ」∠)_*✲ﾟ*｡⋆

“If that’s how you gave yourself a hernia, you must really be out of shape.”

“The kid weighs over three hundred pounds.”

Pepper’s jaw fell open. “How is that possible? If anything, Loki still looks like she needs to eat more.”

“Weirdly dense alien bones,” Tony told her.

“None of this explains how you ended up assaulting a police officer.”

“I’m getting to it.”

⸝₍̗⁽°°⁾₎͕⸍∘˚˳°✧

Through nothing short of a Herculean effort, and likely aided by a new flood of adrenaline, he’d managed to pick Loki up and carry them out of there. Luckily, he’d only had to make it as far as where the police car was parked directly outside the castle before cop lady insisted he and Loki get in the back and let her drive them to the hospital.

“Nice of you,” he’d told her.

“If I let you drive yourself, would you drive at a safe speed?”

“Probably not,” he admitted.

“And that’s why I’m taking you there.”

Tony put Loki in first, then after he slid in on the other side, he leaned over to buckle her seatbelt for her, since she was still playing at catatonia. He squeezed her shoulder. “Everything’s going to be okay, Loki.”

The police officer turned around to look at him over her shoulder. “Did you say Loki?”

“It’s a common name in Asgard.” Once again, Tony held his breath until the officer turned back around and started the car, backing out and making her way back to the road.

And of course, she was driving five miles below the speed limit. “Hey, can’t you go any faster?”

“I know you’re concerned about your son, Mister Stark, but the weather’s getting worse. There isn’t anyone in this car who’s injured, and I have a responsibility to keep it that way.”

“Actually, I’m pretty sure I am injured.” It felt like he’d strained something carrying Loki.

“We’re not that far away from the hospital. Are you going to die in the next ten minutes?”

“I might.” Loki made that horrible whimpering sound she’d been making a lot of lately, and Tony bit his own tongue. “It was a joke. I’m sorry, I tend to do that when I’m stressed. I’m not dying. No one’s dying, Lokes.”

“Are they going to be okay?” asked the police officer.

“They’d be better if you could get us to the hospital a little quicker.”

“I’ll get there as quickly as I can, Mister Stark, but I’m not going to endanger anyone inside or outside of this vehicle unnecessarily.”

*✲ﾟ*｡⋆*✲ﾟ*｡ō͡≡o

“So was that the police officer you punched in the face?”

“You know I would never intentionally punch a woman in the face, even if they were a cop.”

“So, yes—oh my God, this is going to be on the news—” Pepper rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand.

Probably not a good time to mention she had been a black female cop, then. “She was just standing in the wrong place at the wrong time, Pep. Do you want me to continue the story or not?”

She didn’t seem to be listening. “Probably the national news—”

“Hey Pep, you alright?”

“No, Tony, I’m not alright! This was the last thing I needed to have to deal with right now.”

“Oh right. What happened with—”

Pepper cut him short with a look that he knew meant “don’t even ask.”

“Pep, you know you don’t have to handle any of this stuff by yourself. This is why we have lawyers and a PR department.” Pepper fidgeted with her engagement ring, twisting it back and forth on her finger. He reached out and took her hand. “You don’t normally wear that outside the tower—hey, is this your way of saying it’s time to use our ‘get out of jail free card?’”

“I needed a little reassurance today, so I wore it. It’s on my right hand, see? No one needs to know it’s an engagement ring.”

“Oh.” Tony felt a little disappointed, but now probably wasn’t the right time to start planning a wedding anyway. Still, just how hot did it have to get before they were officially out of the frying pan, into the fire?

・o・)⊃-(🔥)

“Come on Lokes, time to get out of the car.”

Loki didn’t respond. Tony ran a hand through his own hair. “You know, don’t you think you’re being just a little bit selfish here? You remember that Pietro is in critical condition, right?”

Loki’s eyes shifted towards him. “I told you to leave me where I was.”

Okay, at least they were talking now. “You know I wasn’t going to do that.”

“Why do you care what happens to me?”

“Because you’re my kid.” How many times did he need to say it?

“I’m not, though.”

So they were back to that. “No, you are, and damn it, if the universe doesn’t get a clue after I picked all three hundred pounds of you up and carried you across Central Park, I don’t know how else I can prove it—”

Loki frowned at him. “The universe?”

“When you guys came back from your mom’s wedding, your brother told me that he had a talk with Frigga, and that according to her I needed to prove it to the universe that you were mine, so that Odin wouldn’t have a claim on you anymore.”

“That’s ridiculous.” Loki wiped her nose, which had started to run, with the back of her hand. “Odin doesn’t want me. He never has. No one has.”

“I can’t speak for Odin, but Odin aside, you should know that isn’t true. First of all, I want you. Everyone else in the tower thinks of you as family. I’m pretty sure Frigga wanted you too, even though she has an odd way of showing it sometimes. And Thor wanted you to stay in Asgard, didn’t he?”

“He said he did, but—”

“But what?”

“But he hasn’t seen me like this! If he did, he wouldn’t want to call me his sibling.”

“Loki, you’re his little brother, other than when you’re his little sister. He’s not going to reject you just because you could go as a blueberry for Halloween, no costume required.”

Loki scowled at him. Apparently they didn’t appreciate the joke. “You don’t understand. Perhaps my appearance holds little meaning for you, but any Asgardian who saw me this way would see a monster.”

“And they would be wrong. You aren’t a monster, and I swear I’m going to keep telling you that until you believe it.”

Loki shook their head. “I can’t get out of the car like this.”

“Okay, I get that. You probably would draw some unwanted attention. So just turn back, and let’s go.”

“Don’t you think I would have turned back if I could?” snapped Loki.

“Oh—” So the kid had gotten themself stuck in smurf mode.

“I can change sexes, but try as I might, I can’t make myself look like a person.”

“Loki, you are a person.” Tony was getting angry now—not at Loki, but at everyone who had made them feel less-than.

“You keep saying that, but just look at me.”

“I am looking at you, and I’m seeing the same person that I’ve always seen. You’re smart, smart-mouthed, and every bit the kid I never thought I’d have. Sometimes I can’t believe we’re not related by blood.”

Tears rolled down Loki’s cheeks, and Tony could only hope that they were crying in relief if not happiness. They wiped their nose again with the sleeve of Tony’s jacket. He’d probably need to get it dry cleaned, but that was fine.

“Come on, Loki, just get out of the car. If anyone looks at you funny, I’ll punch them in the nose for you.”

Loki nodded, and let him take their hand to help them out of the car.

( ╥_╥)0 o(-෴-)

“And is that how—”

“Nope. As it turns out, in New York, a blue alien kid doesn’t attract that much attention. Everyone in the ER’s waiting room probably thought they were a street performer or an extra from a sci-fi movie that was filming nearby.”

Pepper arched an eyebrow at him. “So how did you end up punching someone?”

🏥⚕️🩹🩺🩸

The man in front of him extended a hand towards him. “I’m Doctor Strange.”

“Strange? That’s seriously your name?”

“We’ve met before, Mister Stark. It was at the last gala for the Maria Stark Foundation. And the answer is the same now as it was then: yes, that’s really my name.”

Right, now he remembered. There had been something about the guy that had put him off then. “Sorry, I meet lots of people. And it isn’t my fault that you have a name that sounds like a third rate birthday party magician’s stage name. Are you Pietro’s doctor?”

The man gave him a tight-lipped smile. “I’m one of the most prominent neurosurgeons in the country, Mister Stark. I was called in because the young man in question seems to have suffered extensive neurological trauma, despite a complete lack of external injury. Like I said, I’m one of the best. I may be able to prevent him from spending the rest of his life as a vegetable, but before I can operate, I need to know how his injuries occurred.”

There was no way this guy was going to believe the truth, so Tony didn’t bother trying to give it to him. “Why does it matter? Aren’t we just wasting time here? Shouldn’t you be operating right now?”

“Mister Stark, as head of neurology at Metro General, I reserve the right to choose which cases I take on. I haven’t agreed to take his yet.”

Okay, now he was starting to figure out why his “asshole” detector had gone off as soon as the doctor had swaggered over to him. “In that case, find anyone else to operate on him! Someone who doesn’t waste time asking pointless questions.”

“There’s no reason to become belligerent. You’ll find that of all the surgeons here, I have the highest success rate with these kinds of patients. The information I’ve asked for is necessary if you want him to have the best chance of recovery. If I don’t know the nature of the injury, I’ll be going in blind.”

“Alright, fine! If you have to know, he was caught in the crossfire of two magical spells.”

“Magic?” Strange gave him a look that said he thought he was nuts, and Tony couldn’t blame him for that. He shook his head. “Right, I think I’m going to have to pass on this one.”

“Sorry, you’re going to have to pass?”

(Tony barely registered it when the police officer who had driven them to the hospital had come up behind Strange, probably because she’d heard him raise his voice.)

“If you’re not going to take my inquiries seriously, I don’t have the time to deal with you,” said Strange. “I can have Doctor West take a look at the boy, but I really wouldn’t get my hopes up if I were—”

( ▼෴▼)=○)Д)゜゜

“And that was when you took a swing at him?” asked Pepper. Tony couldn’t get a good read on her expression.

He answered her question with another. “Wouldn’t you have?”

“Of course not—I would have taken off one of my shoes and beaten him with it.”

“Those are your most dangerous shoes you’re wearing,” he said, looking down at Pepper’s three inch Louboutins. “You could put someone’s eye out with one of those.”

Pepper gave him a small, strained smile. “This really isn’t the time to be joking around, Tony.”

“I know.” Pepper sat down on the edge of the hospital bed, and Tony buried his face in her neck to get a good whiff of her Chanel N°5. “I swear, I’m going to make sure Strange doesn’t work in this town again—”

“I’ve told you this before, but you can’t ruin someone’s career, even if they are a monumental jerk. And jokes aside, you definitely can’t resort to violence, even if you thought you were protecting your family.”

Tony wasn’t in the mood to argue with her. “Just tell me how Loki and Wanda are doing.”

“They’re okay. You don’t need to worry. Happy’s keeping an eye on them out in the waiting room.”

“Happy is—?” So far, he hadn’t formerly introduced Happy to Loki or the twins, even though the guy technically knew about the arrangement. As head of security at Stark Industries, there was no way he couldn’t know about everyone living in the tower.

“Also, Pietro hasn’t woken up yet, but Doctor Palmer said she was confident he would make a full recovery.”

Tony felt like a weight had been lifted from his chest. “That’s good. I—I didn’t want to ask, because I thought—”

“I know. I’m sorry; I should have told you that first, shouldn’t I?”

Chapter Text

“Must you stare at me?”

The ironically nicknamed “Happy” watched him with a maddeningly unreadable expression. “Ms. Potts asked me to keep an eye on you two while she had a private conversation with her fiancé, so that’s what I’m doing.”

“I’m not sure she meant it literally.”

“If I’d taken it literally, I would have had to pluck out my eyeball and glue it to your forehead,” the man in front of him pointed out.

“Touché,” Loki acknowledged, then stood up.

“Hey, where do you think you’re going?”

“The restroom. Surely I’m allowed to relieve myself?” Loki didn’t really need the restroom, but he was tired of being stared at.

“If you really need to go, we’ll all go.”

“I don’t need an escort,” objected Loki.

“Yeah, I’m thinking you do.”

He felt the comment like a cut from one of his good daggers, which come to think of it, he would have to ask after the next time he was in Asgard. “Of course, you don’t trust me because I look like this.”

Happy’s expression didn’t change. “Enough weird stuff has happened in the past few years that the blue thing doesn’t really bother me. I don’t trust you because you’re a known flight risk. Just how many times have you tried to run off since Tony took you in?”

Loki felt a little better. He had a feeling he ought to be annoyed by the man, but there was something about his blunt manner that appealed to him. He felt like he could trust him, if only because the man didn’t seem to care if what he said rubbed Loki the wrong way.

Happy stood, then looked down at Wanda. “Hey, mopey girl in the red coat—get up, we’re moving.”

Wanda glared at him. In the next moment, she had lunged for him with her arm outstretched.

Loki caught her arm, instinctively neutralizing the magic with his own. “No, bad Wanda. You can’t attack everyone who makes you angry with your magic. Do you know what will happen if you do? Eventually you’re going to kill someone close to you, and you’ll be very sorry. If you kill your brother, how will you feel then?”

He had only parroted the words Frigga had said to him when he was very young and had difficulty controlling himself, but maybe he should have been more careful. Wanda wailed like a banshee and slumped to the floor.

He took a step away from her, then looked to Happy. “What do we do now?”

“Don’t ask me. You’re the one that made her cry.”

“But you were the one that provoked her! How would you like to be called ‘mopey girl in the red coat?’ She almost killed her own brother today. She had a reason to be mopey.”

Wanda’s volume increased.

“You know, maybe you should stop bringing up the thing with the brother,” said Happy.

Obviously, the man was determined to make a point of being no use whatsoever. Loki had no choice, then—he would have to try to be a good older brother and comfort her himself. Frantically, he tried to think of what Thor would do in one of his rare moments of being a decent older sibling. Loki knelt on the ground in front of her, and cautiously, put a hand on his shoulder. “There, there,” he said, forcing himself to smile.

Wanda glared coldly at him and made a gesture with two fingers; while it wasn’t one used in the part of Midgard he was accustomed to, he didn’t need All-Speak to figure out what it meant. At least her tears had slowed a little.

Loki decided he had better approach things from a different angle. This time, he tried to think of what he would want someone to say to him if he were in her position. “What happened wasn’t your fault, Wanda. You haven’t had anyone to teach you how to use your powers, which were thrust on you all at once. I had hundreds of years to develop mine, and I’m just as responsible if not more responsible for what happened. Besides, Pietro is going to be fine. The doctor said we can go see him when he wakes up.”

“Knowing I hurt him makes me feel sick.”

“I know,” Loki commiserated, though he wondered if he ought to get out of the way, just in case she meant it literally.

Wanda looked down at her hands, which had been the instrument of her brother’s near-murder. “I feel like a monster.”

“I know,” Loki repeated, taking one of her hands in his blue one. For a long moment, they just sat there on the floor of the hospital waiting room, staring at their conjoined fingers.

“So, did you still need to go to the restroom or not?” asked Happy, ruining their moment.

( ｡･_･｡)_.._(｡･_･｡ )

“So I’m not dead?” asked Pietro Maximoff.

Hela closed her eyes and concentrated for a moment, sending a tendril of her magic to feel along the string that connected the boy to Yggdrasil. “No, it looks as if you’ll live. Pity.”

“If I’m still alive, why are we hanging around down here? My body is upstairs, isn’t it?”

Hela looked around the brightly lit hospital morgue, which was currently empty—the morgue technicians had gone to lunch, and everyone else present had simply gone on, with the exception of the tenacious child in front of her. “You don’t like it here? I thought it felt kind of homey.”

“I want to see my sister and make sure she’s alright.”

Hela shook her head; she would never understand mortals. “Here you are, your body lying in what could have been your death bed, your soul lingering in a hospital morgue with the queen of the dead, and you’re concerned about the person who nearly killed you.”

“She didn’t mean to hurt me. You saw how upset she was.”

“You’re free to go anywhere you wish,” Hela pointed out with an exasperated sigh. “You’re the one who’s been following me around like a lost puppy—how is my father finding his Yule gift, by the way?”

The boy scowled at her. “He isn’t house trained, and in the last week he’s set fire to the window dressings in the common room twice.”

“The dog or Loki?”

The boy frowned. “I’m sure that Loki feels bad about what happened to me as well.”

“For a Loki, this one is especially tender hearted,” Hela agreed. “All of them are sensitive, mind you, but that doesn’t always translate into regard for others.”

The boy got a wistful look in his eye. “I think Loki is wonderful. I’m going to marry them one day; I suppose that will make you my stepdaughter. And what a beautiful stepdaughter you are. Another green eyed, raven haired beauty, like your parent.”

“You know, it’s a wonder my father hasn’t killed you before now,” Hela deadpanned.

(ㅍ_ㅍ) ヽ(ー。一)

“Karla, you aren’t responsible for your father’s death.”

“I know that! I don’t need you to tell me that.” Karla had torn the kitten poster from the wall in a pique of rage, and was now in the process of ripping the poor kitten to shreds.  Leonard took a step back. At least she wasn’t pointing that gun of hers at him anymore. In fact, she had left it lying on the sofa—while she had her back to it, he stepped to the side, picked it up, and tucked it into the front of his trousers.

Karla turned to the desk that was crammed in the corner and picked up a handful of pens that had been sitting in a mug emblazoned with the words, “Trust Me, I’m a Psychiatrist.” She threw them at the wall, then screamed and kicked the chair Leonard had been sitting in when she couldn’t find anything else to throw. Leonard started to back out of the room, but when she picked up the mug and seconds later, it had ended its life in an explosion of knife-like ceramic shards, he changed his mind. Before she could hurt herself, he doubled back to where Karla stood, grabbed her, and easily pitched her over his shoulder.

Karla kneed him in the chest and scraped her claw-like fingernails over his back. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“We’re going to find Betty and Bruce and get out of here. Then, with any luck, you can go somewhere where you can get the help you need.”

“I don’t need help! I’m quite capable of helping myself.”

“You just keep telling yourself that.”

Karla stopped struggling. She reached down and groped him an area she wished she would leave alone, but which in her position was within easy reach. “When did you get so strong, by the way?”

“I’ve been working out,” Leonard answered dryly. “And cut it out, that’s sexual assault.”

Karla ignored him, continuing to touch him inappropriately. “Swimming, I suppose? Though I thought chlorine only turned blond hair green.”

“Where do I find Betty’s room?” Leonard asked her, cutting her off before she could make any more comments about his new found muscle power, or take her flirting any farther, if that was what it was.

“What will you do if I refuse to tell you?” Karla purred.

“Wander around and knock on every door in this place until I find it, I guess?”

She sighed. “How boring of you. In that case, down the hall, to the left. It’s the largest cell—I mean, dorm room. There’s even a nameplate on the door, you can’t miss it.”

He didn’t have much trouble following Karla’s directions. Before he saw the nameplate on the door, he saw Betty’s “dogs,” which had disappeared after their initial encounter with Karla, lying in front of the door. He leaned over them and knocked.

A few moments later, the door opened a couple of inches. “Leonard?” The dogs leapt up and pushed their way into the room, nearly knocking Betty over.

“We need to get out of here,” he told her. “Do you have Bruce with you?”

Betty opened the door the rest of the way. “I do now,” she said, somewhat cryptically.

Karla still slung over his shoulder, he followed her into the room, where Bruce sat on the bed. His eyebrows shot up. “Leonard, what are you doing here? And what are you doing with Doctor Sofen?”

Before Karla could start groping him again, he put her down, at the same time grabbing her wrists and holding them behind her back. “She’s been manipulating you, Bruce.”

“Yeah, I know. That became apparent when she gassed me—what was that stuff anyway?” Instead of looking at Sofen, though, he looked at Betty.

Betty looked away. “If you’re thinking it was something I developed, you’re right. I’m sorry, it wasn’t supposed to be used that way.”

“How was it supposed to be used?” asked Bruce.

“It’s a chemical compound that can suppress the gamma radiation in your bloodstream. That’s why you couldn’t transform into the Hulk, until I gave you the antidote.”

Bruce stared at her blankly for a few moments. “And you developed this for the military, at your father’s request.”

“No, of course not. I did it for you, Bruce. I thought you wanted a way to control your, um, transitions. I thought I was helping.”

“Until recently, I’ve been able to control them on my own.”

“That’s fantastic.”

“Until recently,” Bruce repeated.

“Oh.”

“Betty, what have you been doing here, really? And what are those?” he asked, pointing to the dogs. “What you’ve been working on—is it related to our research from before?”

Betty fidgeted and looked away again. “I didn’t have much choice.”

“There’s always a choice, Betty.”

“I told myself that at least, the research I was doing might benefit you, and anyone else who has already been or will be exposed to high doses of gamma radiation. That at least understanding more about what happened might mean I could find a way to reverse it—”

“I’ve given up on finding a way to reverse it.”

Leonard felt the need to say something to that, because regardless of his own feelings about it (in his professional opinion, he thought it would be healthier for Bruce to accept Hulk as part of himself), he’d been under the opposite impression. “If you have, what is it that you’ve spent all your time researching since I’ve known you?” The man had a large collection of his own tissue samples taking up an entire wall of his lab. So either he had been studying his condition, or he had a serious problem and they needed to find him another psychiatrist ASAP.

Bruce’s eyes flicked to the side, and he licked his lips. He took a breath, but before he could say anything, Leonard interrupted him.

“Don’t lie.”

“I wasn’t going to—”

Leonard smiled at him, tight lipped. “Your body language says something different.”

Bruce winced. “Look, is this important right now? Shouldn’t we be trying to find a way out of here?”

“Bruce, if you weren’t trying to find a way to reverse it, then—” Leonard bit his own tongue; Bruce was right, they could focus on finding a way out first.

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT …

(This completely unrelated scene takes place around seven months earlier, shortly after the events of Eat, Pray, Loki.)

After dinner, Bruce decided to sit down in the common room for a while. Leonard had gone up to his office. He had said that he needed to organize some paperwork, but Pepper had left the table shortly after he had, and he suspected they were having a session. Unlike the other residents of the tower, she had a “real job” and couldn’t see him during the day. Bruce might be the only one left in the tower who wasn’t seeing Leonard professionally.

Loki sat on the carpet in front of him; he had his laptop out and seemed to be completely absorbed in whatever he was typing. “What is it that you’ve been writing, Loki?”

“Doctor Samson suggested that I turn my hand to writing as a way of exploring my feelings,” Loki told him, without even looking up.

Thor, who had been sitting on the other side of the sofa watching the television with glazed eyes, looked down at Loki, frowning. “You’re not writing poetry again, are you?”

The click of Loki’s laptop paused long enough for him to scowl up at his brother. “Don’t worry. Even if I was writing poetry, I wouldn’t subject you to it. I am well aware that you do not appreciate my artistic efforts.”

“I’m sorry Brother, but it wasn’t just me, everyone agreed—”

Loki snorted. “Yes, and by everyone, you mean you and your friends. You’re all such authorities when it comes to art.”

Tony had just sat in the chair across from them. He leaned towards Thor. “So how bad is it? I mean, are we talking Vogon level—?”

“Tony,” Bruce warned. Thor might not know what a Vogon was, but Loki was better at picking up on those kinds of references. And even though he appeared to be preoccupied with his writing, Bruce knew there was no way he wasn’t listening to every word they said—not when he seemed to hear everything that anyone said about him when they weren’t less than five feet away from him.

Thor shook his head. “I do not know what you speak of, but—it was just so depressing. And morbid; even mother agreed that Loki should not be allowed to write it anymore, and she has always supported him in his pursuits, even the ones that were considered unmanly by Asgard’s standards.”

“So what are you writing?” Bruce asked, purposely interrupting Thor and Tony’s discussion.

“Doctor Samson suggested that as an exercise, I might rewrite a past event in the way I wished it to have happened,” Loki told him.

“Oh,” Bruce said, a little surprised that Loki had actually taken the suggestion. “Would you consider letting me read it?” In a way, it felt a little intrusive to ask, but if Loki was willing, it might give him a little insight into his recent state of mind. It might have been Bruce’s imagination, but it seemed that ever since his “death” and subsequent resurrection, he had been quieter than usual.

Loki looked up slowly, and the corner of his mouth turned up in a way that made him a little suspicious. But then again, maybe Loki was just happy to have someone take an interest. “You really wish to read it?”

“Of course.”

“Very well. I shall email you what I have so far, and you can give me your opinion.”

A few moments later, Bruce navigated to the email app on the smart phone Tony had practically forced on him a year ago, and found the email. He opened the attachment, and begun to read. Apparently, the subject he had chosen was his fight with Steve at Stuttgart.

Loki deflected the mortal captain ’s shield with ease. Still, he was putting up a good enough fight for a mortal. And Loki had to admit to himself that there was something about the pompous patriot that he found appealing. Perhaps it was the sort of raw power that the captain exuded. It was something primitive, just as one might expect of a lower life form.

Loki was suddenly overcome with the desire to surrender to his foe right then and there. “Let us fight no more,” he cried. “As you can see, your flimsy little shield is useless against my superior physical and magical prowess. If you wish to conquer me, you must do so with your sword.”

“Sword? Steve no carry sword,” said the mortal, perhaps confused because his brain matter, unlike the rest of him, was only of average size for a mortal, if not somewhat smaller.

“I beg to differ, for I can very well see that you are indeed blessed with one of the largest swords I have ever seen,” said the rightful king of Asgard, licking his lips. Indeed, the captain’s uniform was made of the Midgardian material known as ‘spandex’ and left very little to the imagination.

The captain blushed like a maiden as he attempted to cover himself with his shield.

The most powerful god in the universe blinked in and out of existence, and appeared directly behind the good captain. “No, you mustn’t hide,” he whispered gently. “I will agree to be your sheath—ahem, I mean, prisoner—but I have some very specific conditions.”

Loki reached around the Captain and his hand slid down the man ’s rock hard, spandex covered abdominal muscles. He felt them quiver beneath his clever fingers…

It only went downhill from there. Bruce nearly choked on his words when he was finally able to force them out of his mouth. “Loki, what is this?”

“It’s the exercise that Doctor Samson suggested,” Loki said casually.

“Somehow I doubt he told you to write this.”

“He suggested I rewrite an event from my past in the way I wished it had happened, so I did.”

“Uh-huh.” Bruce supposed that in a way, Loki’s approach to the exercise was actually quite telling. Or it would be, if he wasn’t sure that Loki had written it for the sole purpose of screwing with him (or possibly, with Leonard, since he was the one who had given him the writing prompt). At least he hoped that was what it was. Otherwise, he might be beyond help.

Bruce arched an eyebrow at Loki. “You know, maybe I should forward this to Steve. He might find it interesting.”

Loki blushed—like a maiden, thought Bruce. “You wouldn’t.”

Loki was right; he wouldn’t, but Loki needed to learn that if he was going to mess with people, they could mess with him back. He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe Steve ought to know how you really feel about him.”

“What are you talking about? Obviously, it was a joke! I don’t feel anything for Steve.”

“Really? Because from what you wrote, it sounds like you’ve been thinking a lot about his sword.”

“Um, sorry, would you two like to share with the class?” Tony interrupted. “Did I miss something? When did Steve get a sword?”

“Don’t you dare show it to anyone,” Loki growled.

“Or what?” Bruce felt a little disappointed, but not entirely surprised that Loki had resorted to threatening him.

“Or I’ll never trust you again!”

Now Bruce was taken aback by Loki’s choice of threat, mainly because he hadn’t considered that Loki trusted him in the first place. “I’m not going to show anyone,” he promised. “I was only teasing.”

Loki looked at him wearily, and nodded. “Very well. Just so you know, that was all I was doing as well.”

“I believe you,” he told Loki. Though really, he wasn’t so sure now. Did Loki really have a crush on Steve? Then he wondered, even if he doesn’t really have feelings for Steve, was this Loki’s way of broaching the subject of his sexuality with him? He wondered what the rules were about sexuality in Asgard’s masculinity obsessed culture, and what might be considered taboo. Loki might really need someone to talk to, and maybe he didn’t know a better way of bringing it up.

While he was still trying to figure out what to say next, Loki got up and walked out of the room, taking his laptop with him.

Tony looked over to Bruce. “So, was what just happened something we should worry about?”

“You don’t need to worry about it,” Bruce told him. “I’ll take care of it—or maybe I’ll get Leonard to talk to him, actually.”

Thor seemed to be content to at least pretend to have been absorbed in the infomercial he had been watching the entire time, though Bruce wasn’t sure he could blame him. “Perhaps we should purchase one of these juicers for the common kitchen. Bruce, you are always saying that Loki should get more nutrients. Juice is a healthy beverage, is it not?”

Tony squinted at the television. “I feel like I had a juicer like that at one time. Pretty sure U broke it, though.”

Thor blinked at him. “I didn’t break your juicer.”

Tony’s eyebrows scrunched together. “No, I mean—you know what? Never mind.”

Chapter Text

Pepper yawned as she stepped onto the tower’s elevator. It was late, but all she needed to do was grab some extra clothes for Tony and all three kids. She would have liked to bring Loki and Wanda back to the tower with her so that they could get some sleep, but trying to convince them to leave the hospital’s waiting room while Tony was in surgery and Pietro still hadn’t woken up would have been an exercise in futility.

The elevator doors opened out onto the penthouse, and Pepper heard the television. Tony must have left it on, she reasoned. She was nearly to the bedroom when she realized that something wasn’t right. As she spun around, she pulled the concealed handgun out of her purse and pointed it at the unfamiliar dark haired woman sitting on her living room sofa watching television. “Who are you, and why are you wearing my robe?”

The woman looked at her, then looked at her pistol without seeming too concerned that it was pointed at her. “We’ve met before, Ms. Potts. Over the summer, in Malibu.”

“I don’t remember—” Pepper began, but then she realized that she had met the woman before; she just hadn’t been a woman at the time. She relaxed her stance, but didn’t put the gun away. “What are you doing here?”

“Rotting my brain on your insipid mortal entertainment. I would have gone back to the TVA, but it occurred to me that there really isn’t a reason to go straight back. I can spend as much time as I wish here, and when I do eventually leave this dimension, no one—Sylvie, Mobius, or any of the worker drones—should have noticed. Finally, I can get a little me time, without any inane talk of jet skis, lost childhoods, the timeline this and the timeline that, blah, blah, blah.”

Deciding that this Loki was likely no more of a threat than their Loki, she put the gun back in her purse. She had been extremely reluctant when Natasha had first suggested she carry a weapon. All the statistics pointed to those who carried a gun being in more danger of being the victim of gun violence, she had argued, and the most likely thing that would happen would be that someone would steal the gun and turn it on her, or that she would shoot herself accidentally while rummaging for her lipstick. Natasha had argued that with enough training, she would be more deadly to others than to herself, but Pepper wasn’t so sure about that. Eventually they had compromised, and she had agreed to carry an unloaded prop gun as a deterrent. “JARVIS, why didn’t you warn me that someone was here?”

“You didn’t ask,” said JARVIS, and this time when she heard the amusement in his voice, she didn’t tell herself it was only her imagination.

“From now on, if there are non-tower residents in the residential floors of the tower when I get home, let me know.”

“Loki is a resident of the tower,” JARVIS pointed out.

“This isn’t the same Loki, obviously.”

“Their essential biological markers are the same.”

“Interesting to know, but I still think you’re smart enough to be able to tell the difference. Obviously, this Loki is older.”

“We’re the same age, actually,” said Lady Loki.

“If you say so. Either way, I want you to take my clothes off,” said Pepper.

The corner of Lady Loki’s mouth quirked upwards. “As you wish, Lady Potts.”

A second later, Pepper found herself standing there in her underwear. This Loki really was too much like their Loki, and she should have known better. Feeling exposed, she crossed her arms over her chest and set her mouth in a straight line. “You know that’s not what I meant, and after the day I’ve had, I’m really not in the mood. Now give me my clothes back, or you’re going to be in big trouble.”

The woman had the nerve to laugh. “I’m going to be in trouble am I—and just what will you do?”

“I’m going to count,” said Pepper, because actually, she had no idea yet what she could do to the goddess sitting on her couch. “I expect my clothes to be back by the time I get to three.”

Lady Loki’s eyebrows drifted towards her hairline.

“One,” said Pepper. Loki yawned.

“Two,” she said. Loki leaned back and put her feet up on the coffee table. Pepper noted that she was wearing her favorite Saint Laurent faux fur slippers.

“Two and a half,” she said. When Loki continued to ignore her she pulled out her phone, went to her contacts, and brought up Frigga’s number. She turned the phone where Loki could see it. Her finger hovered over the call button.

Lady Loki’s jaw dropped open. “You wouldn’t dare.”

Pepper pressed the button, and brought the phone up to her ear. As she expected, it went immediately to voice mail, but Lady Loki didn’t know that.

“Alright, alright—you can have your stupid clothes back!”

Pepper smiled and pressed the button to end the call. As soon as she did, Lady Loki waved her hand through the air and once again, Pepper was fully clothed. She frowned down at herself. “Actually, can you put me in what you’re wearing? I think I’d like to get some rest before I go back to the hospital.” Luckily, she trusted Happy with the kids completely. At the very least, they would be just as safe with him as they would be with her.

Lady Loki rolled her eyes before making another lazy gesture. They switched clothes, and Pepper sighed in relief to no longer be wearing what Tony had called her “most dangerous heels.” She collapsed on the couch next to her unexpected guest. “You know, maybe you could take Tony and the kids their clothes, since you’re here?”

“You’re asking me to do you a favor? What is wrong with people in this time line?”

“I’m just asking you to take a few things to the hospital. I’m not asking for one of your kidneys. I’m not even asking you to stay with the kids, because Happy is still there. Besides, can’t you teleport or something? It seems like it wouldn’t be that much of an effort for you.”

“I can’t teleport, actually, but the effort required isn’t the problem.”

“Then what is?”

“That you trust me to do anything for you at all.”

Pepper turned her head towards the other woman and arched an eyebrow at her. “Is there a reason I shouldn’t?”

“I threw your fiancé out of a window.”

“Actually, I think that was our Loki—”

“Semantics,” Loki mumbled. “I threw a Man of Iron out a window, whether or not it was the one from this timeline.”

“And if you’re anything like our Loki, it was because you were being manipulated. If no one’s told you this yet, I’m telling you now—what happened during the invasion wasn’t your fault.”

“Don’t be a fool.” Lady Loki snorted. “Whether or not I was in control of myself at the time, nothing I did was anything I wouldn’t have done. I’ve never cared at all about any of you mortals or your mayfly existences.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Oh, now you don’t believe me, when I’m telling the truth—”

“Maybe you think that’s the truth, but I still don’t believe it.”

“For Norns’ sake, why?”

“Because for the most part, you’re the same as our Loki. And when you say you don’t care, there’s this look on your face; like you hate yourself for saying it.”

“Whether or not I hate myself seems beside the point. I’m fully capable of directing my hatred in both inward and outward directions.”

Pepper slid closer to her on the couch. Feeling bold, she put her head on her shoulder and put her hand over Loki’s. “Admit it, you’re just a big old softy—”

“You’re so tired you’re delirious.”

“Maybe,” Pepper admitted, with a yawn. “So could you please take the kids and Tony some clothes? I’ve spent all day trying to convince the United States government that our Loki is my intern, and that Sif and the Warriors Three are her cos-player friends.”

“And how did that go?”

“Not great. They want to talk to Tony; and to Thor—and to Loki, but I’m going to try to keep that from happening.”

“You don’t trust my younger, cuter self not to reveal themself?”

Actually, it had occurred to her that under the pressure, Loki might say or do something to reveal themself, but that wasn’t the main issue. “Being interrogated by a governmental committee would probably be distressing for them. I want to protect our Loki from that if at all possible.”

Loki sighed. “It isn’t fair.”

“What isn’t?”

“No one’s ever wished to protect me from anything.”

Pepper doubted that was true. “What about Frigga and Thor?”

Loki shrugged. “Perhaps. They weren’t too good at it, though. Not that I ever made it easy for them.”

“I’m sorry,” said Pepper, patting Loki’s knee. She yawned. “Anyway, JARVIS will tell you where to find the kids’ clothes.”

(・・、)ヾ(^^ )

“Your brother is waking up. Do you want to see him now?”

The nurse didn’t need to repeat herself.  Loki was left wondering if Wanda could teleport or if she’d suddenly been blessed with her brother’s speed. She had been sitting next to him on the floor one second, and gone the next.

“Hey, hold on—” Happy ran after her for a few steps, then he stopped and turned around. “Come on, get up. I’m supposed to watch both of you.”

Loki headed down the hall to Pietro’s room at a casual pace. When he got there, he stood in front of the door.

“Are you just going to stand there, or are you going to go in?” asked his temporary guardian.

“I think I’d rather stay out here,” said Loki, struck with a sudden worry over how Pietro would react to his new appearance. While he had never appreciated Pietro’s pining over him before, it would be rather a hit to his ego if Pietro fell out of love.

Happy got straight to the point. “What? You’re worried because he hasn’t seen you blue?”

“That is rather the problem,” said Loki. “What if he’s disgusted?”

“Or maybe he won’t be. You never know, blue aliens might be a real turn on for him. Now are you going to hang around in the hall all night stressing about it, or are you going to go in?”

Maybe Happy was right; he couldn’t be sure how Pietro would react until they saw one another. So far, the mortals around him hadn’t paid much attention to the unusual pigmentation of his skin.

When Loki entered the room, Wanda was already curled against her brother in his bed, bawling into the front of his hospital gown. Pietro still looked a little drowsy; he played with his sister’s hair absentmindedly, and when he saw Loki, he gave her a goofy grin. “The nurse said I was technically dead for three minutes. You know, they say that death cannot stop true love; it can only delay it for a while.”

“Glad to know that technically being dead hasn’t changed you at all.”

“Your daughter says hello.”

Loki blinked in surprise; he hadn’t expected the sudden confirmation that he wasn’t insane for believing that the entire incident with Hela had happened. “You met her, did you?”

“She is a beautiful woman, just like her father.”

“Pietro, you haven’t noticed anything different about me, by any chance?” Perhaps being technically dead had rendered him colorblind.

“You mean the fact that you are blue now?” Pietro waggled his eyebrows. “I think it’s sexy.”

Loki gave him a tight lipped smile. “Right, of course you do.”

Pietro frowned. “You do not like the way you look?”

“How could I? I look like a monster.”

Pietro shook his head. “You look like you, just with a few differences. Your skin is the most beautiful shade of the sky, and your eyes are red—”

“Like blood.”

“No, like the color of red carnations. They were my mother’s favorite flower.”

Loki could feel himself blushing. He had never been certain of how to take complements, having not received many.

--------{---(@

“So how do we get out of here?” Leonard asked Betty.

Betty looked at him as if he’d just grown a second head. “If I knew that, I would have left by now.”

“Okay, second question. You don’t happen to know where my cellphone is? I was supposed to call Tony if I ran into trouble, and I think we might be past that point.”

“As far as I know, you didn’t have it on you when you were brought down here. It doesn’t matter, since there isn’t any cellphone service down here.”

“You’d be surprised how good the service is on these Stark phones now. I’m pretty sure Tony’s planning on expanding the network to Asgard next.”

“Asgard?”

“Let’s just say a lot has happened since you’ve been down here. We can explain later.”

“There’s a land line in the General’s office.”

“Great—I don’t actually know Tony’s number, though.”

“I know it,” said Bruce. “I made sure to memorize it in case I ended up somewhere without my phone.”

“Okay, let’s go then.”

Betty looked at him again with raised eyebrows. “If it was possible to just walk into my dad’s office and use the phone, don’t you think I would have done that by now?”

Leonard blinked at her. “Yeah, I guess you would have—so what’s standing in our way? I haven’t actually seen anyone else down here, other than the people who are in this room.”

“That’s because there isn’t anyone else around right now. Holidays, you know? But there is a lock on the door.”

“Isn’t this a military base? How is everyone on vacation at the same time—okay, well anyway, that doesn’t sound impossible.”

“It’s a two-factor biometric lock. It only opens with a retina scan and a fingerprint.”

“That’s sounding a little more impossible.”

“The door is six-inch-thick steel.”

“Isn’t that overkill for an office? What does your dad have in there?”

Betty shrugged. “A phone. It’s the only link to the outside world in this place. There’s no Internet either, by the way. I’ve had access to research databases so that I can do my work, but that’s it.”

“You’ve been completely isolated?” That really wasn’t healthy. “Have you even had anything to do, other than your work?”

“Well, there’s a few copies of National Geographic from about ten years ago in the staff lounge. There’s also a room with a movie projector. There are two films; one of them is a workplace safety video, and the other is Gigli.”

“So was that really as bad as everyone said it was?” asked Karla, possibly just to remind everyone she was still there.

“I wouldn’t know,” said Betty. “I never got desperate enough to watch it. But did you know that every year, over three million accidents occur in the workplace?”

🦺🚧🤕

“So this is it, huh?”

Betty nodded. “But again, I’m not sure what you’re going to do. I’m not even sure Hulk could get through that door.”

“I’m definitely not ready to go again, by the way,” said Bruce. “I kind of have a headache, actually.”

“I’m sorry,” said Betty. “I really didn’t know how forcing the transformation was going to affect you, but I couldn’t see another way to get you out of the cell. Again, it only opens with my father’s biometric data.”

Karla smiled at them sardonically. “Aren’t you all sweet? So concerned for one another’s feelings.”

“Normal people generally are,” Leonard told her. He was really starting to look forward to handing her off to the police. He didn’t think she belonged in jail—she’d be a lot better off in a mental hospital, and he would testify to that in court. But he also didn’t want her within one hundred yards of Bruce, Betty, or anyone she could easily manipulate anytime soon.

 So then again, maybe a mental hospital wouldn’t be the best place for her either—but that would be up to a judge to decide, and not up to him.

“Alright, everyone stand back,” said Leonard.

“Why? Do you have some sort of explosives?” asked Bruce.

“Not exactly.” Leonard backed up as far as he could, so that his back was to the wall facing the door.

“Uh, Leonard,” he heard Betty say, as he rushed shoulder first into the door—and bounced off of it, landing on his back on the floor.

“Ow,” he said.

Karla cackled gleefully.

Bruce leaned over him. “Leonard, what was that?”

“I thought that maybe I could knock it down—”

“Sorry, but I think the serum I gave you wore off,” said Betty. “You didn’t notice? Your hair isn’t green anymore.”

“No, I can’t see my own hair, and we haven’t passed any mirrors. You should have told me! I don’t get it, though, until I ran into that door, I still felt great—”

“It was probably just the built up adrenaline.”

Karla cackled again.

“Oh, shut up Karla.” He pulled Karla’s gun out of the waistband of his pants to examine it.

“Going to make me shut up, are you?”

“It’s tempting, but I’m not going to shoot you. I was just thinking—maybe I could shoot the lock off or something? It always works in movies.”

Bruce arched an eyebrow at him. “Do you even know how to use that?”

“How hard can it be? You take the safety off and pull the trigger.” Leonard inspected the gun, looking for something that could conceivably be the safety.

Karla suddenly decided to be helpful. “It doesn’t have a safety.”

“What kind of gun doesn’t have a safety?” Leonard wandered aloud, and pointed it at the door.

“Leonard, maybe you shouldn’t—” Bruce was cut off by a loud bang and a explosion of debris as the door and half the wall came down.

“Holy crap,” said Leonard, staring at the weapon he was still holding. “This thing doesn’t have a safety, and I HAD IT STUCK DOWN THE FRONT OF MY PANTS.”

Once again, Karla laughed at him, and this time, Betty joined her, though she covered her mouth with her hand and was obviously trying to contain it. Bruce just stood there, as stunned as he was. Finally, Leonard turned towards Karla. “Where the hell did you get this?”

“So that’s what it does—I’ve never actually fired it before.  You know, ever since aliens attacked New York, you can find the most interesting things on the black market.”

Betty looked from Leonard to Bruce uneasily. “Aliens?”

“We’ve really got a lot to catch you up on,” Leonard told her. He began picking his way through the rubble, looking for the phone Betty had told them about.

Betty and Bruce had followed him. “There,” said Betty, and a moment later, the three of them converged on the spot she had pointed to.

Bruce picked up the handset and dialed the number before handing it to Leonard. Leonard put it up to his ear. After three rings, it went to Tony’s voice mail. “He’s not answering,” said Leonard.

“If you dial ‘zero’ you can talk to JARVIS,” Bruce told him.

Leonard took the handset away from his ear and punched the ‘zero’ key, then held it back up to his ear.

“This is JARVIS. How may I help you, Doctor Samson?”

“How did you know it was me?”

“Call it a lucky guess. I gather you are trying to reach Sir for back up.”

“Well, yes—where is he?”

“In surgery, I’m afraid.”

“Surgery? JARVIS, what happened?”

“It seems he insisted on carrying a three-hundred-pound blue alien across Central Park and gave himself a hernia. So I’m afraid that Sir won’t be able to come to your aid, as he is currently under sedation. Shall I connect you with Captain Rogers instead?”

“I’m not sure how he’s going to help us. Have he and the others even made it to wherever they were going yet? If they’d flown commercial, they would still be on the plane.” It was probably telling that they had just skimmed right past the whole “three-hundred-pound blue alien” thing as if that was a completely normal way to injure yourself.

“The Quinjet is not a commercial airliner,” said JARVIS. “They arrived at their destination around the same time you arrived in Virginia earlier today. With any luck, they should just be wrapping up their mission. Just stay on the line, and I’ll connect you.”

“Okay, but I hope you’re right and we’re not going to be interrupting him in the middle of something important.”

Leonard waited for JARVIS to put him through. A moment later, he listened to another phone ring three times, but this one didn’t go to voice mail. “Tony?”

“No, it’s Leonard. Tony’s in the hospital.”

“Again? Can’t he go one mission without getting injured?”

“Yeah, actually—he was supposed to be waiting a few miles away in case I needed backup, but I’m not sure what happened. Apparently, he went back to New York. Anyway, I found Bruce and Betty, but now we’re all trapped in this bunker. So how are things at your end?”

“Er—so good news is, we found the scepter.”

“I’m guessing there’s bad news?”

“Zora disappeared with it, and we’re pretty sure she took it to Doom.”

“So what you’re saying is that Victor von Doom, an insane dictator whose favorite pastime is making robotic clones of himself, is now in possession of a powerful magical artifact capable of controlling minds.”

“Yep.”

( う-´)づ︻╦̵̵💥|

Loki strode into the room, and dumped the paper sack she was holding out onto the foot of the hospital bed.

Her younger self and the two mortal children stared at the heap of clothing that had tumbled out of the sack.

“Who are you?” asked the little red haired witch.

Her brother turned to young Loki. “Is this your mother?”

“No,” said Loki, at the exact moment his younger self said, “Yes.” Loki scowled at him. “Just take your clothing and get changed. I’ve brought you both night things and ‘street clothes’ as the mortals say.”

“None of these are my clothes,” said the witch girl, picking through the pile. She picked up what appeared to be a black piece of string, though Loki suspected it to be some sort of mortal undergarment invented by men for the purpose of torturing women. “I think these are Natasha’s, actually.”

“And Clint’s,” said young Loki, holding up a gray t-shirt emblazoned with the words “PROPERTY OF SHIELD.”

“I think these are Steve’s,” said the boy, holding up a pair of high waisted, tan-colored trousers.

Loki shrugged; Stark’s snotty AI must have directed her to the wrong floor. “Oh well. Mortal ‘casual’ clothing is all essentially the same anyway.”

Her younger self shrugged off the jacket he had on, and pulled the SHIELD t-shirt over his head. “You haven’t said anything, yet.”

“About what?”

“My appearance, obviously. You don’t think it’s shameful?”

Loki sighed. This wasn’t a conversation she was prepared to have with herself, because it wasn’t even one she had had with—well, herself, yet. “I suppose you are a bit on the scrawny side. Perhaps you should try to get more protein in your diet.”

“Don’t play stupid. You know what I’m talking about.”

“If you don’t like that form, change back.”

“I can’t. I’m stuck this way, otherwise I would have turned back by now.”

“You’re probably over-thinking it. At the risk of sounding cliché, all you have to do is be yourself.”

Young Loki stared at their own hands with an expression of distaste. “But this is me. This is what I truly am.”

“You’re Loki. You get to be whatever you want to be. If anything, limiting yourself to the form you were born with would be a sin against your own nature.” Loki held out her hand and conjured a small projection of herself. With a flick of her wrist, it changed to a projection of their male form, and with another, of a Loki who was a frost giant. Then she flicked through several other projections, each showing one of their variants: old Loki, fox Loki, faun Loki, Hulk Loki, zombie Loki, alligator Loki—she stopped on a projection of Sylvie. It had only been a few hours since she had seen her, but Loki might be starting to miss her a little.

“All those are us?”

“You have the power to be whatever you wish, so you might as well be whatever feels right. It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks of it.” Look at me, thought Loki, sharing wisdom with a youngling. If Frigga could have seen it, she might have been proud for once.

Young Loki frowned. “Now I feel even more confused. Gender is one thing, but race-fluidity isn’t a thing, even on Midgard.”

The child couldn’t just be grateful for the wisdom that had been shared with him, could he? “Race is mostly a social construction anyway.”

“Maybe it is when you’re talking about Asgardians and Vanir or mortals with different skin tones, but not when you’re talking about Frost Giants and Asgardians. They aren’t even the same species. An alligator isn’t even a mammal. Also, how did we become a zombie?”

“Obviously, we were bitten by a zombie.”

“That’s not a choice, then.”

“Who said anything about choice? Although if you intentionally get bitten by a zombie—”

“Who intentionally gets bitten by a zombie?”

“Like I said before, you’re over thinking this. Loki’s are Loki’s. We probably ought to qualify as our own species. But there will be plenty of time for you to have an identity crisis tomorrow. Do you have any idea what time it is? All three of you children should be in bed at this hour.”

“I am in a bed,” the boy pointed out.

“I meant that good little children should be asleep at this hour.”

“I couldn’t possibly sleep right now,” said his younger self. “Besides, where are Wanda and I supposed to sleep?”

With a sweep of her arm a full sized four poster bed, complete with an emerald green crushed velvet canopy and matching bedding made from the finest Egyptian cotton, appeared in the empty space between the door and the hospital bed.

Her younger self stared at it with their mouth gaping open. “How did you do that? Do you have the Reality Stone?”

“I have at least twenty,” Loki told him. “But I’ve told you before that I don’t use any of those damned stones. I just pulled that out of my dimensional storage.”

“Why would you carry around something that large?”

“Because pocket dimensions offer an almost unlimited amount of storage space, and you never know when you might need to sleep in a space that lacks adequate furnishing.”

“I’m still not tired,” her younger self objected.

“What do you want me to do, sing you a lullaby?”

Her young, obnoxious self grinned at her. “If you actually sing, I’ll go to sleep.”

“Oh, for crying out—fine. Put your night things on, first.”

“Clint’s night things, you mean.”

“Whatever. Get ready for bed, and once you’re in bed, I’ll sing.”

Loki watched as her younger self took his pants off and put on a pair of plaid flannel pajama bottoms that must have belonged to Barton. The witch girl held up a silky black negligee and looked at it uncertainly. “I think I would be too cold in this.”

“You could wear Steve’s pajamas,” her brother said. “I’m probably not supposed to take my hospital gown off yet, and I’m not sure how I could with these tubes and things coming out of me.” The boy tugged at one such tube that was coming out of the crook of his arm. Younger Loki snatched his wrist, pursing his lips at him disapprovingly.

The little red haired girl picked up a pair of flannel pajamas that were sure to be much too large for her. She took them into the bathroom to change. A few moments later, she came back, the waistband twisted around her hand as she struggled to keep them up. Before she lost them completely, she climbed under the covers of Loki’s bed.

Young Loki got in on the other side. “Could you tell us a bedtime story, too?”

“Don’t push it,” Loki growled. When the children had settled in, she sat down at the foot of the bed, cleared her throat, and began to sing to the tune of “Brahm’s Lullaby:”

Go to sleep,

Little brats,

Or I ’ll murder you surely—

Go to sleep,

Ri-ight now,

Else you won ’t see the light of day—

Rudely, her younger self interrupted her. “No, I want a real lullaby.”

“Fine,” Loki snapped. “Tell you what—I’ll sing you a real lullaby. An old Midgardian folk song from Scandinavia.* Would that make you happy?” Her younger self nodded as Loki took a deep breath and began to sing softly, beginning in a sweet falsetto:

A man walked into a timber wood,

Hey farah, the timber wood,

There a crow sat in a tree and crowed,

Hey farah, farah, farah—

That crow wants to kill me, the man did think,

Hey farah, the man did think,

So he shot the crow dead and she fell from the tree,

Hey farah, farah, farah—

He took the crow back to the barn,

Hey farah, back to the barn,

He skinned her and he cut her up,

Hey farah, farah, farah—

From the pelt, he made some shoes,

Hey farah, he made some shoes,

Twenty pairs of shoes he made,

Hey farah, farah, farah—