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Chapter Text

“Enough!” he had screamed, staring at the thing in front of him as fury had invaded his chest like a weapon stabbing him directly in it, standing tall and full of self-worth even if he had been slightly shaking in place, whispers of ‘How dare them,’ ‘Shame, shame, shame,’ and ‘Destroy them all!’ rippling inside his head while a soft undercurrent of something unclear wanted to discourage him. It wanted him to retreat for whatever reason he couldn’t comprehend yet. 

Still, despite that and despite being almost breathless, he unrelentingly continued.

“You are… all of you are beneath me!” 

‘Yes, yes, yes,’  many of the voices whispered in unison, clearly delighted. 'Let him know. Let them all know. Let them see who you are. Have them fear you. Yes.’

The eyes of the beast stared back at him, though. And by the hint of sentiment written on its face, and on his body language, it looked like it was seeing him as an unnerving, annoying fly to be swatted away at best. The big brute definitely wasn't afraid of him. And that made him feel a soft lurch of tension under the forced pride—almost being vomited by his being—overwhelming, shining on any other emotion like a lighthouse in a storm.

“I am a God, you dull creature,” he added, still prideful, still apparently fearless, more whispers urging him on. “And I will not be bullied by…”

He wasn’t able to finish talking. 

A hand closed up on his leg so quickly that he didn’t even see it coming. His words turned into a shocked noise similar to a half-shout as he didn’t feel the ground under his feet anymore.

A trace of regret made itself known before all he felt was blinding pain repeating itself as he hit the ground so many times he lost count; a loud crack of something he wasn’t sure what could be since no spot was hurting more than others… and then nothing at all. 

********

When he regained consciousness, his surroundings were a chaos of disordered shapes, of clustered colors that blinked into existence only to be consequently—but for short amounts of time—removed by the dark spots that filled his eyesight, threatening him to make him swoon a second time. 

There was agony flaring everywhere. Waves of hurt rippled through his spine, skin, and nerves like destructive tsunamis, making every inch of his body shake, spasm, and burn terribly. His already heavy slow breathing couldn't help but stagger even more inside his lungs at every burst, rasping unpleasantly, small wheezing sounds following every exhale, which… a small part of him knew that it wasn't exactly a good sign. But he was still reeling from the rushing of pure torture that was literally all over him, so he almost ignored the information entirely.

Between the new and the past wounds that littered his whole being, he felt like he was breaking apart, shattering like an old, crumbled toy. He was so broken that he would have been utterly fine in finally letting his mind shut down entirely again—he would have done so with pleasure, all to avoid the current of torment that just wouldn't stop assaulting him—resting inside the hole on the floor that the green brute had provoked by throwing him around like a ragdoll—and he must have looked as bad as he felt. 

But even with the way his head was spinning and throbbing, overwhelmed by painful sensations and by the loud noises provoked by explosions and by the battle that kept going in the city, eventually something stopped him and made him fight to keep attention. 

His head… It was quiet, mostly. 

There was a new clarity in his thoughts—no more disordered, incomplete ones. No more screams. No more whispers begging for his attention and pushing him to act. No more small talk that was covered to the point that it felt more like it was a buzzing noise, not words spewing out between the chaos—as if someone had opened a window to let out the stale air. And the root… The deep root—that had felt like it was cracking his skull, at times—formed to connect him to The Other was missing, too. 

His chest felt lighter as well, even though it was tight, sore, and full of stabs of pain. The aggressive, powerful, unwanted feelings were fading out slowly—more slowly than the thoughts in his brain—silhouettes of them just moving towards a corner in his being until they just were there, but they didn't feel his anymore. 

He had wanted to conquer Miðgarðr and rule it—As he was supposed to do. He was supposed to be King, one of many voices had screamed before. 

He had been internally assaulted by an insane amount of twisted happiness at the idea of hurting the mortals. At the idea of making them suffer in a way that would never be forgotten—that would never let him be in the shadows of anyone ever again! they had fiercely insisted.

He had desired deeply to let them all see his strength, to kill those who did not understand his view—to repudiate those he couldn't trust, those who refused his gifts to them, those who acted like they were constantly better than him and made him prove himself over and over and over. Like what he did was never enough to change their minds. 

But… it did not make any sense. 

He had never desired to be king. He had wanted to be his broth… No. Not Brother. He wasn't his brother—Never had been. And that was clear. He had thrown him down the Bifrost without thinking twice and that was enough proof to tell him that the one he had seen as family had mocked him with fake care. Just like Oðin did—but still, he had wanted to be Thor's equal when he had thought that he was related to him… In a way, he still did, even now. 

He had wanted to be seen by him. Properly. He had… wanted to be treated like his opinion mattered; like he mattered—he never did, did he? Nothing else but a stolen relic of a pet. He had been an entertainment for a while, always searching desperately for scraps of approval… No more now, though. 

But ruling on Miðgarðr to make himself matter? That wasn't something he had wanted at all. 

He was supposed to protect the Nine Realms, this one included. He was not supposed to harm it. It was what he had been taught since he was a child—just like the fact that he had to care for their well-being, being destined to rule or at least help rule as an advisor. Just like he had learned politics and history, even of realms outside the Nines.

Why go against what he knew was wrong, what he felt was wrong to do? Why? Except for the situation in Jötunheimr, which was… different—a disgraceful taboo—he really… He…

Oh. 

Oh. Right.

He had done everything just to bring the Tesseract to his merciful, loving Father so that he would be pleased with him. So that he could return victorious and be worthy of being one of his Children, even though he was a dirty, disgusting Jötunn runt that had been left to die. Both in the cold and in the Void. 

But he had failed! The Loki that had desired to conquer had been defeated by the green beast and his mind had returned to him, the Infinity Stone’s effect gone, just like the opening in his head that led him to The Other. And in little to no time, the Portal that brought the armies to Miðgarðr would have been closed, too, blocking the invasion.

The fight was going to end soon enough. 

A good part of him wanted to gloat about it. It wanted to cheer because perhaps… perhaps—even in his fractured, confused, lost mind. Even with his twisted, over-the-top, uncontrolled feelings rolling around his veins like poison—he had been somehow able to fight back, at least enough to not win. While the rest of him… the rest of him knew. 

There was gonna be no realm, no barren moon, no crevice, where Fath… The Mad Titan would not find him.

Fear froze the blood in his veins just at the thought. It made him flinch, enough to feel another flash of agony hitting him harshly, tearing a small whimper from his mouth. 

He was going to get him. It didn't matter when. Or where he would be. He was going to find him and bring him back to Sanctuary begging and screaming for mercy until he made his throat raw. 

He would have made him pay for his failure. He was going to discover a new type of pain. 

To avoid a similar ending, being captured and killed quickly seemed a good idea. Waiting for the return of the self-called Avengers seemed like the right thing to do. The fast way to bring him back for his punishment on Asgarðr. 

‘But what if…ʼ his mind jumped up, almost teasingly, almost perversely, sounding scared still. 'What if Oðin isn’t going to swing the axe fast enough? What if in the time you waited for perdition, the Black Order got to you first? What then? What then?!'

Then… Then he…

Quick, frenetic, violent images flickered into his brain, making him perceive the cold fully getting stuck into him, dread rising and assaulting him, taking his breath away. The feeling of being choked made him wheeze once again, more pain blazing inside his chest as he forced himself to inhale deeply. 

His heart drummed in it, fast and desperate like an animal clawing at his skin as a single, almost inaudible “No…” slipped from his lips. 

The decision of what to do came just as fast. It was taken even before he realized it, the fact that he did not have any tempting extra option to fight it with being enough to not have him hesitate. The worst alternative was too hurtful, too dislikable to let him consider them even more than just a split second. 

Loki—even with a still pained head and many, severely injured body parts—raised on his feet, quivering strongly and called on his seiðr. 

Part of it was already working on him, trying to heal some of the most dangerous wounds. It was weak and tired… in a way it was almost offended for being mistreated, too, but it still responded to him, interrupting its workings. 

He would let it heal him when he was safe, but first he needed it to leave and get there, he reminded himself, almost to let it listen to him more, to follow his needs more. 

Loki focused. He felt and saw the faint, cold green energy run inside and outside him, pulsing irregularly a little before getting steadier. 

He knew that he had little options with the state he was in, but even those little options were going to be enough. One of them, specifically. 

He closed his eyes and went rigid at the pain forming in his bones as he felt himself getting shaped, some fractures making it harder than how it was supposed to be. 

Even if achingly, his body still got smaller, pulling onto himself, moving all his organs out of the way to avoid them getting squashed until they started to diminish in size, too, adjusting properly and so returning to the right places. 

Black, white, green, and blue feathers developed first on his arms, making his hands and fingers disappear. Then they replaced his hair, feeling heavier but not stinging or itching at all. And then, immediately after that, they covered the rest of his skin as his armor and clothes vanished, almost emerging from the inside. 

In between the growth, his mouth snapped open against his own will and became solid and long, turning his lips into a sharp dark beak. His sight changed as well, somehow making everything brighter, more limpid, and more defined, to the point that he could see a hint of dust falling on the floor in the extreme corner of the room. 

The process of transformation had seemed long for his perceptions, but it had taken less than a few seconds to complete. And as it finished, he could not help but shake his slightly round body in a full body shiver—more torment hitting him forcefully, making him wince once more, croaking in displeasure. The shift hadn’t changed that in the slightest, no. Every single thing was aching. More than just one bone had been shattered and now, inside the body of the bird he had taken the form of, they felt even more out of place, jutting uncomfortably against his skin—and blink, hopping carefully in place to feel the ruined ground under his long but still small, shiny legs.

Then, even though he was still heavily hurting , even though he had issues breathing, he laboriously shook his wings until he took flight, the wind shaking through him like invisible fingers trying to grasp him. 

The vibrant blue of the sky instantaneously occupied his entire view—the various buildings underneath being nothing but an implied decoration—making him feel, just for a moment, like he had seen it for the first time in centuries, a hint of something that felt like true freedom running through his veins in soft exhilaration… even though freedom did not exist. Certainly, it did not exist for him. 

And so, Loki moved forward. He let himself be carried away by the current, trying to ignore the suffering that continued to flare in him, having him stutter and stagger like a hatchling still trying to learn what and how to move. 

He proceeded as much as he could, having little to no issues with the Chitauri’s battalion crossing the sky as well, since shortly after he went out, he saw them all drop like puppets whose strings had been cut out, ending up loudly clattering as they unceremoniously fell on the ground—Yes. They had definitely lost. The heroes had won. 

Loki—the other Loki. He definitely felt like him, but at the same time, he was like a different entity that had moved his body, that had made him see the things he did like everything was perfectly right, perfectly justified, absolute, and eternally superior to any other being’s view—the wanna-be-conqueror, Children of the Titan but the son of none, had lost. He, too, was lacking strings now. 

Had he had had a proper mouth, he would have smiled at that. But he did not. 

He limited himself to keep flying on and on, a part of him still capturing the view of the battered state of buildings under all the beautiful blue. Visualizing the smoke that rose from them before dissipating, forming again and repeating the loop. 

It was a small show of the consequences of what he had done, which he would have liked to ignore, but knew he could not. Would not—hints of guilt already gnawing at him, breathing on his neck and telling him ‘This was all you. You did this. You brought this upon them and you did it with pleasure.’

Eventually, after what felt like too little and at the same time too much, he had to stop his flight. 

His body was too strained, too tired. Moving his wings got harder and harder each time he did, even with the air helping him in the process. He couldn't keep a strict line and he kept risking it to make his trajectories in the wrong way. He hadn't been too far from hitting a building a few times and he had almost fainted thrice during his journey. 

So, he ended up entering a ruined, small, gray house with few windows and a hole in the ceiling, surrounded by an untended garden. 

He didn't even have time to set protection and illusion spells around him. He simply collapsed onto the floor, more pain making him agonize there for an instant or two before everything went pitch black for the second time in the day.

********

He dreamt of him, of the “No, Loki.” and of that empty stare that had made him feel like nothing mattered anymore. Like death would be more accepting of him—The Lady hadn't been. She had refused to take him in with her. 

He dreamt of his skin turning a disgusting shade of blue—so different from the one of the skies he had seen before, no, no… He didn't want this, he wanted to return to himself. Wanted to be what he always thought he was. He didn't want to see his abhorrent form anymore. Didn’t want to feel the weird feeling of new, fresh, pulsing freezing energy rolling inside his veins—and of the uncaring, revolted look on Thor's face before he simply shook his head and threw him into the abyss. 

He dreamt of falling, nothing but silence and a glacial chill keeping him close, his shouts vanishing into the Void.

He dreamt of countless stars dancing around his eyes—vague, distant, unreachable—while everything else was dark and somehow hungry as it tried to gulp him down piece by piece, ending up spitting him out like dirt on its tongue anyway. 

He dreamt of blood pooling in his mouth, iron covering entirely his taste buds until he vomited it on the dirty floor with some gall, nausea twisting his stomach even though he had nothing in it to offer to quiet down the malady. 

He dreamt of hands with six fingers grabbing him and breaking his bones one by one, only to wait for them to be fixed to be able to do it all over again, choosing then to switch technique: extreme warmth burning on his skin, branding it as theirs, his own wails echoing in his head like they were someone else’s.

He dreamt of his Fath… the Titan. He cradled his face with a weird kindness—it was there, but it never felt natural. It never felt real. But did he really know the difference between what was and what wasn’t?—tilting his head as he stared at him, delusion crossing his features before nodding towards Ebony Maw, letting him have another round—As always, he looked so eager to play with him, showing all his teeth as he smiled in satisfaction. 

And then he woke up with a choked yell blocked in his throat. 

In less than three seconds, he looked at his surroundings, not big as they had looked before even though they were the same, realizing after an aborted painful jerking movement that he was in his Æsir form again. 

Sweat was trickling down his forehead, his wrecked back, and his battered chest, making his clothes feel wet and sticky against them, dirty in a way that disturbed him way too much. 

His head was still spinning. His heartbeat was even faster than before and the sore feeling had become even more intense, like someone was pushing purposefully on his body until he fully split, starting from his rib cage.

His breath was still short and hard to let in just like it was hard to let out, the wheezing noise being even more prominent each time he forced himself to try.

His seiðr was even weaker, even slower in its movements. It flickered around his wounds, trying to treat them, but it had issues even trying as he probably had gotten in a worse physical state by forcing himself to fly longer than he should have after Shapeshifting—And now he had Shapeshifted again, even if not wanting to do so. Which must have taken away all the inner energy he had obtained by resting, having it get even lower. Much lower than his entire being could sustain while trying to heal him, and so making him feel near to collapse. Again.

A small, annoyed, throaty sound evaded his lips as he forced himself to relax against the pain, returning to stay still, not daring to move an inch. 

His eyelids were heavy, so he let them go down once more after peeking at the hole above him—blue and orange and dark gray hues melting into puffy cumulus that dominated the view—but he remained vigilant, listening to the quiet around him—interrupted a little by the scurrying around of... maybe cockroaches, maybe rats. For his still confused mind, it was not clear—and outside the entrance door.

At a certain point, during the long waiting and careful listening—which, in a way, had felt almost boring because doing nothing wasn't his forte, not when he knew that he was still in the enemy’s territory—a wave of dangerously scorching heat crossed him from head to toes, followed by more dizziness and by a headache that seemed to stab him with vicious sharp knives. It made him want to curse out loud, but he even had problems gulping down saliva without feeling his throat scraped by sandpaper, so he preferred swearing mentally and hoping that the Norns—wretched, hateful things as they were—were going to, at least, give him a moment of peace. 

Yes, he was going to be filled with even more agony, eventually. Yes, he would probably try to slit his own throat before they could catch him. But a fortnight or two of rest without feeling like a horse had stomped on him wouldn't have been that disgusting, would they? Or that would have been too kind for a revolting creature such as he?—Possibly. It surely felt that way. 

********

He slipped in and out of consciousness many times, never daring to move from where he had landed even though, from time to time, a strong desire to leave the place hit, especially since the safe place in which he was did not feel safe at all. 

It was too open, too warm, too dirty, too near to where Thor was. 

For whatever reason, he had already seen the Thunderer way too often in that room, the sight making him get rigid and then laugh acidly at his face. 

Seeing him made him want to beg for help like the weak being he was. It made him want to ask for him to not leave him, even though he always did. He always did, every time he blinked too strongly, feeling his view still filling itself with black stains. 

He was there, then he was not. Then, when he had stopped expecting him—with heat all over his body, burning him slowly and painfully, rattling coughs tricking their way out of his mouth—he was there again, staring and saying nothing, not moving either, which didn't feel like a Thor thing, repeating the pattern, returning to make him feel things he was trying to push away. Making him want to ask him things that he knew he had no right to. 

During the periods in which he hadn't seen his oaf of a… Thor… Just Thor Oðinson… He had thought he had seen Frigga, which had been a kick in the guts, making him feel even worse since she wasn't even trying to get near and her face was so blank that he knew he had done something extremely wrong to get that expression. And it made him want to scream. It made him want to apologize, to kneel, to implore for her forgiveness—He probably did. He wasn't sure. His throat hurt nonetheless. 

When she wasn't there either—leaving a sentiment of betrayal and regret that stirred through his system—he noticed the dark night sky, making him terribly restless and uncomfortable. Like every shadow was out to get him. Like the Mad Titan had already made his call, requesting their services and they were just waiting for him to lower his—already low, working very little—defenses.

Then the sun had returned high, mighty, and unnervingly radiant—unnervingly reassuring—shining its rays and making them timidly coming through the ceiling. Then, again, something must have moved the clouds, which had been much more gray and much more big than how he had seen them before, because it was everything he could notice from the hole. 

Still, between his confusing ins and outs of sleep, the pain had diminished, in complete opposition to the warm waves running on his face and chest, which had seemed to become even warmer, like he was there again, the boiling temperatures taking his breath away, the burns tracing his body even in intimate places—the one between his thighs still itched. 

He didn't realize he was crying until the tears reached his mouth and a choked sob made his throat hurt like Hel, his body fully shaking in response. 

Like he had done in the Sanctuary, many times, a part of him hoped that his amma, Thor, his faðir or even Heimdallr would show up—They never did anyway. 

********

When he was lucid enough—the weird fog covering logical thoughts almost entirely gone—he ended up guessing, a bit ashamed of himself, that he might have been feverish enough to hallucinate.

His breath had cleared out. It had done so especially after an intense burst of seiðr in his chest, which apparently had moved a rib out from his left lung, closing the inner wound as soon as it was able to. 

The rest of his body still ached, but he definitely didn't feel like every piece of his skin was on fire or breaking apart anymore. And because of it, his mind felt clearer, capturing sounds in their entirety, following the flow of energy in his blood without hitches, studying the movements of the cockroaches, analyzing the four walls of the flat he had momentarily taken possession of.

Ruined, simple white paper was on every wall, looking cracked and interrupted by small dark dots.

An old square picture—that showed a happy family of three and a little orange cat with a bell attached to the pink collar—was at his right. 

An oak wood floor was under him, while on it, on his left, stood a dirty, empty umbrella stand made out of metal. 

The window from which he had entered had been just near the entrance, where the dark brown door seemed to barely stay attached to the hinges and they were behind him. 

In front of him, he could see the start of a new room through a singular, rectangular empty space that interrupted the wall. The new environment was just as lacking as the one he was in. But it didn't really matter, anyway. 

At the exact moment his seiðr would stop healing him and he would be replenished enough—his stomach, right there and then, was so empty that it didn’t even hurt. He almost didn’t feel the hunger—he would have left the house. By Teletransporting, if he had felt up to it. If not, Shapeshifting again. 

To where? He did not know. He had to think about it more. Surely, he needed to be as far away as possible. 

He could get anywhere with a good disguise, but it would have been better to remain on Miðgarðr, knowing how to hide by laying low and… being perfectly aware that the Titan could not get there on his own yet, banished and all. 

Some of his lackeys would, before or later, but not him—not without the Space Stone.  The Tesseract was even more out of his reach, since the Mind Stone and him were out of it, too, now. In a way it was almost hilarious to think about it—and maybe, if he had been ready and strong enough, he would have been able to fight some of them. He could at least hope for that.

They had got him easily, almost willingly, the first time. Of course, they had. He had been weak, delirious from falling and falling and falling for what had seemed an eternity and without a visible ending in sight, almost paralyzed by the cold, starving and dehydrated.

If he had allowed himself to regain all his strength, he would have not gone down without a fight. 

And if he had, if they had defeated him like that as well, one way or another, it would not have been without him taking some down as well. The more, the better. 

If he had to suffer—or directly kill himself—in the end, he would make them force their hands to accomplish it first. 

********

It was after more resting and staying still, hearing little to no sound in an unnatural state of quiet that he realized—pure panic exploding in him until he felt nothing but—that the enchantment which hid him from Heimdallr had interrupted itself.  

Whether it had happened between his seiðr latching to every scrap of energy available to heal him or something else—like the Mad Titan himself when he had sent him to Miðgarðr—he wasn't sure. But it was gone. It had been gone for a while, at this point. 

He hoped that he hadn't searched for him while he was unconscious, but considering that he had disappeared from the tower of the man in the red flying armor—Anthony Stark, if he remembered correctly. The one that had offered him a drink to stall. The one that he had thrown out of the window in a fit of curling dislike and rage—and that he momentarily was enemy number one of the realm, he very much doubted it. Especially if Thor wanted to find him as soon as possible to capture him, he would tell him where he was without a second of delay. 

The anxiety started pressing against his being just at the thought, returning to make him feel like he could not breathe. 

With his nerves making him feel particularly self-conscious—his skin even more full of sweat and aches, his spine still feeling not quite healed yet—he quickly covered himself again, concealing his body from any curious all-seeing eyes, his legs protesting just a bit as he decided to rise quietly on his feet to move, his back softly connecting against one of the walls. 

It took him very little to let himself focus again on his surroundings, perceiving something—someone—coming his way in an ever-diminishing radius, so fast that it raised all his hair on his body and it probably cut through the air . 

His mind immediately started to race with ‘What to do?’ and ‘Where to go?’ phrases repeating again and again as he scanned his own Miðgarðian memories as fast as he could. 

As he felt the loud sound of the storm approaching, almost screaming in his ears, he called for his seiðr, letting it roam through him again, humming pleasantly, but definitely not feeling ready for a far away Teletransportation. It was barely enough for a small one. He hadn't eaten, he had slept enough to heal the worst of his injuries and little more than that. He definitely wasn't prepared to get to Norway. He wasn't even able to get to the borders of Pennsylvania—Which would have been easy like breathing if he had been well enough. 

So, no, he could not leave properly. But… 

But he could disappear. Make it seem like he had left again. Have them run around to understand where he had left to get to. 

He immediately started manipulating the light around himself, his work being slower than he would have liked to, but fast enough to end before Thor actually bursted into the room from the open ceiling like an angry Bilgesnipe, his red cape shaking behind him, Mjöllnir trembling just a little in his hand. His expression was absolutely murderous as he turned behind, left and right, the view making Loki hold his breath without even realizing it. 

The blonde oaf—after just a small, small pause, like he was forcing himself not to shout his name out loud, deep breaths shaking his shoulders—moved forward, heavy fast steps bringing him into the next room. 

Loki stopped seeing him, remaining where he was, making his hearing sharper instead in an attempt to perceive every small, big sound he made. And he waited. 

He waited, heard, and saw Stark coming in shortly after, too, opening the door from the inside and so being followed by the Spider, who cautiously stepped in like an animal on a hunt, prepared to fight and to investigate. 

Loki stared at them both, still not daring to inhale, exhale, or move a muscle in his corner—a part of him tensed even more as something told him someone was just outside the house, too, but he wasn't sure if it was just him being paranoid or if it was the truth. 

Stark moved quickly, his face covered by the yellow mask, not letting him have a view of the emotions underneath. His arm was raised to shoot. “Jarvis, analyze,” he heard him utter, making Jarvis say something he did not understand. There was a small noise, similar to talking, but nothing was audible to him. 

The Spider—unreadable in her expressions even without a mask hiding her face—looked down, then up, her soft but detached blue-green eyes running on the wallpaper until they stared directly at him—to the point that he almost feared her truly seeing him as they lingered where he was far longer than how he would have liked, his heart going a little faster again—before passing him over, focusing on the picture of the family. 

He attentively followed every single movement they made as they kept looking around before strolling deeper into the flat. 

“Knock-knock, Point Break?” he heard Stark say after just a hint of silence, his voice not too loud. “You with us?”

“He is not here,” Thor stated, frustration coming through his tone. “Not anymore. He might have sensed us coming.”

“The blood traces stop near the door.” the Spider asserted flatly after a few instants, provoking another short pause. Loki, at the exact words, told himself to cover his tracks better if something similar happened a second time, caught off guard or not. 

“If he is still bleeding like that, he might not be far.”

The assumption almost made him chuckle, but he still killed the noise before it could slip out and give him away, especially at hearing them walking again in the flat. 

‘Smart woman,' he thought, his lips twitching in slight amusement. ‘If you only knew...’

“Guess we'll hafta check some cameras again, then. See if he pops in. Stole children's candy, murdered a neighbor, or whatever.”

“He still might have had enough time to heal and Teletransport himself,” Thor still sounded upset, somehow even more than how he had after noticing the lack of him in there. “My Brother is very powerful. I would not exclude it.”

Loki almost felt flattered. Almost—The fact that he hadn't been able to do it fully might have been the reason why. It surely ruined his merits. 

They still searched again by moving and touching stuff—the woman returned where the trail of blood was as well, her fingers running on the surface almost to search for a broken tile or something that could move, shaking her head when nothing did—then they talked just a little bit more, but except from keeping an eye on the place, nothing they said was terribly important. 

After that, they left the house, more or less like they had entered it: fast but cautious. The main difference was that they all used the door this time, closing it behind them delicately enough, having it squeak like it was protesting against the movement—And the unknown outside presence he had perceived left as well. Just as quietly, but more slowly. 

He almost refused to let out the air from his lungs even when they weren't there anymore, feeling his chest full and tight, his heart pounding, pulsing with a fast, wild rhythm. 

He definitely did not stop manipulating the lights, even though his seiðr was protesting again at the stubborn, insistent use. 

If he had to leave the house, he would have done it by being invisible, not risking any type of human technology registering him again, not even in the form of someone—or something—else. 

He wouldn't let the Avengers catch him either. No matter what. 

He wouldn't hurt them—if it wasn't extremely necessary, probably in a matter of self-defense, which he could avoid if he was good enough at finding shelter—if they tried to capture him, but they would not get him either. 

He refused to. 

Chapter Text

A rush of rage and frustration was percolating through him like lava, setting his face on fire first and then making everything else feel stiff and hot. The steely chair—covered by a flat pillow—on which he was had already been uncomfortable the moment he had sat on it, but with the taut state of his, it simply aggravated.

He clenched his jaw, his lips pressing together as a tremble threatened to shake them, a loud exhale huffing through his nose before he inhaled again, sniffing an undertone of ozone in the air. 

He then gripped his fingers into tight fists, his fingernails thrusting on his skin—his knuckles becoming white from strain—to the point that if he added the smallest hint of want and strength he would have broken through it, making them bleed. Which was rather abnormal, considering that he wasn’t usually the one who picked or casually injured his own hands in his family. 

Mother did. She had a tendency to prod and nag her palms when she was nervous, trying to hide it and mostly obtaining results, not betraying anything in her expression or in most of her words. Just her hands attacking each other—pulling repeatedly, latching at the pale ivory, and turning the color to a blooming light red—were the clear proof of it. 

Loki did it as well, for the exact same reason, even though it had become a rare sight in the last few decades. Or were they centuries?—Sometimes there was a clear cut between the years, which was easy to determine. Sometimes, instead, they just slipped through his fingers, leaving him with dozens of uncertainties that eventually tended to disappear as soon as he focused on the present action.

The view had become that way to him, at least. Which… was abnormal as well. Aye, Loki wasn't an open person. Never had been. But with Thor, it had been different. 

He had been so used to being able to see his Brother's fragilities all the time when they were children. They always tended to be attached to the hip, sharing things, adventures, stories, small secrets, and running jokes, often sleeping in the same bed as well when in need of reassurance. 

But then—somewhere between the lines, between fights for glory and the approaching adulthood that had hit fast and hard—it had just stopped. A distance had formed, and he hadn't noticed it. Not really. He had simply seen it as them getting older and naturally more independent. 

Somehow it felt like a sign, now. Just thinking about it felt bitter. It was one of the many things he had not realized until it was too late to fix them. 

Thor scowled, some more irritation rising in his chest, ugly and hard to ignore. But he still took another deep breath, forcing himself to flatten the sentiment instead of letting it get to him, no matter the mightiness of it.

He focused instead on the floaty shiny blue surface of the Man of Iron’s technology. Most of his Miðgarðian shield brothers and sisters were rewatching the same events—playing over and over without even a trace of Loki in them—attentively, continuously controlling hints by letting the voice in the wall enlarge the pictures and move them around, listening to the sounds that had been captured as well—little to nothing. Just the sound of the weird metallic carriages passing by, powered by dirty gas. 

The long-tailed Magpie his Brother had taken the shape of had left the Tower, fled—clearly struggling, which made him feel a pang of worry even though he probably shouldn't have, not after everything that had happened. But he still felt it, instinctive, embedded greatly inside his being like the Yggdrasill’s roots—and reached the ruined abode only to vanish in it. But nothing moved after that. 

No birds, nor any other small animals or any person quietly slipped out. Not even by examining so closely that it looked like they were right in front of the building. There were no changes until they arrived after leaving the big ship—that apparently was called Helicarrier—not too far behind and breaking the still, heavy calm that had seemed to freeze everything in place.

He, Lady Romanoff, and Stark had entered while Barton had remained outside, ready to stop Loki in case he tried to sneak out. All while Rogers and Banner had instead controlled the immediate nearby area, apparently refraining from asking questions to the people to avoid alarming them.

The lack of results had made them all somber, mostly silent; snarky remarks, annoyed comments, more detached tones, or focused answers rising when they weren't.

It had left them on edge; the Archer especially. He had moments in which he looked like he was close to starting screaming in rage, having a full breakdown, or throwing items out of the windows—to which the shield-sister tried to offer him comfort. She attempted some private soft spoken words and shared looks with him that clearly showed the softness they felt for each other and some hand-holding. 

But, still, they had not interrupted the research, not even after returning to the big Tower. Not even after being told that the Spies leader—the SHIELD, he insisted to himself, trying to remember it. The name fit quite well if they were intended to protect Miðgarðr’s safety as well as the Avengers did, so it might not have been a complicated matter—needed to talk to them with high urgency and that he would come to them. Maybe that evening. Maybe at sunset. He had not specified, apparently. 

Some pauses were made to avoid losing their minds, but they were short and they tended to happen when the upsetment rose to unmanageable levels. It had them leave the room—Lady Pepper’s fleeting appearances being a sign for some of them—or, as he had done, to sit and remain still. 

Thor hadn't left the room, no. He knew that if he had, he would have left the Tower entirely to start searching for Loki on his own, the quest of finding him and bringing him back home strongly tempting, but looking nebulous almost like how it had seemed to find him alive after he fell—him always asking… Nay, begging Heimdallr to tell him if something in his view had changed. If maybe the Void had a small gash in its defenses for once, if maybe Loki's concealing spell had lost effect for one reason or another if maybe the Norns had listened to his and his amma’s prayers to have him return to them, if, if, if… So many ifs. 

A displeased, strong feeling that he couldn't really define with a name yet churned inside his stomach. More hot, blinding frustration boiled inside his veins in response to it, bringing him to inhale and exhale once again. 

He had no desire to unleash any vicious, destructive storm upon the—already harmed, in clear need of restorations and of a period of peace—city. 

The clouds—light gray mixed with dirty white—still formed and crossed the sky even without his help, but there was no smell of rain in the air. He had no intention to change it. Not because of his altered mood, nor for any other possible reason.  

********

He made an appearance while they were all on the couches, near a low brown table, slowly feasting on a few Miðgarðians delicacies called Tacos, Quesadillas, and something sweet that he had not really caught the name of—it looked round and very orange—accompanied by some liquor and a few bottles of still water that the Man of Iron had ordered. 

The voice in the wall had announced the SHIELD leader while he had been taking the elevator, so they had been prepared for him, but still, his entrance was able to surprise most of them. 

He seemed to emerge from the shadows, stopping right in front of them, everything in him looking solemn and severe. Still, he had not been withering enough to restrain Stark from intervening, immediately after gulping down his nourishment. 

“And he arrives!” he said, sounding perhaps way too cheerful. “Fashionably late gets no food without a written apology.”

“I'm not here for the food,” the Spy retorted coldly. “Nor for jokes.”

“More for us then,” the man shrugged, a little grin painting his features as he quickly took another Tacos, munching on it. “Great.”

“You're here for Loki.” Rogers simply asserted, both his eyebrows up, his hands holding his emptied plate. Immediately after that statement, the Archer dropped his drained glass on the table with a thunk sound that made Lady Romanoff frown.  

Fury ignored the sudden gesture. He just stared at them for what felt too long of a time, his gaze moving in the room quickly on all his companions before it ended up landing on him. 

“I am here… ” he started quietly, his voice still harsh. “... Because I need to know that you have the situation under control. And no, do not interrupt me. Yes, I am talking to you, Stark,” he retaliated. 

“I mean, only because you tell me that, you kind of push me to do it. Just saying.”

“Tony…” Rogers sighed. 

“What? It's the ‘do not’ thing. You do not simply listen to the ‘do not’ thing. Oldest rule in the book.”

“Whatever comment you want to make, do it later. Please. This is important.” 

Thor found himself completely agreeing with him. He wasn't sure he would have been able to resist the tension locked into his body if there had been too many attempts at lightening the mood, which would have been a well-meant gesture but would have stalled the conversation. 

The Man of Iron visibly sobered. “I won't promise it, but I will attempt it.”

A small, fleeting smile slipped on the Captain's face as his body shifted into another sitting position. “...Fair enough.”

“So,” Lady Romanoff leaned forward, showing no apparent interest in her surroundings as she was entirely focused on Fury, whose only eye gazed, visibly annoyed, at Stark before transfixing on her. There were more munching sounds and a loud exhale. “What were you saying, boss?”

The Spy huffed, a hand of his getting on his flank before staring at Thor again—something of that look reminded him of Oðin. And it wasn't only because of the lack of the second eye. Maybe it was the high expectations written in it, the refusal of any mistake. They were both sensations clear like fresh, transparent water.

He clenched his hands tightly again until the stare returned to move away, not observing anyone this time.

“I said that I need to know that you have the situation under control,” he repeated, just at the exact moment in which Rogers rose to his feet to get a few napkins, one of which was given to Banner without the man even asking for it, as some of the cheese in his Quesadillas had fallen right on his white shirt, making him hiss and look visibly sheepish and flushed. “It has no if in it. It's a straight-up request.”

A heavy pause. Thor left his plate down, not feeling like feasting anymore since a knot started to form in his stomach. 

"I need to be sure that you know exactly what you have to do to find him. Because if you don't, then we're completely at a loss. And if we are, we can only wait for his next move since luring him with the Sceptre or the Tesseract is not an option.” 

“It definitely is not…” Barton murmured under his breath, so low that he almost did not hear him at all. 

“I need you to find a way, because if not, how the fuck are we supposed to catch someone who changes looks like nothing and that might not be on Earth anymore already? Which, to be completely honest, would not be a problem for us if he did …” 

The Archer raised to his feet, looking ready to retort at that, but saying nothing. He just refused to return sitting down, walking around like a frightened, cornered beast. 

“... But it very much would be if he is still out there, planning to control, slaughter people, and to conquer the planet a second time.”

Someone's leg started bouncing loud enough to be heard. Thor didn't see who it was as his eyes had fallen on his clenched fingers once more. 

The tension was thick in the air, so thick that it was hard not to feel oppressed by it. But his mind could only show him his baby brother's timid, insecure expression—red blooming on his cheeks, his arms tightening on his books like a matter of life and death—as he threw glances at Volstagg for the first time, startled by his height. 

“That's…” Banner started, clearing his throat and taking the image away. “That's… Yeah. He does look like the type who is stubborn and crazy enough to try again.” 

Thor couldn't help but feel some kind of deep dread mixed with hurt pitting against his chest. 

‘It’s true.’ he thought, running his index finger onto the softest side of his palm. ‘Loki is too resilient and unyielding to not attempt something a second time if he feels the desire to. He will probably just use different methods to act.’

He couldn't save him from his own bad choices and actions. Could not stop him from wanting to do them. He could only watch or fight him again to put an end to them. And watching, letting Miðgarðr burn, wasn't a solution, no matter how painful and upsetting the second choice was. 

“So, yes,” Fury returned to say after taking a few, almost punctuated small steps forward. “I might need you to know what to do. And if you don't, I might need you to discover it as soon as possible. It would be better to avoid letting him even start to plan anything, of course, but the important part is to not let him put it into action." 

The Spy left on the low table the weird metallic object that Jane, Selvig and Darcy Lewis had had as well, which they had called ‘phone’. 

“Romanoff, call from here if you have any important news.” 

She tilted her head, got up, and grabbed it, making it disappear in one of the pockets of her black jacket. “Yes, sir.”

“We’ll send agents all around the globe to search and keep an eye out for him in the meantime,” another pause in which Fury returned to stare at him. “Thor, I would like to know if we can narrow down what we have to search for—Magpies and what else?”

He blinked, almost surprised by the sudden question, but not even that much. 

“He can turn into everything he wants,” he replied, involuntarily scrunching his face. “Snakes, Magpies, Deers, Horses, and Wolves are his favorites, but he could choose everything if he so desires…” he saw Banner's eyebrow rise. “He could be any other man or woman, child or elder. But he always had a tendency to assume a black-green color pattern in his Shapeshifting. Blue, yellow, gold, or white can be there as well, sometimes.” 

“Where do you suppose he might decide to go?”

“Cold places,” he immediately replied. “He likes lakes and big, artistic, cultured cities to disappear into. But I am not certain he would follow his preferences if he felt like it would be too predictable of himself.”

He tried to think about something else, but nothing really jumped in. Nothing, really. Loki was complicated. Everything he was in, that he did, that he liked, was complicated. Different from how Thor was. Starting from the use of his seiðr—from how it even worked—moving to the way he approached things and ending with the way he dealt with his emotions. 

Finding him was going to be just as tricky—especially considering that they weren't aware if he was already on another planet or not. That made the search even harder as it was plausible in both ways. If he truly still wanted to conquer, he might have stayed to observe better or opted for a strategic retreat to plan his eventual next movements peacefully, to… To talk to whoever higher power gave him the Chitauri armies and the Sceptre. 

Something inside him churned unpleasantly again. 

“I apologize,” he ended up saying, his voice somber. “There is not much else to it. If he is still on Miðgarðr and doesn't want to be found, it will be quite hard for him to be. Your agents might get him, aye, but only to have him move to the other side of the realm in a second or less if they aren't careful enough.”

The Spy's face hardly changed—hardly even twitched out from its blank slate—but he gave him a court nod before muttering an unreadable “That's a start..." in a low tone. 

“As I said, find a way.” He then added, bringing his arm down quickly. “That’s all.” 

Several disordered, confusionary phrases of agreement were said collectively as answers, to the point that it was almost hard to get who had said what. 

Fury seemed satisfied enough by them anyway, pausing for an instant or two before making a sharp exhale. “I will take my leave then,” he said. 

After that, he lowered himself onto the table to grab a plate, adding a few Quesadillas to it… and immediately turned around. He did everything so quickly that his sight almost did not catch up with his mind and he doubted it really happened for a moment. 

But then… 

“Hey, no!” Stark barked, his eyes getting wider after a shocked gasp. It made Thor snort a little. And he wasn't the only one who did, either. "You have not written the apology letter yet! No stealing food allowed from you!”

Fury slightly shook his free hand in their direction, still showing his back to them and walking forward at a fast pace to leave the room. “I will write you one… Perhaps. Add thanks for the meal post scriptum as well if you fix this mess.” he responded, something in his tone telling clearly that he had a smirk on his face. This before he actually gave his stolen goods a satisfying bite, having the Man of Iron gasp even louder in fake-offense. 

After that the SHIELD leader was gone, saying no goodbye, nothing but silence stretching in the room for an indefinite time. 

They all looked at each other almost on accord, perplexed gazes meeting others that were more or less mirroring the same sentiment. 

“Well,” Banner said, sounding slightly exasperated. He grabbed the water while his free hand moved curly hair away from his forehead by pushing it behind. “That happened.”

“Yep.” Stark rose on his feet, grabbing the liquor instead and filling his glass to the brim. He almost stumbled before sitting down—for no apparent reason. He did not look drunk enough yet for it to be the cause—letting out a “Whoopsie there,” before restarting to talk properly. “Scolding number two… Or three?... Of the week…”

“Four.” Rogers mused, breathing in and out deeply, glancing at the other man while a hand was supporting his head—one finger on his neck, the others on his face. 

“I am not counting that one,” he replied a little too quickly. Thor had no idea what he was talking about. 

“Still four.”

“Okay, fine, four scoldings. Plus a big dose of ordering around. No pressure, no big deal. Quite nice to be in such a chill situation.”

“We can try to think about something tomorrow. See what we can do.” the Captain folded his arms, staring right in front of him before glancing quickly at Thor, almost thoughtfully. “We should prepare a chart. Think more about how he operates...”

Lady Romanoff tilted her head, contemplative, but she said nothing for a good amount of time as she had still been slowly chewing. “Seeing more of the picture and not just the pieces that we have could definitely be a start.” 

The Scientist agreed, moving his head up and down absently before heavily frowning. 

“I really am not interested in getting to know him better.” The Archer’s voice jumped up acidly, almost in a sing-song way as he spits out the words, a loud sarcastic chuckle evading his lips. “But if this means that we can get him; that he will not be out there, free to do whatever he wants without any consequences for his actions… ” he slightly gritted his teeth, like there was something he was refusing to say out loud or he had just had a displeasing thought. “...Then I'm totally down with it.”

Thor said nothing. He just returned to clench his hands before grabbing his glass and sipping on the liquor—the content of it feeling like a shower of tiny, sharp shards running through his mouth and throat—trying to fight and ignore the storm of emotions that seemed to scream in his chest and that still—even with all of them pushing inside him, battling for dominance—turned into rage. 

He still could not fully understand who he was most angry with: the Norns and their workings—their twisted, sadistic tapestry—with Loki for trying to kill him and the humans, putting him in the position of having to fight against him… or himself, because if he had been less self-centered and arrogant back then when it mattered, maybe, they would have never gotten this far in the first place.

********

He hardly slept at all, his night long and his needs left mostly unfulfilled. 

He had ended up just sitting in the living room of his quarters for a good part of it, staring at the dark but gleaming landscape from the large windows within reach, the human alcohol making almost no effect—He had wanted it to slow him down, to tarnish his senses until they were so dull that his thoughts barely existed, but except for the small burn that settled in his chest after downing a good, long sip, it offered no peace of mind, no quiet, nor any type of comfort.

When he actually did sleep—after infiltrating lazily through the covers since once he had finished the bottle, he had almost dozed off on the chair, risking falling from it—his dreams had been… lacking. If he did have some, as the morning light shined against his eyes—having him squint them strongly to not be blinded from it for just a moment before they quickly adapted—he did not remember any of them. 

He just… Felt them, in some type of twisted manner. There was a nauseating feeling in the pit of his stomach, which could have been a consequence of all the alcohol he had consumed if he had had other symptoms. But his head wasn't spinning and the sun wasn't trying to commit its murder when he looked at it because of it, so the chances of that being the reason were essentially low. 

It was just a gut sensation. A discomfort spread through them, raising a soft confusion with it. Like he knew that he had had a bad dream, but he just could not grasp it. It was hidden somewhere deep in his conscience, under the veil of the unknown, and it clearly intended to stay as such. 

So, Thor did not feel well rested, nor relaxed, as he rose from the mattress. No sudden lack of balance was there either, adding itself to the points that clearly showed him that his lurching stomach was not caused by being drunk. 

He just felt upset. Annoyed. The bad mood that had been enveloping him in those last few days was still there—the rage just boiling under his skin, ready to fire if he gave it a reason, even if it was lighter right there and then in comparison to the day before—not shaken off from his limbs, nor from the center of his being. 

It loomed over his head like a mantle. It made simple, appreciable things like the start of a new day much gloomier, to the point that even during his shower, even with the warm water taking away his grime in the most pleasant manner, the smell of soap tickling at his nose—both of them suggesting that all the high relaxation he needed was there, ready to be absorbed if he let himself—he had still been brooding.

Brooding, aye. Like a youngling near to having a tantrum. Which… Made him feel embarrassed just at the comparison. 

He tried to force out a smile no matter how strained it felt when he finished dressing—his very Miðgarðian, slightly baggy but not in a bad way, clothes ordered by Stark, since he had not returned to Asgarðr yet to obtain some more of his. The armor was a little heavier than how it should have felt, pressing against him with familiarity but giving away nothing else—Mjöllnir coming towards him and slipping between his fingers almost without being prompted, his mind trying to wrap on happy subjects, wanting to slip out from his moodiness. To stop feeling childish. He wanted to feel less wrong. 

The anger would give him strength, eventually. It would give more power to his lightning and his fierce, loud storms, but that… That was not the right moment. 

With that thought in mind, he moved to take the elevator and pushed on the buttons that allowed him to reach the right floor. 

Using it was quite unusual. He could have simply flown to his destination, breaking through in such a way without even blinking, but he somehow felt like slowing things down a little. Going there by entering from the still smashed window which Loki had broken by defenestrating Stark somehow felt way too fast. And maybe he would have scared off whoever was possibly already there. 

Against his wishes, the elevator did not slow down either in reaching the floor. He arrived at his destination with a ding even before he realized it, the silverish doors moving under his gaze and getting stuck in the corners .  

Barton and Rogers were already there, sitting near the bar table… and they had been conversing more or less quietly about something unclear until they heard him, raising their heads simultaneously. 

“Good morning,” the Captain saluted as he got nearer, his left hand making a pencil do a small flip-like shake, his right hand placed upon a closed, very old sketchbook. 

“I hope it will be,” he replied. He really did hope so. He chose to hope for it. And tried to make his smile a little more real. “To you both as well. Have you already broken your fast?”

“Ah…” the soldier had a moment of pause for whatever reason. He blinked a few times. “Not yet.”

“It is still too early.” Barton asserted simply, stretching his arms forward. “Would get a hole in the stomach before midday and have to deal with it.”

“It is?”... He definitely hadn't cared about the hour when he had left his quarters. 

“Yeah. Six and forty in the morning,” he looked at him for a moment. “Guess you didn't sleep much?”

Thor only shook his head and sat on the nearest stool. 

“Huh. Welcome to the club… Neither of us did. We were talking about Tart Cherry Juice because of that. Apparently, it can help,” the Archer said. “Added it to my and Steve's try list to see if it works.”

His mind jumped towards Eir immediately. He vaguely remembered something she had told Frigga ages ago. It had been a way to soften and prepare better for the start of the Oðinsleep. To make it less heavy and less dangerous as well. “Chamomile with honey? Did you attempt it?” 

Barton made a face that was already an answer on its own. “Don't like the taste, man.”

“I do,” Rogers said. “At least the Chamomile. I haven't tried it with honey, yet… But the simple version doesn't work much anymore. Maybe it is a… ‘new me, new problems’ thing.” He sighed. 

“Well…” Barton shrugged. “I am going to try it because I want to,” he then pointed at him. “You are going to try it because you can't stay awake for the next seventy years.”  

The Captain looked like he was ready to debate, but then he inhaled loudly, his eyes to the ceiling, and then nodded. 

“Thor?” Barton asked next. “Want to give it a shot?”

“Why should I shoot juice?”

The Archer—after a moment or two of more than apparent disbelief—actually loudly snorted, coughing to hide or block laughter. “That is not...” he started, sounding amused, chuckling and snorting again. “I meant… Do you want to try it?”

“Oh.” Thor paused. He thought about it . “Aye. I suppose it wouldn't hurt.”

“Unless you are allergic, it doesn’t.”

********

“So… Just a moment... Ah-ah-ah!” Stark uttered, poking at another floaty, shiny, light blue surface. As he did, it passed from a small square to a still small rectangle… only to turn into a bigger rectangle and to end up an even bigger oblong, which almost covered half the size of the room.

“Here,” he said then, his eyes quickly moving from the technology to them. “Big enough, right? Could make it even bigger, but…” his hand made a weird sweeping gesture. “Apart from this, Point Break, whenever you want to start with Rock of Ages classes one-on-one, you can get on with it. Jarvis, please take notes.”

“As you wish, Sir.” the voice in the wall answered promptly. 

Thor’s mouth felt full of saliva, just a small shiver running up and down his spine. “What do you want me to say, exactly?” 

He had one thousand and fifty years of his Brother. There were a myriad of subjects and memories he could talk about. Most of those made his chest hurt by thinking about them, nostalgia hitting like a punch in the stomach. Others made him want to growl at his past self. To shake him and tell him ‘What in Hel are you doing?’

“Whatever you feel is relevant,” Rogers said, almost careful in the way he talked, his gaze boring on him. 

That definitely did not help. Not in the way he saw it. There were tons of things about Loki that were ‘relevant’ to him. 

“Start with his abilities, perhaps?” Lady Romanoff ventured calmly, crossing her legs and letting one swing just a little. “We know he can make illusions. We know he can turn into whoever he wants, that he can teleport and we also know that he can fight well. I imagine it doesn’t stop there?”

“Nay,” he replied. “But I am aware of only what he shared with me or showed when we fought together side by side.” He rubbed one of his hands against his jaw.

“It's fine. We are aware of much less anyway. If we had known he could turn into a bird earlier, we would have taken different precautions against him, so...” the ‘we are trying to take them now’ was implied. 

‘Abilities it is, then,’ he thought, just a shadow of nervousness trying to rise inside him again, he tried to ignore it, but eventually, he started talking.

“He is exceptionally talented in both physical and seiðr-based fights,” he said. 

“Seiðr?” 

“Aye. The innate power source that he has and that makes him a Spellcaster. That makes him himself. I have it as well, but it is…” he truly wasn't sure how he could explain it. The lack of words unnerved him a little. “Different from his…” he ended up settling for. “As mine is not innate, but given by my Father and connected mostly to Mjöllnir.”

“Summed up,” Stark started, tilting his head. “You're saying that he is a space-y, more evil Harry Potter… A Lord Voldemort from another planet, but with more hair and a nose.”

Confusion broke through any kind of sentiment that had been running through his veins. “Who?” 

“Nevermind.” He raised his hands in the air as Lady Romanoff and Banner gave him an unimpressed look. Barton almost looked amused. “Keep going.”

Thor blinked and scratched at his neck before giving a sharp nod. “In physical matters, he excels with knives, swords, and hand-to-hand combat, using his agility and velocity as his main weapons. He is not against being misleading and using tricks to win.” A soft, fond smile painted his face almost without even realizing it before he soured, a small scoff slipping from his mouth. “With his seiðr, he can do much more. Levitation, manipulation of the energy around him, creation of force fields, preparation of potions, and conjuration of objects from his inner pocket dimension…” 

“Inner… Hold on. I am sorry, what?” Banner sounded more than slightly bemused. 

“Inner pocket dimension. An inner boundless space, if you will.” He explained. 

“Seriously?”

“Aye,” he answered. 

“I… ?” he just stared for a moment. “You are telling me that he has a piece of space… Of a… A dimension? A personal dimension? With him all the time?” 

Thor answered him with a firm nod—because apparently he still hadn't understood, for whatever reason—and the Scientist just stared at him as if he had just hit him in the face, without the following angry factor.

“H-How…” he inhaled, then exhaled. “How does that even work? Like, in a matter of physics? How is someone supposed to hold a… It's like he uses Pym Particles, but not on a single, specific subject. He does it to a complex area, paragonable to a cosmos since you said boundless… Just how?”

“I think the simple answer is magic.” The Archer said, making the other man still look bewildered, his mind clearly fighting him to wrap around the new information. Stark's expression was the exact same, making him look way too near to start swearing and grabbing a bottle of liquor even if it wasn't the right hour for it yet. 

Banner brought a hand to his face, massaging his temples, eventually. “Feels like my brain is going to explode,” he muttered. 

“Moving on from this…” Lady Romanoff said. “Was that all?”

“Nay,” he saw Rogers's eyes, already looking surprised, widening a few fractions and the shield-sister raising a brow. “He is very talented in healing enchantments. From physical wounds to poisoning, to more dangerous curses.”

There was clear perplexity and surprise in his companions’ faces when he said that… And he honestly couldn't understand why—They had Healers as well, after all. What was so abnormal about the matter? That he appeared as a man? He vaguely remembered Man Healers when he had landed on Miðgarðr.

When no one said anything, he just shook it off, deciding to postpone the question in its regards. 

He evaluated what he still had to add and stopped himself. He hesitated—he still had to say it anyway. 

“He… can reach your mind… Without the Sceptre,” he said carefully, but still he saw Barton get a little rigid. “But only to see your memories and… Your dreams. He can enter them. Turn nightmares into quieter dreams,” he paused, a thought crossing his mind quite fast. “He can also create ice, I suppose. If there is more, he probably didn't tell me. And if he did… it might be slipping my mind.”

“Alright-y.” The Man of Iron commented. “A whole lot of magic that he didn't entirely use before because of… Arrogance? He is a diva, so maybe yes, maybe not. He had aces in his sleeves, but Hulk smashed him before he could bring them out? Who knows.”

“Which now we'll have to deal with, instead,” Banner commented. It felt like a statement, but…

He replied to that anyway. “Aye.” 

“So the next attempt will be worse.” Lady Romanoff added flatly. 

“ ...Aye.”

If not finding Loki when they had planned to capture him the first time had left them somber, the perspective of going against him when he was perfectly aware that he had to fight with everything he had made them positively look ill, even if still determined. 

“Sucks,” Barton announced, heavy lines running on his forehead. “This absolutely, completely fucking sucks, man.”

“Very much.” Stark agreed, then huffed and looked at the blue surface, bringing Thor to do the same. 

The voice in the walls had made a white box on it with the written list. Some things he had said had near them a long line of apparently casual letters, most of them starting with https. 

"His weaknesses? Excluding his exhibitionism?” The Man of Iron asked, sounding heavily mirthful about it.

Thor paused, evaluating. “His agility, his velocity, and his tricks were useful to him to develop because his body has always been leaner and less powerful in strength than other Warriors in Asgarðr.” He clenched his jaw again. “If he abuses his seiðr in some way, he might end up incapacitated for a while. The more he doesn't rest or respond to his own needs, the more it could… Be problematic to him.” Another pause. “High warmth is another… He has a low body heat.” He said. 

Rogers seemed startled for a moment. “Yes, he has.” He snapped, almost upset, but it wasn't clear to who—but maybe with himself—catching all their attention, making them look quite perplexed.

“What?”

“When he was in the cage.” he clarified. “There was a… A machine that was monitoring him. Vitals, Body pressure… It showed the temperature as well. He was blue, while everything around him in the room almost looked on fire.” he looked at him. “Is it a constant? Does he keep that low temperature even when he is looking like someone else?”

“I… “ he started, then stopped talking, letting a few memories push into his mind. He remembered summers that Loki had passed indoors because the high temperatures risked making him faint, a wet cloth often on his forehead. He remembered him getting on his shoulder as a snake, crawling around them like a very loose scarf. He remembered feeling him on his arm as a Magpie and under his fingers as a black Horse, his green eyes staring at him with mirth. And… “Aye. He does, actually.”

“Oh,” Stark sounded genuinely surprised, his eyes wide. “Wow. Okay, cool, that's… Definitely a good start. Jarvis, can you open the SHIELD’s Loki private file and find registrations of the Cage with all the stats?”

“Of course, sir.” the voice in the walls—Jarvis—answered. 

In less than twenty seconds, a good part of the blue surface that hadn't been used yet suddenly was occupied by two rectangles, one bigger, one smaller, with some writings just near them. 

Both the sections had Loki in them, but as the Captain had said, one of them made him look entirely blue, not letting him see his features—still, Thor couldn't stop from asking himself if that blue was the exact same color that his Brother would have become in his Jötunn form. And how much the transformation would have changed him. Would he have had horns there as well? 

“Jesus. That is fifteen degrees Celsius!” Banner asserted, clearly even more in shock.

“Miðgarðians do not get that low?”

“No. Totally not. Thirty-four degrees to forty-one degrees is the usual standard. Some animals can get to this kind of temperature, but… if he was from Earth, he would be dead.”

“So we know for sure that any person that is not a walking corpse cannot be him… Steve, you know, I have to say it.” Stark asserted, his face serious. “I could actually kiss you right now.”

“Please don't.”

“A problem remains, though…” Lady Romanoff said. “How to understand if an animal is him or if it’s not? Fishes, amphibians, reptiles, and invertebrate have low temperatures as well. The Arctic ones do, too.” she paused. “Want to try interrogating an alligator?”

“Well, we know that everything is not fixed yet. No. But at least we skipped from having to arrest every single shady individual to if a shady individual runs hot, it's not him. For the rest… It needs more thinking, but yeah, a start. Something. Hurray.” A pause. A long pause in which he suddenly got up, his eyes looking like slits. 

“Tony?”

“That something could definitely get bigger…” he stated. “I suppose his DNA doesn’t change as well?”

Chapter Text

It had passed minutes, maybe hours before he had abandoned the flat after Thor, the Spider, Stark and the presence outside the building had left. It hadn’t been safe since the start, so… it had become even less a place that could keep him out of harm's way.

He had forced himself to walk, limping slightly, his seiðr still working around him, many thoughts rolling inside his mind and often resulting quite repetitive in their ending. He calculated where he could go, how he could accomplish it with as little effort as possible, and what to do after that. 

Loki, after reaching an answer that felt satisfying enough, had walked until he had reached the subway. Every single step or stair was a painful aggression somewhere along his body, having him take long pauses in between to breathe and rest, using the blind spots of the Miðgarðian technology to shortly hide and stop the use of his seiðr as well. Still, no matter the pain or the new strain returning to hit him hard, he had been able to get there.

He focused first on what he remembered from one of the last times he had been on Miðgarðr—Not considering the… Uh. Not considering when he used the Destroyer from the Hliðskjálf. That hadn’t been him being there. Not really—which had been something like twenty-something years prior. 

He had been in Norway, Jeløya. Then he had gone to an almost snowy Arizona, making bets, interacting, sometimes tempting humans just a little to do things they weren't supposed to, enjoying whatever came up from it and… putting a few ideas on two astronomers' heads for fun and as a present for being interesting enough, curious to see if they would have gotten results or not—which they did.

But in his travels, in his life periods along Miðgarðians, he hadn’t been to Manhattan. Nor to a New York subway. So, in his state of invisibility, part of him ended up calculating even more things and studying maps, while the other listened to background talking, looking attentively at people and their plans, trying to assimilate as much information as possible.

Thanks to a couple of old French women—maybe lovers by how they acted—asking more or less the same things that he wanted to know, he had little to no complications on getting on the train that would have gotten him to his first stop: Jamaica Station. 

He had to suffer through most of the journey, though, standing on unsteady, pained legs, reaching on the metal above his head to not fall. This was until an entirely empty space was formed, making him avoid being sensed in any way by anyone present.

He had almost no issues after that part of the voyage, except for a moment in which a little girl almost ran into him—looking positively radiant in her pale pink princess-like dress, her dark brown hair fixed in several small box braids, her black shiny eyes set on the window’s view—hitting the corner of his seat and the one just near him… only to be grabbed by one of her parents—sweetly, a touch exasperatedly, like the young one was a complete menace but she was used to it at that point. All in a way that closed his throat just a little and had him avoid looking at them at all costs, focusing his gaze outside—and made her sit on her legs before bouncing her up and down, stealing delighted giggles from her. 

Transferring to the AirTrain after that to get to the Queens' John Fitzgerald Kennedy Airport was definitely much harder. Both because of it being considerably more full than how it was needed, having him ignore the first round, and because his body started aching greatly while waiting for the new one, making his seiðr want to focus itself on more healing, again, and not on keeping him hidden from people’s sight. 

The lack of abandoned buildings in his surroundings and the high amount of Miðgarðian technology had him pushing his needs aside, though, making him beg repeatedly in his thoughts for a ‘later’ that his definitely annoyed inner energy luckily listened to, even if his agony clearly left it all the more unsettled. 

When he actually got on the AirTrain, it took a lot of time to arrive at the destination, but since he was able to sit—feeling the pain roaming around waver and diminish just enough to perceive his seiðr quiet down—he appreciated the period of traveling much more.

What he did not appreciate was instead how some people just stared forward, sometimes in his direction. It made him nervous. It made him sweat, his muscles all tight, and his mouth just a little dry as he almost counted the seconds they kept looking at—or technically through—him. It made him question if the manipulation of the lights was still working well enough not to be noticed. The only answer to that question was yes because they probably would have looked very worried otherwise… unless his face hadn’t really been shared with the population yet. 

Was it possible? He wasn't certain about it. 

That specific unknown condition just worsened his sentiments as the minutes went by; his hands pulled at themselves, his gaze moved on humans as quickly as possible, and… there was a small ache that kept fluttering in his head for just a moment before vanishing and then returning in loops.

Leaving the conveyance was something he was grateful for in the end. He raised from his seat in the quietest, fastest manner he could muster and luckily, really luckily, no wandering eyes chased him as he did. Not when he was near the exit, following a few humans, nor when he was completely out. 

But the anxiety still breathed on in his neck, just like the pulsing headache. And once at the Airport, he passed from the slight but stubborn emotion to a stronger inner paranoia that danced around with a—just as strong—sentiment of disorientation. 

The place was massive, complex in a way that Portland's Airport in the nineteen-seventy-one hadn’t been… and the amount of busy, hasty people he had to avoid to not being run into was scandalous.

He was still able to search for the quickest flight to Oslo, though, and… As he saw it, he started to run. He started to run with everything he had because the hour on the electronic boards had clearly shown him that the plane was going to depart in less than fifteen minutes.  

Fifteen minutes. Only fifteen minutes and he knew very little about where to go, finding difficulties in following single conversations, everything being too loud, too unfocused, too jumbled. Having a sore head and hardship in his movements—as every single inch of his body was screaming at him as he raced forward in the chaos, darting between people like a rock bouncing from one surface to another—didn't help. 

He was able to get on the right airline at the last minute, the door pretty much closing behind him and one of the flight attendants, his breath choking in his lungs and being coerced into silence to stop it from loudly going out in pants. 

Then, after he mostly calmed down, he went to slowly—still limping all the way, his body still feeling every break, burn and wound present on itself, his chest so tight that, because of the remaining hint of his panicked state of mind, he almost thought it was going to explode—sit down in one of the most isolated VIP chambers. 

The armchair was so soft and pleasant that he was—honest to the Norns—between almost falling asleep in it and totally feeling alarmed because of it. 

'Too soft to be normal,' his thoughts whispered, unprompted and unwanted under the aches. It almost took him by surprise because of how sudden it was. ‘Maybe it's a trap.’

He erased the whole hypothesis immediately after it crossed his mind.

He knew it was not realistic as a possibility. He was not visible. No one knew he was there, not even the rich middle-aged man with the expensive gray suit and the shiny, golden, beautiful watch around his right arm, which kept pushing on his mechanical, flat, silver piece of… Whatever that was, since it was not what he remembered being called a computer. And all the armchairs looked the exact same, they were there for people's comfort.

He still did not try to sleep, no matter how much he needed it. But he dared to steal food from the travel company's cart. He did it a few times, only because it was full of goods and the man literally rarely looked up… So Loki just made some of them disappear inside his Inner Pocket Dimension for later—everything for later. He was already quite lucky that the hostess hadn't heard him get in. Chewing was louder—before he cast a small illusion on the technology around them—being still and near enough to actually connect with it—making it look like the man had eaten them.

********

When the plane landed in Norway—luckily not having the headache anymore—his next move was to search for another abandoned place to stay in, momentarily or less momentarily; the first case being the most prominent as remaining near to an important airport wasn't exactly a smart move. 

Getting to Jeløya again felt reassuring as he had knowledge of the island, but truly thinking about it, not letting any personal opinion in its regard win over his practical sense… made him realize how idiotic it was as well. 

He had told his amma about it when he had come back to Asgarðr, sharing how much he had enjoyed returning to the place, how he had had fun, and how he always felt at peace there. She could have shared it easily. Brought the Avengers, the Miðgarðian Spies there. The Æsir Guards and the four Sycophants too, perhaps, after the Bifrost got repaired… That if they saw him as a big enough threat to be hunted down by them, of course—he would have been almost amused by it if it hadn't been that he didn't need more people on his tail. His broth… The blonde oaf, his new… Friends?... and the Mad Titan's lackeys were enough. 

In an instant of pure dread, he couldn't help but question himself about what she must have been thinking about him at such a moment… How displeased she must have felt by realizing the mistake of trying to raise him. A monster remained a monster no matter what, after all. His bloodline and his own actions—both the forced ones and those he had done before—spoke enough. It was natural, normal, logical if she had started to hate him as well. 

He frowned, anguished sentiments and nerves rising once more, his eyelids opening and closing so quickly, so repeatedly that he almost saw nothing at all. His chest was feeling tight all over again, too. Suffocating. 

Loki pinched at the skin on his fingers, trying to forget the dark, uncomfortable thoughts, simply letting himself walk upon stairs as he got on the first bus he noticed, inhaling and exhaling deeply. And he walked silently like a predator, sitting in the empty space almost at the end of the transport. 

He focused on the situation he was in and on what he had to avoid, staring at a new map with all the destinations that popped on the screen in front of the driver and in the middle of the bus. 

‘No staying in Oslo for too long. No getting to the island. No other places that I know because I have probably talked about them as well. No too small places for too long either, unless wanting to stay invisible for who knows how long, because if not… being noticed by the Miðgarðians is going to be a certainty,' he mentally listed, his nails pressing even more against his skin. ‘But… for the moment they hardly matter.’

He needed a new, unknown, casual, lonely spot to eat and drink. He needed to let some more seiðr in, to strengthen himself bit by bit until Teletransportation returned to being easy like it was supposed to be instead of an unreachable fantasy.

He needed… He needed something unsystematic and unexpected. Even for himself. Especially for himself, yes. 

If he did things in a way he would have not done normally, would Thor have had even more issues in searching for him?... The idea made sense in a sort of bizarre manner. Even though doing things differently from his usual felt honestly quite complicated. 

A sigh almost escaped him, getting stuck in his throat as more people started to get in, some fast, some loud and slow, chatting about romantic encounters, about school projects for the week later, and about… Aliens. A crazy genocidal maniac attacking New York—his chest became even tighter—and all the powerful Heroes working together to defeat him. How attractive some of them were. How scary, but somehow kind of ‘cool’ the Hulk was. Things like that. 

Hilarious.

They had the so-called genocidal maniac sitting four seats behind them and they would never know. 

The mental image of showing himself just to scare the Hel out of them was one of the funniest things he had thought about in the last years, but it would have been a dumb move on his part. Honestly, he had hidden himself from everyone’s view for a reason. Not only to ruin it all because of a sudden change of mood. 

He returned to slowly look at the layout of the paths, reading the names several times to ignore them, the beat of his heart fluttering a little faster again as he felt more eyes on himself as a young man strolled towards the actual end of the bus, his ears covered by dark blue technology that clearly gave out more music than it probably should have, the vibrations sounding like someone screaming gravely. He couldn't stop himself from raising an eyebrow before focusing again. 

One of the possible stops was called Tveita. It catched his attention as it seemed far enough from there as a starting choice, being near Oslo's borders as well.  

It was completely casual. He had no idea what kind of place it was. He literally had no information. 

If he didn't like it, he could reach it and leave at the first opportunity by walking and taking another bus. Or a train, if there was another one. 

He would have kept moving similarly until he was satisfied, just a few pauses in between to not upset his seiðr ad nauseam, which he had already done enough lately—and he somehow knew that it wasn't going to be the last. No, this period wasn't exactly a kind one. 

Loki waited for the vehicle to start moving. His eyes suddenly felt very heavy but not enough to actually defeat the way his entire system was still alert, ready for an instant fight or flight reaction. The same engine he had been waiting to start risked activating it because of its loud sound, and almost made him jump on his feet. One of his favorite knives popped into his hand without him even asking for it. 

He toyed with it for a while. Then, after staring at it, he put it back in its place. And listened to the sudden change of argument of the humans, because they had started to talk about general culture. Nothing that hit him in the chest so hard to diminish the oxygen. Nothing that made him want to destroy something in silent hysteria. 

When the vehicle finished his path, calling the name of the city he had chosen out loud, the stop left him almost directly on the road, the bright orange sun being very low on the horizon. 

He moved around as if the gravity had suddenly changed and he wasn't ready to adapt to it. The slightly less painful ache that still was stuck in his spine surely wasn't of help. 

But then he saw a red farm on a silent field. And that somehow felt like enough. 

********

He tried to eat what he had stolen from the travel company. He grabbed the container with the beef and ate it slowly, like every bite was terribly important and so very much cherished. And it was because Fath… The Titan had given him food only when he had been happy with him—for not crying or screaming, usually. Or for when he stopped fighting some of his orders—while most of his Children just… forced it all down his throat or avoided giving it to him entirely. With very small exceptions, Nebula being one, even if she had scarcely been around him—still more than Gamora, anyway. She had been there just a few times before disappearing entirely.

The Luphomoid hadn't been kind, no, but she had been decent enough to let him feel like a person. To loosen the chains just enough to give him back some blood flow and let him eat by himself. He had thought about knocking her unconscious a few times to run away as she had done it, but he hadn’t found the energy to try. Nor the selfishness to repay her in such a way—In any case, he hadn’t had any place to run to at the time. Nonetheless, if he had tried, he would have just worsened his own situation.

Even though he had eaten the meat carefully, he still ended up with a churned, revolted stomach, which had gotten worse and worse and so much worse until he hadn't been able to resist it anymore. 

He had heaved; the smashed, ruined food getting on the golden hay. The simple view and the smell renewed the need to vomit into him. 

With his eyes stinging and his face warm as frustration hit—because the hunger returned to roar into his being. Like a curse. It reminded his body that food existed and it was enough to have it demand it from him even though it had made him throw it all up in the first place—he evaporated the whole stain. And when he lay down, inhaling and exhaling shakily, the animals around him were his only company, some of them looking almost tense. They perceived him. Smelled him. Heard the pained sounds that slipped from him. 

Except for drinking some water, he didn't attempt to get anything into his mouth again that night—not even once—and he fell asleep out of exhaustion. The darkness held him swiftly.

His dreams were always about him falling all over again, the sensation always terrifying, always paralyzing, his thoughts screaming in his head because why was he still alive, why was he still falling, why he couldn't just stop, why couldn’t he just land and bash his head and die, why couldn’t he freeze fully instead of being in the state in between, why?  

Then a slight sensation of fingers pressing on top of his forehead arrived, trying to push in, to crack through his skull. It was the only thing that felt out of place. But it was there. It was there and it was… It was getting painful. It was there and it made him feel pure fear raging inside him to extremes, strong enough to wake him up with a start. 

He didn't let out a single noise because of it. Not a shout. Not a strangled, small whimper. Nothing. Not even as the pushing got even more intense. 

Everything around him except that started to feel weird. Unreal. Wrong. All the while, his entire body was tingling and shaking because of the anxiety that returned to assault him viciously, his heart racing faster and faster in response. 

The fingers pressed more, being aggressive, almost feeling too real to be just an imaginary sensation. They were trying to… intrude, the nails scraping on his scalp and scratching down like sharp claws. They were… oh.

Oh. 

‘Please. Please, no.’ 

Maybe… Maybe they actually were there. The sensation was way too familiar… And not in a reassuring way. No. It made all his hair stand. Shivers rippled on his spine intensely and his heart bounced even harder in his ribcage. 

…The Other was probably trying to get through him again. 

Yes. That was it.

He was—even being so far away from him—attempting to open another door to his brain. And it chilled all the blood inside his veins to the point that it felt like actual ice. 

He couldn't let it happen again. He couldn't. He didn't want to. Norns, he didn't want to be connected to him! Didn't want his hissing voice spitting orders and insults between his thoughts, touching him in them like he knew exactly what to do to fill him with a terror that he couldn't fight.  

Loki didn't want him calling him names. Didn’t want him reminding him of all his not-family hatred. Didn’t want him circling him like he was ready to pounce and strike at his weaknesses, already bare, almost making him feel nude to his ministrations. 

He had just been freed by his presence! He couldn't deal with him piercing through his brain with the link again! No! No, no, no! He just…! Couldn't! 

Without thinking at all, his instincts jumped over everything, and he desperately called his seiðr. 

It didn't refuse him. He must have slept more than how it had seemed to him, because it felt definitely more replenished than before and it was less upset at his actions—or lack of them, at least in the self care department—as well. 

Loki thanked it profusely, then he rapidly waved a web of enchantments to raise defenses inside his head, the chanting slipping from his lips in terrified whispers, trembling more and more as the seconds went on, feeling the attacks trying to fight him, to conquer him before it could work. 

He cursed at him and pushed the fingers out with every single murmur. And attacked him in response, waves of seiðr disappearing from his body to get somewhere else. 

He protected his head again and again as if nothing else mattered. This until the sensation of the fingers disappeared, getting covered instead by quite another potent headache—much worse than the one he had developed on the AirTrain—and a new dosage of tiredness that fell upon him like a mantle, tons of sweat trickling down his skin. 

He couldn't sleep anymore after the whole situation, though. The hypervigilance and the tension kept him awake and prepared to run or to start enchanting once more. It locked the terror inside him so deeply that every sound was able to set him off. 

He tried to return to close his eyes—exactly like he had done in the flat—waiting anxiously for everything and nothing. For the pain in his head to subside. For the tremors to stop. For the fear to fade. But, if they did, they did it so slowly that he wasn't sure if they were actually going away or if it was just him, hoping so strongly for that that they seemed to be diminishing at times. 

When the first early rays of the warm sun crossed the barn’s slits of the windows and doors, the ache was still present, but it was soft enough to not make him waver as he got up. The tremors had actually stopped, but he was on the edge of starting to shake again. And the terror was still there, attached to his chest like a dangerous leech, a parasite that he couldn't get away from and that the more it stayed, the more strong it felt. 

The fast, slight idea of remaining on the farm by Shapeshifting into a cat struck his mind as he watched the animals—most of them still asleep, a few waking up lazily exactly as he shuffled around just that much to feel like he was doing something instead of simply staying still—suddenly remembering about the orange pet of the past owners of the ruined flat in Manhattan. But he removed the option from his mind. He did it to avoid possibly getting brought to a healer or to be treated like a pest—he really did not need to be beaten with a broom. The beast had been enough.

There were no cats inside the farm. Just cows, horses, donkeys, roosters, hens, some sheep, and a few pigs that the day before had been way too loud… And because of that lack, he couldn't be sure of anything. 

He couldn't turn into one of the creatures present, either. He was pretty sure they would have noticed a new pet… And he would have still risked being brought to the healer. To control if he had maladies. 

So, he left discreetly, the still strong panic that buzzed in his veins making him move fast in a way that he had rarely done before, his eyes running around in search of anything wrong and his mind still focusing on itself to fight the insubstantial fingers if they came once more. 

He didn't doubt that they would. Why should he? The Other simply needed to gather enough strength to destroy his walls one by one. But in the time that he fully recharged, Loki would have replenished as well, hopefully. And he would have pushed him out exactly like he had already done. 

He still cursed at him mentally with quite a colorful language, anyway. And he hoped that by failing the Mad Titan one time too many, his head would have ended on a razor-edged spike. Even though the probability was quite low, it was never zero. 

He had seen Fath… the Titan kill one of his daughters, one of the remaining Cotati race, Andromeda. Actually killing her. Not just tortured her until her plant-and-added-metal body was all in disorder, ready to fall apart with a simple touch. Killed her.

He honestly did not remember what reason had brought him to act in a similar, abnormal way. Loki… well, Loki had been rather preoccupied, since a good part of the bone of his neck had broken through his skin, a lovely small present given him by Proxima. So, yes, he had been choking on blood way too much to care about little details like why her body had been on the floor, her decapitated head staring back at him. And she had been rather cruel as well, one of those that had no issue laughing while she forced the food down his throat, that had suggested new methods of torture to her Family, so it wasn’t like he would have cared anyway.

********

He spent a whole day and a half in Tveita, trying to get an opinion about it, and then he took the train and reached Furuset, where the line ended. 

He moved again with another bus. And another. And another, always waiting for one of the last stops, truly checking it out and then moving again.

He rested in hidden areas and slept a few hours per day, never being able to do more than that, the anxiety keeping him in a chokehold, especially considering that he was still waiting. Waiting for the next attempt from The Other. Waiting for someone of the many that he had felt looking through him to actually start pointing at him even though he wasn't supposed to be seen and to hear the person scream at the top of their lungs. Waiting for something to go wrong in an irreparable way. 

He wanted to eat as well, not only to drink, but he stopped himself to avoid wasting the little food he had. To try again when he was safe enough that maybe his body relaxed. And perhaps, by relaxing, it would let him really eat—if it didn't work in such a way either, he might have had to search for a library. Starvation hadn't been a common matter on Asgarðr and Eir had never touched the argument in their lessons. In the history books he had read, it talked about it but it had never mentioned exactly what to do after being starved. 

So he moved again, the terror always there, following him around like blood-lusted Aptrgangr. And the pattern kept going for ninety-six long, endless, painful hours, in which he almost started thinking he would never stop. 

Then he got to Bodø. He easily reached the North of the town. 

He saw several abandoned houses there, most of them so ruined that they looked more like skeletons of houses than buildings… But he found one. The right one, for the moment. 

It was a simple, rustic, old-fashioned cottage that he had found after an hour-long walk from the last bus stop—which had made him cease constantly manipulating lights after a while, doing it only when on the direct road or near to the empty houses. Not when the foliage covered him above and around him, shadows helping the camouflage.

It had a ruined, cracked, boxy door and the paint on the external walls was peeling, visibly decaying. There was some wild ivy clinging desperately to it, even getting through the windows of the first floor. It was surrounded only by spruce trees and by plain hills with grass that was slightly taller than usual, some wildflowers appearing almost in patches.

The interior of the cottage was composed, on the ground floor, of a long open space that would have emanated a cozy and earthy charm if it hadn’t been coated in dust everywhere, the weathered wood almost entirely hidden… while the stony fireplace was wrapped by thick cobwebs.

The first floor, instead, was composed of four, different, detached rooms that were reachable through stairs and a single long corridor that was attached to the walls, surrounded by tall empty shelves and what should have been pots for small plants.

He roamed around, checking all the rooms one by one—two bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchen—then he started evaluating what to do after that.

Putting down several barriers around the field immediately was a good choice. He wanted to cover the biggest perimeter he was able to reach and he itched for being constantly able to perceive people coming towards him much easier, all without hitting other properties—getting maybe alarmed for no real reason—but… He definitely had to clean up as well, unless he wanted to be momentarily residing in the dirt. 

Doing it physically would have taken him a lot of energy that he wasn’t in the mood to truly muster after moving around for so long, especially considering that he had done it in a perpetual state of fear of other people’s attention. And said attention was lacking right there and then, so the adrenaline was vanishing bit by bit, leaving him empty, tired, and deeply aching.

He had to fix the door as well. And there was The Other’s situation, too. It hadn’t ceased to be just because he wished for it with all his being. 

Could he push it away a little? Just a little…? Just enough to actually try to sleep more than two hours? He somehow doubted they would find him in such a short time. He had taken all the precautions he could, after all…

But paranoia still nagged at him, several ‘what ifs’ hardly leaving his mind. Hardly giving him pause to take a breath and making him tense again, enough to start questioning himself if he was already going mad. Which… yes. Possibly. Even though it didn’t even pass much from when he had returned to himself, he was quite sure it was already enough to make him start to go insane. He hadn’t been normal since the start, anyway. Not for Asgarðr’s standards, being an Ergi and all that.

After pondering about the issue at hand just a little longer, his thoughts running more slowly out of tiredness, he came to an appropriate conclusion. 

He was going to clean one bedroom—the one that had the bed in the corner, with a perfect visual of the door and several piles of books tossed in a ruined piece of furniture—and add a singular barrier. One that woke him up instantly if surpassed even by a single human foot. Not more than that, no. Because, in case, he wanted to have enough seiðr to respond to anything that might happen after. 

It was a decent compromise that could let him sleep in a hygienic environment, protect him from his own personal hunters—oh, joy that he hadn’t seen them yet—and have some remaining strength at his disposal. 

Yes, it felt satisfying enough.

********

He slept for a couple of hours, dreaming of falling once again, but no one tried to violate his mind during the night and no one passed through the barrier around the house either. 

With the morning looking stormy as dark gray clouds covered the sun, he added a second barrier that strengthened the first and that analyzed the possible trespasser, sending him a mental image of whoever it might be. Then he started cleaning, beginning from the bathroom to fulfill a few needs. After that, he worked to clean the long, open living room, seeing it in all its almost former glory, something in it still missing—maybe the plants. Maybe some ornaments. 

He paused just for a short period, preferring to look inside the closed cabinets, to stare at the old—very detailed—paintings of macabre landscapes, at the small animal statuettes, and at the woody piano surrounded by puffy sofas, caressing the keys with his fingertips. Beautiful instrument, that one, even though he probably would never even try to use it unless he made the whole house soundproof.

After just a little bit more contemplation, he fixed the main door. Mostly he did it because the rain was starting to fall and it was entering horizontally through the big triangular hole, wetting the floor in a way that the cottage was fortunate it hadn’t as much mold as it could have had—he had cleansed everything, his seiðr making no distinctions. He must have removed it if there had been some before—but he had to remind himself to put an illusion in the next strengthening of the barrier to make it look broken and ruined from the outside once it stopped raining. 

He removed the dirt from the rest as well after that, standing in the end in the empty, lacking kitchen, being very tempted to bring out food and to try eating again something , even simply one small bite of crackers. Or cheese. Or jelly. Or baked beans. But he drank more water instead, perceiving exactly where it landed inside his stomach. 

The building was pretty, but he didn't really feel quite safe yet. It was already a miracle that he had been able to sleep… But that had probably been because he had been so exhausted that waking up sooner had been impossible. It was unlucky and a little unnerving that his body refused to accept nourishment in the same manner. 

He returned to the bedroom he had claimed to analyze the books that had been left there, felt intrigued at many of their premises, plucked the most interesting one, sat on the bed, and in the quiet calmness provoked by the rain—not Thor's rain, luckily. Had it been the case, his br… The oaf’s seiðr would have pulsed through the wind and the falling water in waves, full of sentiment. It would have been faster, somehow louder even by only hitting the ground and accompanied by repeating, deafening thunders that seemed to shake everything they met—he actually started to read, hoping his body would get the message and actually relax, letting go of the nervousness that kept dancing in his veins at the smallest, unexpected noise. Like birds flying or chirping near the roof, maybe hidden from the rain. 

When the drizzle stopped, he was two hundred pages into the novel, the plot being amusing enough to keep his interest, which resulted in a less tense inner being, enough to make him truly attempt slow eating. He tried with the cheese. 

He still vomited everything, reaching the bathroom in time only because he actually Teletransported for the first time in those days. 

It had not been a feat. It wasn't even a kilometer of distance. But he had been able to and consequently took it as a good sign… just slightly ruined by the taste of vomit and bile. Which truly made him decide to plan to go to the library the day after, maybe in the early morning. He was quite sick of throwing up.

********

Returning to the city raised his nerves all over again, but all things considered, most of his personal mission went well. 

He entered the library at the exact moment the keeper of the place did. Invisibly passed through shelves to see the scientific side and compromised the mechanical eyes by reaching a wire before actually slightly moving books, but ending up staring at a computer between many. He sat down carefully, opened the research page, and typed. 

The answer almost made him huff, because, oh, maybe he should have gotten to that conclusion earlier and by himself because it made very much sense.

Liquids. Of course. Because normal food was too heavy for his system, as apparently, his stomach had pretty much shrunk. Then—eventually, after enough time that helped it to adapt—porridge, the baked beans that he already had, scrambled, boiled, fried, or poached egg on bread and other light foods.

What did not go well was… the leaving part. Starting to return to the cottage after lounging some more between those walls—so filled with reading material that he could have remained there for months had it been possible, all until he had made his heart content—looking around more or less cheerfully only to… 

To see people upon people starting to move around to proceed in their day—which was normal—only to notice between them that… Some of them were acting in a suspicious manner? Looking around themselves like they weren’t looking at all?—that wasn't normal—and it made him go quite tense after the signs began presenting themselves to him. 

They… Were searching, yes. Considering. Sometimes getting near to people and asking for information, but with something in the way they did it that didn’t feel quite right. Like they were assessing, studying, and investigating. 

It might have been just him being paranoid, really. After all, he had been on edge for days, looking around like everything was going to jump at him. But he doubted it more and more as he tried to return to the bus stop.  

In the city, five people he saw acted that way. Not one singular crazy case. Five.

He followed one of them just because, just to have a real answer, literally not caring about anything else until he actually had it. He saw him get more and more nervous as well as he probably felt himself being watched, moving until he went into hiding, looking around like he was the one being hunted—‘Quite pleasant, isn't it?’ Loki thought sarcastically—and… responding to a small communication device that he moved from a small pocket to his ear. Reporting that he felt observed and asking if they could locate someone in his surroundings that he couldn't see. Which was an answer in itself. 

The Miðgarðian Spies were there already.

Chapter Text

Sometimes, when she was gazing attentively at people outside or staring at a wall in whatever room the SHIELD had assigned her after or during a mission, she ended up wondering things. 

Her mind never stayed still, no, something always moved it for one reason or another… but in those moments it focused on how her life could have been without the Red Room. 

It pictured what kind of worries she could have had, what thoughts could have filled her mind instead of deciphering body language, tone of voice, or finding out people's weaknesses and planning quick murders. 

It came in only to be usually pushed out since playing what-if games about herself was a hobby she didn’t like to partake in. They were a useless waste of time as the past was written and couldn't be changed. Atone for it, yes—and only by working enough. By trying repeatedly until perhaps the scale tipped in the desired way. Until the image looking at her in her mirror felt less upsetting—but not change or delete it. 

But those scenarios still appeared inside her head, whether she wanted them or not. And as she stayed under the lukewarm shower, hands pressing entirely against the cold wall, her eyes looking at the puddle around her feet, and soap invading her senses one by one, it happened again. 

She navigated through images of ballet dancers, of a possible happy marriage—the fantasies allowed her not to be cheated on, even if the rationality and the lack of trust in people brought her to respond to that with a ‘pizdezh,’ because it would have never happened unless she had been lucky enough. Which wasn't really her thing—and her little sestra. Yes, those scenes were especially about Lena, seeing and participating in most of her firsts exactly like how it should have happened between sisters… But she always felt something like emptiness settling in her bones at each one. 

The Natasha that was in those images was completely different from her. She was too naive, innocent, and very much whole, her hands clean. And she wasn’t on guard. She was not detached like she was supposed to be now. 

She was not her. She was what she could have been, but that felt wrong to her. Out of place. As if all her puzzle pieces were in disorder… Or as if they were too in order, too static. 

Hers were too chaotic, perhaps. The fact that normal spy missions had turned into helping out to fight an Alien Invasion and a Norse God was kind of proof of how messy and unnatural her life was. 

Natasha blinked, twitching just a little. Then she huffed lightly, removing the thoughts from her mind all at once.

She returned to place her hands on her head, letting the fingers run through her wet hair before slowly inhaling, exhaling, and looking up. “Jarvis, could you please shut down the sprayer?” she questioned out loud, trying to not give away her nervousness as both her tone and face turned into white slates. 

“As you wish, Miss Romanoff.” The artificial intelligence replied calmly, immediately obeying and leaving her dripping just for a moment or two before a towel dropped down near her arm in a perhaps too-easy fashion, even if not unpleasantly. “Something else that you might want to request?”

“No, thank you,” she replied, starting to scrub the water out almost immediately before halting a little, curiosity lapping at her chest. “Is there any important news?”

“Mister Stark and Doctor Banner are still working on the new project…” Jarvis announced. And yes, that was definitely expected from them. She was going to check on them before midday, probably, because for how much she knew, they had been working almost non-stop on it since the day after Fury asked them to find Loki. 

“...Mister Oðinson has not returned from his visit to Miss. Foster and Doctor Selvig yet…” That was expected as well. He had just left the day before, both to talk to them, to check on them, and to let out the clear tension that had been running under his skin—which… they hadn’t been able to respond “no” to. He had been restless. Tense. Like an exposed nerve—so, he wasn't going to return from Puente Antiguo until tomorrow, at least. 

“And Captain Rogers went out jogging half an hour ago.” She hummed lightly at that. Another expected thing. He had done it most of the early mornings, at first just after sunrise, then slowly starting to set out after eight o’clock.

Natasha then raised an eyebrow, thoroughly rubbing the towel against her hair, feeling the sensation burn tenderly on her skin. 

“Clint?” she asked.

“Mister Barton is still in his quarters at the moment,” the robot paused. For a split second, she almost thought that it wasn't going to add anything else, but then its voice returned once again. “He announced that he was going to the training ground. He also asked if you wanted to join him.”

Natasha gave him the slightest nod as an answer, a “Just have to finish preparing.” slipping from her lips, exiting the shower carefully and surrounding herself with the warm, soft—definitely expensive, something that she expected by a self-serving, eccentric billionaire—white bathrobe. She rubbed it against her cheeks and sniffed it a little. It gave off a pleasant, sweet lily perfume mixed with some hint of violet, the same that was in one of the cabinets. 

She quickly finished drying her hair, gathering them in a high ponytail. Then she moved around her rooms quietly, giving a quick look at the phone that Fury had given her—which sat on the small round table near her king-size bed—almost waiting for it to start to ring on its own. 

Up to that moment, there had been no news on Loki. She wasn't surprised, honestly, but she wasn't happy about it—How could she be? How could any of them be? 

Closing the Portal, stopping the Chitauri, starting the restorations of the city where it had been destroyed… It should have been a real ending to the whole situation. It should have been an almost closed chapter... But apparently it wasn't. Apparently, it had just started and she wasn't sure she was going to like to find out what exactly was going to follow. 

Natasha blinked a few times again—her face still looking empty in her reflection even though slight uneasiness ran through her veins—searching in the wardrobe for some clothes to dress up properly, ending up in black pants, a white tank top, and a gray sweater that she was going to take off when she had eventually warmed up. The socks, the shoes, and the phone being placed in her pocket followed shortly after.

She looked then at the small fridge in the kitchen as well, stole some jam, the butter and then she got the bread in the pantry to make a proper toast. Ate and sauntered out of the room, choosing to take the stairs. 

Her quarters were the closest to the training grounds, after all. Taking the elevator would have been a waste of time. And the whole process let her control part of the perimeter outside and inside the tower, her eyes searching for anything that might have been out of place. She found none. 

She—not really relaxed but more at the thought of the lack of abnormalities and at the idea of letting out some steam—reached her destination at a fast and silent pace. Her gaze quickly moved to the long rectangular room and its divisions… which were still few, but more in number since the Stark Tower had apparently turned into the Avengers Tower, having them all reside there; even though it felt far out to her, since she was used to living alone and… she was convinced that it was not secure. Not enough, no. 

There were too many windows that weren’t bulletproof yet. The cameras and the AI could definitely help in the matter, but had they been hacked, it wouldn’t have been complicated to pass through defenses and try to kill them all. 

Plus, yes, even though that did raise the security, she… Didn’t really enjoy the feeling of being stared at. And Jarvis—even if very useful—was always looking. 

With led lights shining upon her head, making the room feel slightly off—more out of habitude than for anything else because they were mostly only in that room at the moment—Natasha found Clint already there, shooting arrows repeatedly at different boards that were all around him, placed up and down, left and right, each of them with a panel installed in them that shone at a casual rhythm and with a red or a green color—the red being the one that Clint had to hit, meaning enemy, the green being left there as it was a citizen instead. 

There was a tension on his entire body—utterly different from his usual relaxed one. He once had told her that the bow sometimes even felt like a part of him—and she knew who he was imagining to shoot at. The cold look in his eyes, the way his mandible twitched, and how aggressive some attacks looked only confirmed it. 

“Rude,” she asserted, looking at how his figure almost snapped in her direction in slight alarm before calming down entirely, the tightness leaving his shoulders in waves. “You could have waited for me, you know.”

He smirked a little, even though in a not-fully-him way, walking slowly to put down his bow upon the nearest bench, clicking a button that shut down every colored light in unison. “Not my fault if you were taking your sweet time.”

She tilted her head and evaluated what to say just for a second before deciding to ignore it and say something else entirely. “I'll take my sweet time kicking your ass as well if you want.”

He huffed, but his smile appeared more realistic. More amused. “...Wasn't I the rude one?”

“Just telling the truth.” 

“Ha! You wish!” the smile became even bigger. Turned into something almost teasing. “Bet twenty dollars and a free pizza that I am going to win this time.”

“Only twenty dollars?” she raised a brow. “Afraid of losing?”

“You are almost broke right now. If I ask for more, how are you supposed to get my pizza?”

She snorted. “Alright. Twenty dollars and a free pizza for me as well if I do win. Like I probably will.”

“Deal.”

They shared a challenging look, then, after she left her sweater down as well, they grabbed their weapons from the net attached to the wall at the same time. 

********

They made four, full sparring sessions before opting for a pause—it had been momentarily a draw. But they planned to have the fifth, definitive one that evening—and returning to the main floor, deciding to go actually check on Stark and Banner's project together with the black coffee, the cappuccino, and the few ordered brioches and several pastries that Jarvis said Tony had ordered but still had not taken—apparently too engrossed into his work to remember them. 

So, she and Clint got on the central floor and met the Captain there—whose expression almost looked tired and somber, his entire body moving under his deep panting, showing clear discomfort and upsetment. ‘Probably for the wreckage outside’ Natasha thought—just as they grabbed the packages and ran along with it, all of them getting on their ‘playgroundʼ. 

What Natasha noticed as they went in was that both Bruce and Anthony looked absolutely exhausted, heavy eye bags under their gazes, their expressions worn off but still focused as they muttered under their breath to each other, moving things around and analyzing the screens almost constantly. 

“Do you… think…?” she heard the Doctor say in a murmur—some gears clearly moving in his head but doing it perhaps too slowly—not even finishing his question before the other man curtly nodded. 

“Yeah, yeah, the last battery, it should… be put with those little ones.” Tony hit the table at their left with two fingers, twice. “Right here.”

“Just near the propulsors,” Bruce said absently, shaking his head a few times. He was trying to wake himself up more with the movement, but Natasha was sure by his little wince that it didn't help at all. The only thing he accomplished with it was getting more dizzy, ending up leaning on the metal surface of the chairs near him. 

“Just near the propulsors.” The other man agreed, one of his hands placing itself on his mouth shortly and nonchalantly—maybe to hide a yawn—squinting his eyes and thinking hard. “Next… Huh. Perhaps we should focus on the data receiver, you know, just…”

“Next you should sleep,” Natasha said, interrupting him and making them both jump in place, visibly startled. “You both look like you're going to pass out.”

Confusion took over Bruce’s entire face, his eyes moving on them a little sleepily. “What… When did you…?”

“Jarvis, you didn't tell me they were coming in for a visit.” Stark asserted to the artificial intelligence. He said it with something almost offended in his tone, light disappointment being in it as well. 

“I did, Sir. But neither of you seemed to listen to me, Sir.” 

“Ah...” he raised both his eyebrows, his gaze looking up for a moment in perplexity. Like he was trying to remember, but he was failing drastically. “You're pranking me, Jarvis?” he questioned.

“No, Sir, I am not. But I have the registered conversation if you want me to share it as proof of my truthfulness.” The robot replied, almost with a touch of amusement. Which… felt quite weird to hear from something that was not supposed to have emotions in the first place. It was simply a machine, nothing more than one. But it often even sassed his creator. 

Tony bit his lower lip, rubbing his temples in a slow, tired manner. “Nah, whatever,” he said, this before looking at them again and actually catching a better sight. Mostly of what was in some of their hands. “...Natashlie, Legolas… are those my pastries and my coffee?”

“Not anymore.” Clint raised his shoulders, opening the package with interest, staring at what was inside it and whistling. “They are ours now.”

“They are not!” Tony tried to snatch it from Clint's hands, having the other recoiling a few times to not let him. “Hands off my precious! Are you trying to copy Robin Hood now?”

“Natasha is right. Go to bed, both of you.” Steve said—ignoring whatever banter was very, very near to start, possibly becoming very loud—crossing his arms and moving forward, his attention entirely focused on Banner’s and Stark’s faces. “You need to rest.”

“Yes, we do,” Bruce admitted, his lips thinning. “But we still have not finished phase two, and this is… Quite urgent, really.” He appeared more than a little conflicted, insecurity flashing behind his eyes. On one hand, it was obvious he realized that he was exhausted, while on the other one, it was just as clear that he wanted to reach whatever goal they had set for themselves. Pressure was heavy on them both. It made them extremely susceptible and determined to fulfill their roles. 

“Like this, you'll only risk ruining it and regretting it later, though,” Natasha stated calmly. She moved forward just a little, staring at the materials that dominated the table with vague interest, visualizing and identifying some of them. Then she returned to look at them. “And having to start again will only prolong the issue. So, it would be better if you kept trying after you rest. Not now.”

Stark rolled his eyes at her and loudly scoffed. “Jeez, thank you. Way to butter someone up.” 

“Simple honesty.” She smiled, something almost bitter coming through it before she softened it. 

“Brutal.” 

“Oh, don't be a baby.”

“I am sorry, Natashlie, who did you just call a baby, exactly? No, because, honestly…”

“You both really look like you need it.” Steve insisted. He paused for just a moment as Bruce sighed, one hand upon his eyelids, rubbing them in clear exasperation… and Anthony almost started rambling again, not being fully able to, his mouth opening and closing without a sound—That somehow told even more about his forlorn state. 

“Didn’t you say that you wanted to search for the fun side of things?” he questioned. And at that Tony’s expression changed entirely a second time, making it seem like he was going to laugh really really hard. “Like this, you are just stressing yourself out.”

“Well, we are the only ones who can do this, and we… Truly kind of have to finish this as soon as possible…” Bruce asserted. His body slouched almost imperceptibly, but he still did not sit down. “Director Fury was pretty much clear.”

“Plus, satellites are heavy work. Imagine an experimental satellite.” Tony piped up immediately after. “We have to launch it and then test it. If it doesn't work we're back to square one, while if it does we can catch him. Then, after we do, we can sleep for months, no questions asked.”

“Not like this,” Rogers replied. “Not at your health's expense. You've been working on this for almost twelve days.” 

“What, you're worried about us, Capsicle?” Tony teased, clearly wanting to unnerve Steve but only being able to make him raise an eyebrow. 

“Yes.” The Captain, if it was possible, looked even more firm, every single detail in his face and posture appearing stubborn, which made Natasha think a simple ‘Good luck to them if they try to fight back.’ “You have to rest. I doubt Loki is going to attack the city in the next six hours, anyway.”

“What if he does, though?” Bruce questioned. 

“It wouldn't change much,” Clint replied, shrugging. “The satellite wouldn't be finished after those hours either and you would probably be too tired to actually kick his ass.”

Banner sighed. “That is a good point,” he said, quickly taking off his laboratory jacket, his left arm wagging just a little even though it wasn’t a gesture to actually wave them off. “Alright. I give up. I'll go to bed. Good night.”

Tony looked at him, seeming almost betrayed for a moment, and then he loudly sighed as well, throwing up his hands in the air. “Fine. But only if you…” he pointed at Steve. “...don't let Legolas and Natashlie eat my pastries.”

“So we can still have the black coffee and the cappuccino?” Natasha jumped in, an amused smirk toying at her lips without any control. It went out way too easily. 

“The Cappuccino is Brucies’. But anyway, If the coffee gets cold, it becomes disgusting, so, yes. You can take that one. But you can't have my Tarte Framboise. Nor my macarons. Especially not my macarons.”

“So selfish…” she said jokingly. Tony just shot her an annoyed look—yes. He was definitely exhausted, it was written all over his face—before concentrating on Steve again, who simply nodded in his direction. 

“And so mean,” Clint—just as jokingly—added, following Stark with his gaze. “Consider that I almost offered you some Tart Cherry Juice…” 

“Don’t need it. I'll probably sleep like the dead anyway.” Anthony shrugged, starting to walk towards Banner. The Doctor was already set to leave and he was followed by them all, Jarvis closing the door behind them automatically with a loud whooshing noise. 

In little to no time the two big brains were both off to their quarters, leaving the three of them in the main room again. And Natasha checked around her for more security. Again. 

“So… did it start to work?” She asked curiously to Clint as she finished the quick process, sitting on the sofa. 

“A bit. I actually slept four hours tonight.”

She blinked, her lips twitching. That was definitely progress. 

Considering how he had confessed to her having the worst nightmares he had had in a while, nightmares that wouldn't let him sleep at all after having them, well, it was a good sign—He still refused to talk about them in any way, but she had her suspicions. She could imagine them somehow. 

They weren't going to leave just because of an evening drink, no, and four hours weren't enough to properly rest, but they were surely much better than just thirty minutes. 

“Great. Keep drinking it, then…” hopefully it was going to work even better. Hopefully, when he had actually felt ready to talk, the bad dreams would have fully faded. “And you, Captain?”

The nominee frowned. Remained silent for a while. “...Not much.” he somberly answered, “Not yet.”

She stared at him a little before nodding slowly. The signs weren't very visible, not like on Tony, Bruce, and Clint's faces, but hints of them were clearly forming around his eyes as well. 

He probably would have not been happy about it… but Natasha started to think that maybe he should have taken pills for it. She decided to momentarily keep silent about it, wanting to wait just one more day to try. 

********

Steve was right. Loki did not make any move during the six hours—which Tony had literally decided to have a countdown for. Probably out of spite… Or for a weird type of fun—in which the two slept. 

But after thirty minutes in which they were all more or less in the same room to talk about the restorations and wanting to truly help out with them, the phone inside Natasha's sweater pocket went off, starting to vibrate and startling her. 

She picked it up, her calm facade still in place. 

“Horned Code Red,” said Director Fury's voice at the other end of the line, sounding slightly tense as he spoke. “Get the other's attention and put me on speaker. I'll send you a link that you have to open. Now.”

She raised quickly on her feet, asking no questions of any kind to the Director and immediately clicking the right button. 

“Boys,” she called them all out loud, easily getting all their attention, perhaps because they had been waiting for something since the moment they had seen the phone in her hand. “We have news.”

The message with the link arrived just a second later, as they huddled near the same screen on which Loki’s information had been written. They all waited for it to be opened up by Jarvis. 

The tension followed them around for the entire short wait—the emotion filled the air like a suffocating gas, their low breathing being the only thing that broke the silence—and didn't leave them when a folder opened up either, especially since inside SHIELD's file there were… Videos. Maps pictures.

“So you actually found him?” Tony immediately questioned, between blunt, surprised, and not convinced. 

“Look for yourself,” Fury replied flatly from the speaker. And so the AI opened one of the three videos with a single high-pitched click sound. 

As it started, it showed at first a simple square, mostly occupied by a fountain and by a fair, citizens walking around calmly. Then a figure popped in from literally nowhere, in the middle of it, scaring off the crowd just with their presence. Two more rapid clicks zoomed the image until the camera made it entirely clear that it was truly him. 

His black hair looked just a little less oily, some locks of his entangled to form braids… but it was him. And there was something in him that looked… Different, somehow, even though she couldn't really put her finger on what, exactly. Not as she stared at him, already seeing other things clearly. 

The Loki in the registration had an amused, superior look written in his face as his lips were turned in a soft, pleased smirk. It became more mischievous as the seconds went on, but not… Not really in a cruel way, weirdly. It was more like basking in the situation. 

Without saying a single word he made a mock-bow in front of everyone. Then some people started screaming even more loudly in the background because, after that, a hand of his started to rise slightly in the air, letting out the greenest, most shiny, and vivid light that she had ever seen—which was… Peculiar, considering the colored lights in the training ground were already quite shiny. 

It took him only three seconds to slam it into the ground under him. Hard. Theatrically. Looking absolutely satisfied with himself, enjoying the process from start to end with everything he had—Natasha felt herself bristle a little at the sight. 

And then Loki disappeared without leaving a trace. Not even a single puff of smoke or another light to show off his exit. 

Only the chaos that had formed was proof that he had been there in the first place. 

“He has done the same thing two more times.” Director Fury said as the video finished, quickly closing. “Each attempt was done in a different place in North Dakota. The one that you have seen happened in Dickinson, ” he paused. The screen showed the open folder again, then the opened map, which was the entire state… with three red dots highlighted in it, looking like a triangle. 

“The second one was three minutes later in Bottineau. And the last one was in Valley City, always three minutes after.”

“There were any types of… Of boomy, shiny reactions from his whole, dramatic hitting the floor with his magic shitshow?” Tony asked. 

“Not visible ones, no. Not so far.”

“Are we going to have to get there to check if he is hidden in the area?” Steve questioned instead. 

“No. There are enough of our Agents hidden inside the State right now.” the voice of the Director shared with her that he had probably frowned in his almost imperceptible way. “When Thor returns, I need you all to show this to him. Find out what exactly he might be doing that we don't understand yet.”

“Well, he is surely enjoying all the attention that he is getting.” She ended up saying. “At which exact hours did those scenes happen?”

“Three and thirty, three thirty-three and three thirty-six.” Agent Maria Hills’ voice suddenly answered. And… der’mo. Natasha didn't know what she was looking at, exactly, but she already did not like it. At all. 

He already had a plan. A scheme. One in which he had no issue showing himself to the public and which... Almost felt like a distraction. 

‘What does he want, exactly? What is his goal?’

“The Tesseract and the Scepter are still where they are supposed to be?” She asked again. 

“Yes. They are in a safe place, under our strict surveillance. No one tried to get them.”

The answer left her silent and confused, a quiet, nervous mood starting to stretch inside the room once more. 

‘If it is a distraction, but it is not for them, for what is it?’ 

…Was she wrong about it? Maybe he was actually doing something and his diva-personality was just… Just because he desired the attention. Because he wanted to show off that they had not defeated him. 

She wasn't sure. Not yet. 

“That timing feels… studied.” Bruce hesitantly commented, taking away the thick nothing that had been surrounding them. A deep frown was taking over his entire face. “Three places forming a triangle, at hour three, with three minutes of distance each.”  

“And the things you have listed are three as well,” Clint added, a forced smile and his hands trembling just a little, something that he was clearly trying to hide. Natasha grabbed it almost by instinct, squeezing it between her fingers. The shaking did not stop but diminished a bit. “Feels shady if you ask me.”

Natasha silently agreed to that. 

“It does. Uh… the number three was something connected with magic and myths somewhere? If I am not wrong? I might be. Or maybe the occultism book that I was checking wasn't right. I have no idea…” Banner mostly murmured, the frown deepening even more. 

“Well, we don't either.” Steve simply asserted, his tone flat-out showing how pissed off he was. 

“We need Point Break for that.” Tony, just as pissed, added. 

They all nodded, looking much more bothered than how they had been a few hours before. 

********

She had the fifth sparring with Clint, but neither of them were really one hundred percent in it. Their minds were too focused on waiting for the phone to start to vibrate again. To get a new update, a new announcement—maybe bloody. Images of disaster developed between her thoughts, disappearing and then emerging again in the worst way, no matter how much she tried to ignore them. Just like the what ifs under the shower—of what might have happened in or between the three cities. 

They both still tried to have a decent result from the training fight. Mostly because of the free pizza offer, which was quite a good motivator. But also because they were trading teasing comments when they risked losing focus.

In the end, Natasha won the round for a whisker. She had been able to place her knife above his heart—an amused expression on her face as she breathed hard, staring at him—while he had placed his own just between her hip and the lower left rib. Not reaching higher, more deadly spots. 

After that, they had casually decided to have a movie marathon—both to relax and to keep themselves occupied. To avoid rewatching the three videos a thousand times more—roping Steve in it after he broke another of his personal punching bags. 

Two films in, they prepared dinner—Clint was banned from it as food died badly when he tried cooking—ate some and brought the rest of it to Bruce and Tony, working again on phase two. Then they restarted watching, finished the trilogy and casually picked up a fourth, shorter film, going to bed only after finishing it and drinking a glass of juice. 

Natasha checked the videos about Loki a few more times—even though she shouldn't have, probably. Even though they were pretty much identical… Just placed in different locations and with slightly different timings. 

His way of acting was really the exact same. And Natasha, after staring more and more at his image… suddenly realized that his eyes actually looked more green than blue. 

Seeing them in such a way took her shortly aback. She remembered them blue, easily, as she had interrogated him in the Cage, looking wide and insane on so many levels, threats hidden under them even when he faked politeness. 

After some long, long staring, she—just a little hesitantly, not being completely sure about it since the information actually weirdly tickled at her brain. Like she was truly, completely missing something—passed it over as a trick of the direct sunlight and tried instead to catch some more details, some signs that he gave off, that betrayed something that wasn't a feeling of amusement.

She found little to none of them. Smirks here and there? Common. The feeling of slight unsettlement rose in her as she perceived something different in him that she couldn't quite catch yet? Even more common. The green light and then the little tilt of his head before leaving? Each of the three attacks had them.

Natasha surrendered at two o’clock in the night—the time had flown away even before she had realized it—exiting the registrations with all the fatigue overwhelming her forces. 

She was able to sleep, even though a slight, natural apprehensiveness had returned to sweep through her. 

The only thing she remembered from her dreams in the morning, when she woke up breathing hard—cold sweats running through her body from head to toe—was the face of one of her first kills, staring through her with dead eyes, his lips parted just enough to let out his last, small intake of breath. 

She winded under the fast fall of tepid water just like the previous day even before she thought about it, locks of her hair almost entering her mouth, her hands pressing again against the wall… Like a pattern she couldn't escape from. 

She was sure it was going to change, eventually. She just had to wait some more. Help people some more. Delete the red in her ledger and—even though it was going to be much harder—slowly fade away the one that was still stuck in her mind like a brand.

It took her ten minutes to get out, five to dress up, and a few more hours for Thor to actually return to the Tower. She almost felt sorry for him as he did. Almost. 

He had seemed more relaxed. Happier, for sure. His stay in New Mexico had definitely raised his mood, but less than a second and a “You need to see something.” took most of it away. And the registrations, with fast explanations about the timing and the hypothesis only worsened it. 

Thor had almost seemed stricken by truly seeing his brother on the screen, his hands closing in fists. A small part of Natasha's heart squeezed up. Had she been in his position with Lena on the monitor… 

She pushed herself to remove the thought mentally almost immediately as it came. 

“You're right saying that the number three is important. It is used in many enchantments and potions,” he had said then, once he had finished being updated, almost changing tone as he started speaking again. Like he was practically quoting someone as he talked.“It's called a Triquetra. A common formula of creation, connection, and harnession of powers.” 

“That does sound familiar,” Bruce commented, grabbing his phone and typing quickly something on it. “No specific answer except for that?”

“No. He might be creating a living entity. Preparing to open another Portal…” Stark visibly shuddered at that and all of them became just a little more pale. Even more worrisome, Clint, who almost seemed like he was in between going to kick a chair's leg, angrily cursing and storming off of the room. But he inhaled and kept himself calm. Quiet. 

Natasha did not give herself time to feel anything in response to that. She simply focused on assimilating all the information she could. She had a report to give, after all. There was no space for panic. 

“He might be hiding objects. Stealing energy from the ground… Or, again, marking the area just as it is or for bigger plans.” Thor made a pause, breathing in and out. “There can be small Triquetras in bigger ones to make solid, strong enchantments that would take more time and effort otherwise. If he is truly creating several of them for a bigger design, he will have to be near the ones he just made to not risk severing the connection. And it will be at a distance of… Threes. Not hours, but maybe days. Maybe weeks.”

“...Okay,” Steve said, making a small nod. “I suppose we cannot do much except wait for the consequences.”

********

Natasha advised Steve to try sleeping pills that night. The man, surprisingly, accepted the suggestion without protesting. 

She saw them in his hand before they went back to bed. 

********

SHIELD didn’t find anything inside the ground. No creature, no hidden item, nothing that any of their machines could perceive. 

But Loki did make a second appearance three days later, three times, still with a three-minute difference between his attempts. And this time it was in Washington. Bellingham, Wilbur and Chehalis. Always in public. Always making sure to be seen, like he was feeding on the attention. Like he was satisfied just by being seen. 

Some Agents had almost intervened in time. But hadn't truly been able to. The light he had in his hand got slammed into the ground and then the Norse God had vanished, heavy tranquilizers being shot by pistols only hitting the air instead of him. 

Three days later, the hunt for him in the United States became even harsher, to the point that many spies got moved from their previous assignments to get to Oregon, Idaho, California, Utah, and Nevada. Any place that could form a triangle of some sort with the previous destinations. 

But Loki was still way too fast at doing what he did. So, when he actually appeared once more in California, San Francisco’s Bay, then to Chico and to Coalinga, they still had little to no time to properly catch him, his small theatrical movements being still there but not diminishing his ability to just… Get out of there faster than how it was supposed to. 

Natasha, that day, went to check on the Tesseract and on the Sceptre to be one hundred percent sure that they were still in their places. That they weren't copies. And even though she had doubted it, they had been the real ones . The effect of the Scepter was impossible to hide. It seemed to raise all the hair in her body and twist her stomach with a feeling that she couldn't describe. It almost seemed to call her, which… Creeped her out a little, making her slam the case a little harsher than she probably should have. 

The bad sensation did not leave even after she left. And with that third attack—if it could have actually been called an attack since he hadn't harmed anyone with them. Yet—even more of it started to rise, mixed with tension. A tension that was in all of them, having them snap at each other more often than not.

Waiting for something to happen was absolutely grueling, especially because nothing was really happening, nothing that they really could fight… and yes, it wasn't terrible that the consequences had not begun to explode under their noses, but it somehow worsened the scale of things. Because if it wasn't enough, it was simply going to become bigger. Like he was trying to get a… An utterly insane amount of power out of their planet, just because he was in the mood. Because they had defeated him once and he had not taken it well, so it was his personal vendetta—the thought was absolutely terrifying. She had to compartmentalize it to avoid the fear that was running under her skin. 

After Loki did his routine on Ajo, Kingman, and Show Low in Arizona as well, most of the Avengers ended up adding themselves to the SHIELD Agents, just leaving Tony and Bruce in the Tower to keep working on the Satellite. 

They had not been able to only look at videos, doing nothing anymore. The Helicarrier brought them to their destination quickly, each of them getting to a different location—Steve in Oklahoma, Clint and her in different spots of Texas, and Thor again around New Mexico even if for totally different reasons. All of them with weapons and a different Spy team backing them up, opting to settle near the borders of the States as it seemed to be part of the pattern. One of the three choices Loki made was always near it—but somehow Natasha felt the time pass incredibly slowly, studying the maps in between all over again. 

And after she actually landed, during the first night, after attentively investigating and moving around, gathering as much information as she could… She actually realized that Del Rio's city, which was on the borders of Texas, was pretty much parallel to Bottineau—It was an interesting fact. And a new hypothesis started to formulate inside her mind only because of it. 

The same hypothesis made her, the day after—only when she evaluated even more the places in the city that he might have used to show off—she subdivided the team assigned to her properly. Carefully. 

On the right date, at the right hour and minutes, she didn't see Loki coming. But she heard one of the Agents, who actually did. 

She had shot him, but a barrier in front of him had stopped the darts, making them bounce back—almost landing on the Agent herself—as Loki returned to hit the floor with the energy in his palm, vanishing just a little later, always without saying a word.  

It might have looked similar to one of the first times’ events but for Natasha… It wasn't.

********

“I am starting to think that he is making the Triquetras in a circle shape,” she said to Clint, Thor, and Steve, showing the United States map on a screen. 

“Look…” she highlighted the cities Loki had shown himself in green, adding dotted lines in yellow to shape the triangles. “He is following parallel lines from where there is the triangle tip…” She added more red dotted lines, starting from the one that connected Bottineau and Del Rio, sending then others without a proper ending from Bellingham, San Francisco’s Bay, and Ajo. “We already noticed that some of his destinations are near borders, after all. So, following the flow of thoughts, I suppose that his next stop might be in Florida, in Virginia, and…”

“New York,” Steve concluded with a visible frown. 

“Correct.” Natasha agreed. “Unless he tries to reach Maine instead, but that… Looks perhaps too high. And another attack on New York feels pointed.” She added three new imaginary triangles to the picture, the tip always latching to the nearest city to the coasts or to the nearest State. 

“Of course, it would be New York…” Clint smiled acidly, just like he spat out his words. “Such a piece of…” he stopped talking and made an angry, strangled noise instead, his right hand covering his face.

“I think…” Thor started, almost speaking for the first time of the day—his voice sounding quite low and gruff before clearing his throat—making all of their heads whip towards him. “I think you might be right, Lady Romanoff. That looks like a Symbol of Chaos.”

“A what?”

“A Symbol of Chaos. It's… made out of eight arrows in a radial pattern. It strengthens Loki's seiðr as he is Chaos…” his face almost had a spasm, his voice becoming breathless as he continued. “I've never seen him create one like this before.” They all sent him looks of curiosity. He hurried to explain himself. “It is usually much smaller. Big ones are harder to control and easier to break.”

“That's… good to know.” Rogers asserted, his left eyebrow rising, surprise crossing his features. “So, this time where he could be, exactly, if he is creating this Symbol?”

“Following the parallel line and going to the place that is the most near to the coast…” Natasha said, moving the picture and zooming in “...Technically, Miami.”

********

Natasha remained in her spot, looking everywhere and at everyone, silently assessing details and imprinting them in her mind. 

Her gun was in her right hand, her fingers already near the trigger. Her leg muscles were all tense and ready to have her jump forward. Both of her communication earpieces were active, but completely silent as she waited, seconds ticking by, the tension all over her making minutes move even more slowly than several days before, when she had tried to get to her planned spot in Texas. 

To keep herself occupied enough to stop feeling them in such a way, she focused on the people around her even more. She focused on the girls in the swimsuit, ice cream in their hands, big excited smiles creating laugh lines around their eyes. She focused on the man with the tulips who looked ready for a date, his hair fashionably pushed behind. She focused on the little kid that ran at a fast pace with an inflatable ball between his hands. 

She focused until she stopped, looking at the watch around her arm and seeing three and twenty-four. The number made her press two fingers on the first earpiece, asking the team that had been assigned to her for any kind of personal update, receiving nothing new. Because of that she quickly ended up doing the same thing with the one that was instead connected to Clint, Thor and Steve, exact same quick answers being received. 

And then it was three and thirty. And Clint called out saying that one of the Agents had seen Loki appear in Spring Hill. He had failed to catch him, yes, but it confirmed that he was in Florida. 

At three and thirty-three, no one said anything. Wherever he had gone, no one had actually been on him. 

At three and thirty-six, Thor's voice clearly, loudly said “He is here!”, sending a shiver of something like excitement down her spine, all of her wanting to ask for details but knowing she couldn't. Loki's appearances were too brief to waste time on questions. And even trying to get where they both were was useless, she wouldn't have made it. 

She remained there, silent, waiting, her heart in her throat, more shivers crossing her spine repeatedly. 

Then Thor's voice said something that took away all her oxygen and seemed to paralyze her in place. 

“It was all an illusion.” He sounded incredibly frustrated, a thunder rumbling in the sky as proof, clouds turning more and more dark, more and more ominous. He clearly cursed, even though he did it in a language that definitely wasn't English. But the way he spat out his words made it clear enough. “It was just that, he had never been there at all, he probably just…” he said then something that was supposed to be English, but she wasn't able to catch it because he was talking way too fast, with interferences and more thunder covering his words. 

“Wait, slow down. What? Can you repeat that?” Natasha asked, trying not to sound alarmed even though alarm was everything she was feeling right there and then. 

“It wasn't him!” Thor repeated, more loudly, after a short snarl. “I broke through the barrier he had around before he could evoke his seiðr easily, too easily. I tried to get him down with Mjöllnir so he couldn't have escaped, but it… It went right through him. Illusions cannot be touched.”

Natasha's stomach twisted, an unwanted scowl settling on her face. 

‘Yebat'...’ she thought. 

“How do you know that he hasn't simply teleported again?”

“He hasn't, friend Rogers,” he said, his tone somber, angry, almost betrayed. "His illusions look different when they disappear. They fade. You can see it happen.”

“What… What the fuck are we supposed to do, then?” Clint exploded angrily—she heard Steve wince just a little—clearly starting to pace by the sounds that followed him, making concern return to hit inside her being all over again like a harsh slap. “Did he choose another place? Or he had already finished whatever plan he had and he just… Just wanted to annoy us more by making us think we had him? What kind of game is he even playing? I can't even… Fuck! I hate him!”

“I… Am truly sorry. I am not certain, friend Barton.” Thor replied, guilt radiating in each word. 

“No! No, you… You don't have to be sorry, okay. It's not your fucking fault. He should be. He is the one that has been making us all run a fool's errand and that is probably even having fun at doing it. I swear to God…”

“We need…” Natasha tried to shut down her emotions again as quickly as possible, feeling them hide in her little internal, imaginary box. “We have to check the cameras again, maybe… Maybe we'll get some answers out of it. See each other on the Helicarrier before four.”

‘Or maybe you won't get anything out of it.’ her mind softly whispered, doubts returning to rise, her legs starting to move on her own, almost not hearing several “Yes.” as answers. ‘Maybe he truly toyed with us. Distracted us. But for what? What is he planning? If he doesn't want the Tesseract or the Sceptre, what does he want?’

She still had no answer. 

Chapter Text

For a moment—short and highly spiteful, irritation twisting his insides to the point that they almost started to hurt—his thoughts had definitely roamed around quite the negative images: He evaluated how fast he might have been able to knock them all out one by one, tie them up, steal their technological items—faking being them in case their Leader called—and set them on a small unnoticed ship to reach a casual island. With the right effort and without big external hitches, it wouldn't have been more than half an hour. 

But it had taken him less than three seconds to reprimand himself and scoff internally, pushing away the temptation. 

‘Way to draw attention to the city in case something goes wrong.’ He thought, even more irritated at the definitive lack of self-control that seemed to have started to possess him—since he had touched the Casket, more or less. And it didn't feel like a coincidence, honestly—rolling his eyes. ‘It would be just like directly announcing my presence, screaming “I’m here, come catch me!”... Yeah, no. Idiotic.’

He looked at the slightly tense human persisting to remain in his spot—who was, even then, listening to the communication piece in his ear as at the other end of the line they were probably still talking. Still checking the area in some way or another. Still wanting to give an answer to the inexplicable sense of discomfort that the spy was feeling—with a heavy frown and his dark eyes thinning. 

Loki couldn't attack any of the five people he had seen, no. Nor kidnap them, even though closing them in a room of the cottage and forcing them to say what he wanted or… directly seeing their memories to do it even faster was not a terrible idea—he just didn’t like it. It would have hit too close to home. It would have scratched at the way-too-fresh wounds that he had not gotten over yet and he didn’t know how much he could have handled it without having a full nervous breakdown or worse—but he knew that leaving them around there, doing nothing and being perfectly aware that they could have easily asked more things to citizens—any important information, of details that he would have fetched for in case he had been in their place—moving from the populated part of the town to the abandoned side and eventually noticing that one of the many ruined buildings was… suspiciously clean. No, it wasn’t acceptable either. 

It would not have been obvious like the first option he had thought about, nor an extremely distasteful, dangerous game like the second one, but it still would have given him away. 

If he couldn’t hit them, nor kidnap them, nor let them remain there… excluding the choice of Loki leaving Bodø like a scared child, because, well, had he done so, everything he had attempted up to now would have been useless—and he didn’t doubt that he would have found more of the mortals in the new destination as well before or later. It depended on how many spies the leader had moved to capture him. He was almost certain that the man thought that he might have gone on a new kill-and-conquer spree, so the answer was many—the fifth option was to simply have them pack their things and leave. Induce them to abandon the town and get somewhere else instead. 

But how? How to have them act in such a way? And possibly with no quick return in mind as well? 

He couldn’t simply toss a bone and hope they would try to catch it like dogs. Once they had finished biting into it, they would have been back to their hunt for the fox with just as much intent as before.  

Unless…

Unless the bone was harder to get. And with just enough fresh meat around it to make it attractive. Desirable. Worth running around for.

As he stared some more, letting the man walk away without moving a single muscle to follow him, Loki’s mind was starting to thrive. It was hit by several, fast pictures that flashed in with clarity, each of them attaching to the others, often to close up loose details in the most efficient way he could think of. 

Once he finished, he couldn’t help but smirk just a little, hints of excitement running inside his veins like they hadn't done in quite a while, his heart positively racing. But in a good way. 

The delight was blazing so strongly between his emotions that a peal of soft laughter was just against his throat, pressing relentlessly to slip from his lips, having him breathe deeply in and out to stop it from happening. Still, his grin got even bigger, even more unhinged.

‘You all want to catch me, mortals?...’ he thought, not feeling truly satisfied but lighter. Amused. Excited. ‘...Have fun trying, then.’

********

After stealing needed stuff left and right—still more than cautiously, being sure that the cameras were down, stuck with the same footage on loop even though the time in them still moved, looking around and only grabbing things when no eyes could find him, making them vanish immediately after—he got on the bus again and finally returned to the cottage. 

He checked over and over that there were no differences anywhere, then he took a long moment to rest his aching limbs—Some of them were pulsing annoyingly, new bursts of pain screaming at him for the effort that he had almost silenced before, but not enough to stop him from wincing from time to time. Quite pathetic, really—until he felt ready to move again, starting to put all the new, mostly liquid supplies in the kitchen. 

With his empty insides growling madly at him, he ended up choosing a casual mushroom soup to try to fill it. He let it warm up with a small but steady flame until it looked ready, even if waiting for it felt like torture. 

When he tried to sneak a bit of it into his mouth, sipping it directly from a white, round ceramic plate—still very, very slowly, ready for the worst, for another betrayal of his own body—it… more or less settled into his stomach.

It felt heavy, a little abnormal, but no real sickness raised its ugly head to have him retch in the bathroom again. So, still careful, he finished most of what had been on his plate, leaving the leftovers inside the small pot—which had had more soup in it still, because apparently, it had been for two portions, not just for one—destined to an eventual later. 

After eating—the taste still lingering in his mouth in a way that made it seem to be one of the most amazing things he had ever eaten—he then returned to his room, letting out the Geography book—with all the maps possible, not only the American one—from his inner pocket dimension, getting it next to the other volume that he had almost finished reading already, just above the bedside table. And the small clock that he had grabbed got there as well, shortly before the quire and the pen that he had chosen in the stationery shop—always with the same pattern, even though it had been somehow harder to complete as many people had stuck around to talk to the vendor—placing them instead on the mattress. 

As he touched the cover with his fingertips almost absently—he had picked one that was light blue with a golden pattern at its corner, and with at the center a bird that looked like a falcon—he hesitated just for a moment. He actually questioned himself for the first time of the whole ordeal if returning home was truly that bad of a choice, receiving a harsh ‘Yes.’ as an answer through new, violent mental images immediately after. 

He frowned, shook his head, decided to start to work and he started doing exactly that by mentally picturing the entire house perimeter instead; flat, plain and clear.

He simply needed to trace a Symbol of Chaos onto the cottage floor, but it had to be perfectly calibrated to make it work. And he needed it to work because he needed more seiðr. He definitely needed more seiðr. He needed enough of it to not end up feeling empty and tired in too little time, all of it because of more focused effort, although essentially short in timing.

He didn't entirely like the idea, no. Its energy would have trapped him inside the abode in a way, not letting him leave it unless he wanted to break the enchantment and have it hit him instead, but… It wasn't like he wanted and needed to get somewhere else right there and then—The whole plan was to keep that specific roof over his head for as much time as possible, after all—so it was more a feeling of discontentment to the whole concept of being secluded than anything else. 

But he could ignore it. Yes. Absolutely. Rather easily.

… No, not really. That was a lie. A big one as well, considering that being trapped when hunters were on his tail was honestly a terrible choice with possible terrible developments… But he could try to, at least. For a not too big amount of time. Surely not for a whole week.

‘Two days.’ He thought. ‘Two days isn't too much, right? Surely they will not catch me so quickly. They wouldn't get here instantly. The cottage is quite hidden in the depths of nature, after all. And there are so many abandoned dwellings, not just this one…’ 

He didn’t feel convinced. He wasn’t. At all, really. But he still tried to act, to think like he was. To persuade himself. Also, he tried to focus on the very positive side of the whole thing: Two days were forty-eight hours of rejoicing in the evoked power of pandemonium. It was not a bad way to start gathering his strengths, all things considered. 

And so, evaluating the short-term ending, fighting to not change his mind and transform into a wolf to hide in the forest, he started creating the Symbol without any hitches or real hesitation. He called on his calm seiðr, definitely more content than he—because of the food he had consumed before, probably—keeping an eye on the minute hand in the clock while the rest of his attention was still on the perimeter of the house. 

He passed from one arrow to another, gradually. A shiver crossed his spine every time one was finished, sweet sparkling whispers already reaching him even if still incomplete, tons of sweat starting to run down his forehead and his body screaming at him again.

Humiliating. It was almost nothing compared to what he usually did in Asgarðr. Norns help him, he despised feeling so weak. He was so easy to tire. 

He didn't allow himself a pause, though. It would have ruined his creation. It would have made him start once again. And he wasn't sure he would have been able to try a second time. 

So, he kept going no matter the strain. Once he was fully done with all of the arrows, he went to the center of the Symbol, evoked a knife, let his entire body be immersed in the inner energy that he possessed at the moment, and slashed the center of his left palm on behalf of the first day. He did not even grimace at the gesture. It did not hurt at all, compared to the rest of his body. 

He cut through his right hand as well to support the second day, then he let the blood hit the ground by squeezing his fingers on both of the wounds—still receiving little pain in response—for twenty-four seconds each. 

As the countdown ended—the pitter-patter echoing eerily in the silent building for the entire process—he immediately felt the previous, slight, shushed murmurs turn into a vibration. A vibration that rolled in the air around him like a powerful, hungry wave. 

Loud disordered electricity almost ran with it, dancing around him and pressing pleasantly but icily upon his skin until it passed under, making his own seiðr instantly overjoyed, crackling and roaming into him as if the cold flame had turned into an excited foal. Just perceiving it in such a way made him smile a little, raising his mood exponentially and pushing many bad thoughts away where he couldn't see them. 

He stayed still for a moment or two, just letting himself enjoy the sentiment, and then he decided to go on with his plan even further—even though he could technically delay it. He had two long days to wait through after all—cleaning himself as he moved upon the stairs to avoid staining anything else. 

He returned to the bedroom quickly, then he delicately opened the Miðgarðian book and started to search for the right map, trying to decide where to throw his bone the first time. 

He knew that his appearances had to happen all in the United States or most of the Spies would have still had enough mind to stay in all the remaining lands just in case. But by showing interest only there, their aim would have been reduced. They would have defined other States as not important enough to be controlled too much. 

… And it would have been even more reduced if they, well, perhaps, thought he was obligated to stay in America to get his mysterious, dangerous work done. Especially if it had some real knowledge to back it up, making it look realistic and plausible to their eyes. 

He didn't doubt that the humans would have asked Thor things. Didn’t doubt he would remember at least some basis of his abilities, especially after seeing him use them more than a few times during all their years together. 

So the trail had to be realistic enough, convincing enough to Thor to get under the Spies’ skin as well. The bait had to be the center of their attention. 

Loki tilted his head, and then he chuckled as he felt another pleasant wave of seiðr going through him from his feet to the ends of his hair. He grabbed the pen to trace attentively on the map the same exact Symbol that was giving him energy. 

He could already imagine them scrambling to try to stop him, failing and getting more panicked each time as the crazy maniac easily got what he wanted.

Sure, his reputation with the mortals would have only worsened, but honestly, who cared? Not him for sure. It was already bad anyway and there was no possibility nor reason to change it—If he had tried to explain himself, they would not have believed a single word that exited his mouth. He was more than certain of it. Almost no one ever did. 

Starting casual chaos, not really causing any harm to anything but just… Acting for the sake of it, for the fun of it, was exactly what he needed. One real occasion to have some entertainment and be fruitful at the same time. 

Everyone was going to get very annoyed and unnerved with him. The Leader of the Spies especially. He was going to lose his mind and his sleep—Not his hair. The human didn't have many of them, he thought amusedly—trying to fix problems that did not really exist!

Loki was positively radiant only thinking about it. 

********

The first day of his relinquishing in seiðr moved almost too quickly. 

He passed his hours simply appreciating the waves reaching his veins, mostly finishing planning details in his imaginary, personal game of Tafl and reading the already started book, perceiving several of his bruises starting to heal more in between. 

One of the most important ones which did so was a bone of his spine that finally snapped back in its place—there were a couple of other ones that weren't exactly regular yet, but the one that his inner energy had fixed was the most worrisome out of them all—as the cuts on his hands glowed and the air around him seemed to change color and temperature. 

The second one, instead, already from its start, from the moment his eyes had slowly fluttered open… was less so. 

He awoke feeling highly disoriented, the darkness all around him, his mind scrambling in fear, his hearing trying to stay sharp to focus on all the sounds—searching for any noise, but being especially ready to listen at the echo of familiar loud footsteps hitting the floor, at the metal constantly jingling as his hands and arms couldn't stop shaking, the key snapping before the door squeaked and then hissed as it got opened and then immediately closed—his nose inhaling as much oxygen as possible and still feeling it lack in his lungs, making his heart slam against his ribcage painfully. 

He waited and panicked even more, trying and at first failing to get back at least a hint of control to remove power from Ebony Maw's hands—seeing him terrified gave him a lot of it. If he wanted to avoid the worst, he had to show that he wasn’t afraid of pain. He always grew bored when he kept in his emotions—or to not let Father down.  

Father had said that he admired his abilities. But they weren't enough, Loki knew. Crying in fear and agony, being immersed in sentiments of anxiety and terror was dishonorable for a Child of Thanos. And he couldn't be a disappointment to him—even though he already was by simply wanting to receive less pain, perhaps. By fearing being a disappointment in the first place as well—he… He couldn't. So he had to stay strong. He had to be quiet. He had to be good enough this time.

He tried to. He forced himself to shut down the fright that pierced through his veins, logically pushing it away with the explosive confidence that he desperately attempted to muster when he felt anything but. That he needed to stay alive. He lied to himself about being certain and worthy until all he felt was detachment regarding seeing him again, waiting more and more, almost counting the seconds. 

Everything kept going in that exact way until his seiðr rushed all up to his head, having him wince at the sudden stab of discomfort, the ache flaring like fire blazing upon all his nerves, making his sight blackout for an unknown time… but it still made him return to the present. The real present.  

‘This isn’t Sanctuary.’ His mind whispered immediately.

He blinked quickly, almost jolting to sit—at first wanting to get up as well, to leave, to run away as fast as he could wherever his legs took him, absolutely no hint of care about anything in any particle of his being—and almost having a fainting spell in response to it, making him still like a statue and place both his hands on his face, his elbows touching his knees.

He breathed in and out, slowly, carefully, tasting the clean air and smelling just his own sweat.

Loki knew that he wasn't on the ship. He couldn’t be. He knew it. He was… No. He wasn't certain about it. Curse it. 

‘Maybe it’s a simulation,’ his mind returned to whisper, alarmed, terrified once more. ‘Maybe everything was a simulation from the start. Maybe I never left. Maybe…’

No. No, no, no. That wasn't it. That couldn't be it. Even though so realistic that Loki had started to truly fear not being able to distinguish them from reality during his captivity, the scenarios that The Children proposed to his mind weren't so still, nor so lacking of violence and blood. He also could usually feel just the slightest hint of the energy of the Mind Stone rolling in the background, but right there and then there was none. 

It wasn’t a simulation.

Loki was in Miðgarðr. He had been sent there to get the Tesseract with the Chitauri army and the Scepter in tow. 

He had used the Infinity Stone to invade some of the Spies’ minds. Doctor Selvig as well, being the first one on the list. 

Thor had been there. The Avengers had been there. 

He had failed in the invasion and ran away. He had reached and claimed a cottage in Norway.  

He had a bed to sleep on—He hadn't had a bed in Sanctuary. Just the cold floor.

His seiðr wasn't at its best but it was there—it was not stuck, hidden, plastered in a corner of his being because of the manacles shutting it down.  

Fath… The Titan wasn't there. Nor any of his Children. He wasn't one of them. He had been one of them before, yes. But he wasn't one of them anymore. 

‘Loki, son of none.’ He reminded himself once again. ‘No family. No… No one to belong with. No one that I want to belong with.’

Lie. Lie, lie, lie. 

Norns, he wanted to not desire to belong with them. His entire chest, his entire head, his whole soul screamed for it, though, getting more and more upset at the simple thought that it just wasn’t possible. 

He missed her so much that it hurt. It made his eyes burn, his breath stutter and his chest constrict painfully… It made him feel incredibly small and lost. 

He missed the damn oaf, more than ever, more than when he had been there but at the same time not really—no, Loki hadn’t been enough. Never enough to let him stay. Never enough to truly matter. Stupid him for believing it differently—and definitely more than he would have liked to admit to himself. He was supposed to hate him, but he didn’t—Thor did.

He missed Oðin as well, no matter the sentiment of betrayal, of rage, of being used—and he had been. He had been used so thoroughly that he had lost himself, had lost his mind in between it all, to the point that he had tried to be used even more. Because that at least would have meant being loved somehow—and the controversial sentiments jumped in every time his mind lingered upon him even for an instant. 

He missed his home like a severed limb, the phantom pains echoing and shattering him with ease. He missed the smell, the sounds, the view. He missed waking up in the early mornings, safe and quiet between palace walls, not even the slightest shiver of fear running through his veins. 

He could barely handle it, but there was no coming back. 

No one wanted him to belong with them. He knew that, he had known that, even in Sanctuary, but it still hurt. 

He wasn't going to see their faces ever again, nor hear their voices. Nor to receive any kind of—false. They had been false, they hadn't really cared, he tried to remind himself—affection from them. 

He was going to die alone and unloved, no one giving him any more thoughts than ones with contempt.

He surrounded himself with his own arms, feeling a sob stuck in his throat—just like laughter had been twenty-four hours before. It had been only one day, but the happy mischievousness he had felt was already so far away—and he closed his eyes, letting himself pretend.

He pretended his amma was holding him, welcoming especially like she had always been when he had been little—and not too ashamed to ask—whispering soft, sweet nothings in his ear to calm him down. Singing his favorite songs and lullabies until he slept or forgot what he had been so upset about, her slender fingers toying with his hair and turning some short locks into pretty braids that he hardly removed for weeks. 

He almost hoped to see her when he eventually opened his eyes again, his chest warmed up by the memories… but he ended up staring at the empty wall instead. 

His heart squeezed and shattered into pieces all over again. And the black, vacant hole in its place wasn't fixable no matter how much seiðr he could have used to try. 

He absently, almost without even realizing it—suddenly drained, but not because of the low inner energy or out of lack of sleep—plaited his hair a little. He then swayed on his feet, moving slowly to grab once again the Geography book, his notes, and another casual volume. 

Loki left the room entirely. Didn’t return there at all, not even when the night returned to fall. He mostly remained on the couch, the need to cry setting in way too often, mixed with the same anxiety that he had felt while moving from city to city. Still, no matter how strong the combination of feelings was, it got pushed aside more often than not by the desolation that kept slamming inside him, lingering until everything else was nothing and his ears almost seemed filled with thick cotton. 

********

Once the second day ended and the right hour came, his sentiments weren't fully recovered but had a real purpose, a goal that he could run towards—even if it felt definitely less exciting than before, almost nonsensical from many points of view, except when he got angry. And being angry reminded him of the possibility of getting a little revenge before his eventual death—made him feel a little better. 

He sat at the exact center of the cottage, where the blood had been spilled—his seiðr glowing and shivering expectantly, almost as if it wished him to create another Symbol… Or it was just incredibly happy about creating some mayhem—and, closing his eyes, Loki focused strongly to create a copy of himself. 

A cocky, delighted, mischievous illusion appeared next to him just a few seconds later. He let his mind trickle into its form, to see what the other him saw. After that, he focused on adding a singular protective barrier around it in one slightly shaky breath. And then he thought about the first destination he had chosen, pushing himself to send it there.

It took him quite an effort to be successful—luckily, thanks to the absorbed energy, not too much. He still felt his seiðr slide and quiver in and out of him like a flowing river—but after that, his copy was there, right in front of the very much-needed public and cameras.

He assisted at how most of the humans instantly froze in fear upon seeing him. Interesting. Everything in them was showing that they had recognized who he was. 

They clearly wanted to run. Some of them just did it without thinking twice, screaming loudly like gooses whose destiny was to get their necks wrung out. 

A bigger grin split his face, fake only upon a certain point because… well, the comparison was rather comical. And contempt or no contempt?... He was not going to be forgotten, for sure. At least for a while. 

That was something, even though it wasn't great… nor enough to remove the melancholy that aggressively ate at his being whenever he least expected it. This was until he had little left to give or to keep. But he didn’t need sadness right now. It would have ruined his plans. So he ignored it.

He made his copy bow slightly in a heavily impudent, dramatic manner, then had him raise his hand in the air. Had him evoke a simple, innocent light that could have easily been mistaken with everything to those that weren't true seiðrmaðr or vísendakona… which luckily weren't on Miðgarðr right there and then, not considering Loki himself. 

Frigga or Eir would have seen through it immediately. He hoped that Thor did not even think of going to them to ask for advice. But he supposed that even if it was a possibility, it was a small one. The oaf didn't want to worry amma. Nor to risk putting himself in a bad light. Also, the Bifrost was still broken, so, since he did not know how to Worldwalk, he only had two options to get to Asgarðr: dark energy—which he doubted Oðin could muster at the moment, after using it to send him on Miðgarðr in the first place—or via Tesseract—somehow he also doubted he would use it. Mostly because of pride. 

Still, because of that innocent but misleading light, more screams exploded in the air. Fear started to spread through the market like blood in the water, even more people running away… but with some surprising exceptions.

Some of the mortals—five or six of them, one of them with a technological piece in her hand, covering part of her face as she held it—were still looking at him as he kept going in his acting sequence—they had very little common sense, honestly, but more courage than the others, for sure. Good for them. It didn't change that if he had planned worse if he had been still possessed by the Mind Stone, it would have probably meant death—following every movement, almost hypnotized by the theatrics and by the shiny enchantment that rested in the other himself's palm. 

Between them, the best reaction he could see was from a very foolish young boy who was looking at him with a wide—mostly more shocked than actually scared—gaze, his mouth so slack that he would not have been surprised at seeing his jaw hitting the floor—A fish out of water would have opened his mouth less, perhaps—which… his ice cream did instead, with a timing that felt quite comedic to him, for whatever reason. Loki couldn't comprehend why, no, but he hypothesized that since he was just that lacking in the amusement department, the slightest hint of humor felt much more forceful than how it was supposed to be.  

Still, that definitely made his copy’s smirk even truer, forcing him to avert his eyes from the teen to not make it too pleased and especially to not let out a snort. But, nonetheless, he just couldn't bring himself to have it look as scary or intimidating as he had hoped to do. 

So, he simply pushed the fake him to slam the light down with as much strength as he could make his illusion muster. Which was… A lot, actually. Hadn't he been without a physical body, and hadn’t the bright sphere just been a glowing luminescence… he might have made a proper hole in the ground. 

Just three seconds later, he let his copy vanish, exactly like he had planned.

As his mind fully returned to his body, sending the image of the teenager’s face inside his thoughts once more, he couldn't help but huff loudly in delight, shaking his head. And he prepared for the second round, hoping to assist in even more hilarious reactions. 

Three minutes later, in Bottineau, sadly, nothing of entertainment happened. Just some scared staring and running away. More apparent holding of the flat mechanical pieces to… Record him, perhaps. But nothing else. 

Valley City, instead, was a whole other story. A man fell first on his posterior, then slipped while trying to rise—returning to hit the floor with a loud thunk—and then as he actually was able to get up, he risked running straight, face first, into a light pole. Hadn’t Loki obligated his illusion to silence and just to amusement—blocking his own true expression from creeping in just to be sure—he might have definitely lost his composure.

********

In the following weeks, more funny reactions did arrive. Not as much as he had wished, though. Especially because he was very, very bored for the rest of it. 

Excluding when he sent more of his illusions, Loki was left in the cottage with almost nothing to do. 

His plan had worked, he was sure of it. And it was almost entirely confirmed by how the Miðgarðians Spies had started to arrive very quickly to where his copies appeared—often trying and failing to shoot him—and by the fact that in the urban side of Bodø, any type of suspicious presence was suddenly missing. And it was good, in a way, but, yes, quite boring. 

And so he tried to spend most of the free time he had reading, using his inner energy as little as he could to truly have it heal every break, every cut or bruise, until it actually started to replenish properly—helped by the soups and the smoothies. He still vomited them from time to time, but… less. And he wasn’t sure what he had done wrong in those few cases, to be fair. He may have taken more than how he had been able to stomach, but it hadn’t seemed to him like that?—since it didn't need to work hard on him anymore… if not add more barriers inside his head, just to be sure. 

The Other hadn't tried anything that dangerous to break the ones that he had yet. He had attempted something, twice, but they had been tentative. Not convinced. Loki hadn’t been certain about how to take it. It could have been a good thing… or a very, very bad one. And because of it, his nightmares mostly moved from the simple fall in the Void to having his face grabbed, his six fingers pushing into it, his hidden eyes shining under the dark cloth. 

Loki always had issues when he woke up. It sent him into a frenzied hypervigilance that would only stop with evoking new protection spells. He had lost count of how many he had made, to be fair. 

When he wasn't in reading mood or he felt like he was going crazy by staying in all the time, he also made some walks outside the house, mostly arriving deep in the woods and ending up sitting down in the foliage—when his muscles asked him to stop, which still happened no matter how all his body had healed—looking at the sky, the grass tickling at his skin, the smell of flowers filling his nostrils. 

He returned to the center of the town as well, but only to add more food to his pantry and to look around, sometimes losing himself in the beauty of the lake, but always investigating, always alert to prove to himself that his wanna-be-jailers' missing state was still the same. And it was.

All the dogs were still truly on the hunt. They hadn’t realized that the bait was just a bone and not the entire meal yet. 

He had already reached and deleted Texas from the hit list, though. Twelve more days and he would have technically finished his not-existent evil plan. To which, if they wanted another fight, they would have been very deluded to assist to a complete lack of reaction. 

He honestly had no idea what to do after that. 

Maybe he could have stayed in that cottage some more. But he doubted it was a good choice. 

He could have tried teletransporting somewhere where the space between the worlds was less thick, so to attempt Worldwalking to get to Vanaheim, where they weren’t searching for him at all, but he wasn’t sure he wouldn’t have depleted his reserves because of the two actions instantly. 

Or maybe he could have transformed into an animal and run through the woods. Waiting just a little more—just a few weeks more… or directly a month—would have been better. The main issue was to turn into a creature that had little to no predators. Included men and women in their constant need for hunting trophies and fur coats. Not that that was something new to Asgarðians either. They, after all, had their fair amount of relics.

He had to think about it. Calculate every possibility that was at hand. Maybe a better choice would have jumped in, eventually.

********

When the hour came, he sent his copy to Miami. 

As it reached its destination, the entire world seemed to freeze. 

At six, maybe seven meters of distance from the fake him, surrounded by the crowd that was already trying to run away, staring at him with very wide eyes and just the slightest hint of surprise, was Thor. 

The illusion kept acting unaffected, not even slightly perturbed as the oaf, blinking out from his stupor and saying something that, since he was far away enough, Loki wasn't able to hear, started moving—directly flying—towards him. But the real him definitely felt his heart stop for a second before it started bouncing in his chest faster and faster. 

He had expected him to actually be around, but at the same time, he hadn't expected him to appear. Even leaving a path for the spies to follow, for him to follow, making them all feel the necessity to stop him, the fact he truly met him was bemusing. 

For a moment, as his copy raised his hand and Thor speeded up in his flight, getting nearer and nearer and nearer, he almost wanted to sneer. To say something sarcastic, maybe talking normally, maybe screaming at the top of his lungs. To laugh out loud hysterically because wow, well, at least he would fully remember his determined, gloomy face before accepting his own demise. 

But the temptation vanished pretty quickly as his br… Thor broke his half-hearted barrier, slamming Mjöllnir onto it and wrecking it to pieces. And he just stared. 

He stared, yes. Gazed at him stubbornly and waited to see, almost curious to know what he would have done to him in case he had truly been there. 

The answer was easy. Terribly easy. Way too expectable. He wasn't surprised at all by it, but at the same time, it still managed to take his breath away. 

He used the hammer again, trying to hit him straight in the stomach. And even though his real body wasn't there, making a hole in the second him, part of him fully felt the hit anyway. 

Just an attack. No new attempt to talk. No new fake begging to have him return home when in reality he had just wanted the Tesseract and a prisoner on a silver plate. Nothing of that. It was the smartest thing to do, he couldn't even blame him for it. 

‘Of course,’ he thought, still a little bitter, but he wasn’t sure about who, exactly. ‘I am a merciless killer and a Frost Giant, after all. What did I even expect?’

A lump blocked itself in his throat as his copy began to fade and his mind returned to trickle into his real body, his eyes starting to burn just a little even though he tried to ignore the sensation, actually ending up giggling loudly. A giggle that then simply turned into laughter as his mind couldn't help itself but give him several, very specific questions. 

After the stomach, would he have aimed for the head? Would he have hit once? Twice? How many times would have taken him to bash his skull in? Would he have felt them all or after the first everything would have gone out like a light? 

Well. There was only one way to find out, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to let it happen.

Chapter Text

The two little oval-like, longish pieces inside his ears made the skin turn quite itchy. 

They were uncanny to him. And they felt slippery. Like he had to constantly press on them to be sure they wouldn't fall out, even though their shape was supposed to have them remain still. 

‘Maybe it’s the nerves,’ he supposed with a frown, breathing in and out and trying to stop himself from touching them—from even simply scratching at them with his nails—not failing but still perceiving the unnerving sliding, which made his fingers twitch. ‘Aye, it probably is that.’

His sentiments were quite overpowering after all—they almost always were. They tended to be explosive in good or terribly bad ways, his impulses not helping much, if not at all—and the technological items were just one of the uncomfortable matters involving him at that moment. 

His throat felt all tight—like someone was trying to strangle him, to choke the life out of him—his neck paining him. Mjöllnir felt heavier in his grip than it had felt in all his years as if it wanted to defeat him by gravity, absorbed by the soil under his feet. A sense of discomfort and dread kept making his stomach churn in the most upsetting way, a knot tying his intestines. And his mind… 

His mind felt like a bloody battlefield. He and he only against a battalion. 

He had several insistent foes attacking him on all sides, infiltrating through the quiet with mental images and questions, often one after the other or even at the same time, lacking respite and returning to fill him with a restlessness that he had no idea how to defeat. He had thought he had been able to while visiting New Mexico to see Selvig—to ask how he fared, especially after assisting at Barton's state, discovering that the man preferred using tons of… Pills, he had called them, to help him calm down in the bad moments and be almost completely easygoing in the good ones. And he had been in a good one when they had seen each other—Jane and Lady Darcy again, but one single foot back in the Tower had sent him more or less back to the starting point, if not even worse as the bittersweet delusion added itself.

Being surrounded while waiting was not helping either, his gaze moving fast, searching for him between a sea of faces—even though he was aware that he wasn’t going to be between them. Not so casually. He knew that. He was certain of that—finding people staring back at him with something like awe, admiration, or even lust… and then Thor found himself looking down on the small round thing attached to his arm because of small straps—its name definitely escaped his memory, but he was confident that it started with a ‘c’—with the numbers to keep himself primed regarding the hour.

Three and thirty-two, it said. And as it got to three and thirty-three, before he returned to look up, the small frown crossing his face became bigger, turning to be even more intense as the entire minute vanished almost without a word from the communication items. 

And because of that silence, his mind returned to run, thoughts fighting against him for his attention. Loki was the center and the common point of all of them, like a constant, the North of his personal compass. He followed him around from simple, casual, and quiet reasoning to any kind of mental picture that his mind formulated. He almost seemed to haunt him—Thor was almost sure that Loki would have been amused by it if he had known. 

Because of that haunting, of that inexorable fall in thoughts where his Brother was the absolute protagonist, the moment when he actually saw him Teletransport in the middle of the crowd—the gold and the green and the black shining under the sun, his posture looking regal in its composure—he almost thought he was seeing things. That he was imagining him being there. It definitely wouldn't have been the first time. 

But he wasn't a figment of his imagination, he realized, his heart skipping a beat or two as he noticed that most of the mortals started to quickly disperse, to move away desperately from his stark figure as if they were a flock trying to escape from a hungry predator. 

His mind felt empty and his ears almost stopped hearing sounds, leaving only white noise for a second. This before Loki's large mischievous grin snapped him out of it, having him grab both the annoying little things in his ears—still so slippery and abnormal to him—pressing on them until they clicked before announcing a simple, unstable “He's here!”. His voice somehow came out both raspy and loud simultaneously, his blood rushing to his head like a waterfall moving backward. 

He didn't listen to any possible answer given to his statement—didn’t even hear them if they had been there, the white noise returning to hit once again, making the chaos around him almost muted as well—as he exploited the quickly expanding empty space forming around him and his Brother to take a boost and fly forward. 

As he did so, his mind tried to focus on the list of actions he had ended up formulating in several of the previous mind pictures. 

He knew he had to stop him from using his seiðr, from bringing to fruition the new part of his plan… and especially stop him from leaving. All of those things. Possibly at the same time as well. 

Throwing himself at him was excluded. It was an easy way to get stabbed. To get him weakened—even for a short amount of time—and have Loki proceed in his plans with just a momentary, small hitch in it before vanishing again. 

Mjöllnir, instead, could work. It could have him fall down, trapped by it and incapacitated… like he had done on the Bifrost before Thor himself had to raise it to break the Rainbow Bridge apart.

His mind had no issue showing him again the part that was immediately after the breaking. Loki dangling, barely holding on to Gugnir. The expression on his face became empty. His hand opened, letting himself slip. Him falling and falling and falling as Thor screamed and almost wanted to jump down to get him, being blocked by faðir, who held him back. 

His face darkened as he tried to push away the sequence. And kept flying. 

There was no open space under them now. Just the road. So it was a better choice—twas alright. No one was going to plummet into any more abysses. No one.

He couldn't aim at the legs as it wouldn't have helped much—just had him limp, which wouldn’t matter. Wouldn’t help to restrain him—and it probably was way too easy to avoid. He also drastically refused to hit his chest—armor or not, he didn't care—neck and especially near the head or the head itself. So that reduced his range to his belly. 

And then… The remaining part of his scenario was a little confusing. It depended a lot on how much time the SHIELD Agents would have taken to get where they were. If they got there immediately after, there was little he could have done anyway. But… 

He wanted to talk to him. Wanted to ask him so many things—question him again with who he was allied, where he had ended up in the year he had gone missing, what he was really doing by taking energy from such an enormous quantity of ground…—but he wasn’t sure it would have gone well. The possibility of him telling the truth was so much smaller than the one of having him lie right in his face, finding a way to use that moment of questioning—of his desperate need for answers—to his advantage somehow. 

Getting him arrested and asking him later seemed more reasonable and less dangerous, but he… still doubted Loki would tell him anything. No, he couldn't picture it going well. The resentment definitely wouldn’t have helped. And then, eventually, after his trial, the chances would have gotten even thinner. 

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he ended up thinking as he finally reached him—his green eyes staring at him with hostile mirth, the smirk on his face definitely mocking him, his hand starting to rise almost in a challenge to stop him, emerald light trickling at his long fingers, zapping up and down with extremely rapid flickers—pushing any thought aside once more and throwing Mjöllnir against the barrier. A barrier that he was ready to find there, that he had been ready to find for a whole week at this point. 

What he had not been ready at all to see was his Brother's defense crack and shatter instantly like glass, pieces of it showing themselves after the impact, floating in the air before, in a blink of an eye, then there was no more. It made him feel his breath catch as confusion and something like suspicion trickled in, almost expecting a second hidden barrier as he threw Mjöllnir again. 

But instead of hitting a second line of defenses—Loki's expression almost looking unchanged, no worry tracing his gaze, not even for a second—his hammer got to his Brother and passed through him entirely, more green shimmering around a wide hole that simply got bigger and bigger every instant a little more. 

Seeing it—his eyes getting wide, staring in front of him and then around him, his fast-pacing heart seeming to stop for the second time of the day—he felt as if someone had just backhanded him.

An illusion. 

No Loki. Just a single illusion of him that was definitely vanishing, the grin still there, as he had just played entirely in his hand. Like everything had been planned, scheme after scheme. 

“Are you ever not gonna fall for that?” He almost heard him say in his thoughts as his copy blinked out of existence entirely, leaving him there, still like a statue, his hammer returning in his hand more out of habitude than for actual need. 

His entire body started to shake a little as his frustration returned to rise like a powerful wave, crashing on everything around it so strongly that he almost wanted to wreck things and howl with all the air inside his lungs. Howl until the exhausting sensation of failure—heavy and poisonous inside his being—stopped slamming in, making him feel lost and weak on his knees. 

It took him several deep breaths, his muscles clenching and unclenching—almost to follow every inhale—to resist.  

But thunder roared in the screaming ozone-tinted wind in his place—Thor’s voice altered to a weird, slightly panicked pitch wrapped with grave growls as he tried to speak, his own explanations sounding foreign to his mouth as if he was spitting out nonsensical, inexistent words as he attempted to offer them to his shield brothers and sister, receiving too many answers, some of them that he had trouble catching. One of them, the last one, clear enough that his mind recognized it, was a request of regrouping before four—the rain slowly falling at first only to pick up a faster pace until the water seemed to transform into the irritating clapping of an invisible public. 

A lightning strike set a far away, big, mangrove tree—just near the ocean—on fire as he turned his back on it. Black, thick smoke started to rise to reach the ominous dark clouds above. 

He ended up closing his free hand until his nails were hurting his skin. 

********

He was completely drenched when he reached the Helicarrier. 

The rain made his hair stick to his face in all places, but mostly on his cheeks. A pool of water formed around his feet just at the entrance, where he more or less remained until the pitter-patter of the drops falling out of him stopped—outside it kept pouring, another crack of thunder resonating in the air—and he went to change into the spare clothes he had brought with him just in case—wise choice of his, developed after centuries of ending almost naked after battles against monsters. But in this case, it was only wise on a certain amount, considering that twas completely his own terrible mood's fault if he had to get changed. But between the vicious rain and the crying out in rage, wrecking things like a mindless, violent Berserkr… having a devastating storm upon himself was much more preferable. 

Once properly dressed with a large, dark blue sleeveless shirt and light gray pants—not wanting to put his armor on again as it felt heavy even holding it at the moment—he returned to the others, finding two of them already occupied looking at a screen while the third stared at the ceiling like it had offended him personally. 

All the Spies present there—some that he recognized as those that had been in the same apartment he had slept in New Mexico; Lady May being one of them. Others, instead, he had never seen before—were working on the Ship's system or moving around to ensure that everything was as regular as possible. 

“He has been in Panama City at three-thirty, in Saint Augustine at three thirty-three, and… Miami at three thirty-six.” Lady Romanoff said immediately after he entered the room, without moving her gaze from the piece of technology. “Except he wasn't really there in the last one. And there was no second attempt. No finishing of the triangle in another part of the city. No sudden attack anywhere. Nothing.”

“Question,” Rogers said, looking at him. “You mentioned before that… That his illusions can attack people as well, right?”

“Aye. If he gave them a physical weapon or proper seiðr, he can.”

“So he might have sent illusions each time to do what he wanted?” 

“Aye,” he nodded and replied again, a small breath slipping through his mouth like a silent sigh. “But I doubt that this last occasion was the case. If it had been part of his plan, he would have defended himself more. He would have made many illusions of himself to fight me to let at least one of them continue the Symbol.”

“Yep, he had a whole minute,” stated Barton flatly, his gaze not moving from the higher wall. “If he wanted to end it, he would have. So, distraction.”

“The thing is, why did he need one?” the Captain asked. “And from when he started to play us? Since today, for a week or he did it from the start?”

Thor looked at all the destinations that had been on the map, his lips twisting slightly. “The shape he composed is incomplete and it doesn't look like anything he ever created in such a manner. I doubt it is from this day only.”

“From the start is probably the answer.” Lady Romanoff said, her tone not betraying any emotions. “Wherever he is, whatever he is doing, he desires our attention elsewhere. Perhaps he noticed someone of the SHIELD on his trail, perhaps he expected some of them to find him, so he sent them on a chase.”

A second passed. He, Rogers and Barton moved their heads in agreement, looking at each other as silence filled the room, pensive expressions painting their faces. 

“Maybe he is just hiding at the moment.” The Archer ended up suggesting after a while. “Maybe he is waiting for new allies to arrive. To back him up. And keeping us distracted guaranteed that he could avoid moving from his place of choice.”

“But he stopped.” His shield sister replied, tilting her head. “It doesn’t sound like him.”

“Aye, it doesn't.” Thor asserted. “He could have finished the Symbol and made us pursue him further.” He crossed his arms, one of his hands just grazing against his own forearm, the other staying down. 

“Is that supposed to mean that he doesn't feel the need to hide anymore because they, whoever they are, are near or…” Rogers glanced at him, his brow raising a little as for a second or two he just went quiet. “...Because of you, Thor?”

He blinked in confusion. “I don’t think he would stop on my account…?” 

‘He would have probably done the opposite, actually.’ He thought, his jaw clenching. He almost shared it out loud but stopped himself at seeing that the Captain was going to say something else, his face spasming just a little. 

“Well, I don't know. You're still his Brother, so maybe you took him by surprise.” He shrugged a little, almost embarrassed before a frown returned to take over. “On the Helicarrier, after Germany, he did look tense when he realized you were near.”

‘What?’ 

Something inside Thor's stomach seemed to flip and twist. A sensation that he could not truly name combined with confusion spread through him, fast and aggressively. Another thunder rumbled in the sky, more loud than the ones before. 

Barton snorted. “You're saying that just by being there he confused him so hard that his plan went to hell?”

“That's…” An intense emotion crossed Lady Romanoff's eyes so fast that he couldn't understand which one it was. Wasn’t really even interested in understanding it as his mind still fought to follow the information he had just received. Still, he saw her blink quickly. “Maybe we should…” she said, but she was not able to actually finish talking. 

A vibration activated quite suddenly, having her shut down and throw her hand in one of her suit's pockets, showing the phone that Fury had given her, while each one of them became rigid and fully alert. 

She showed little to no surprise in her expression as she picked up and looked at the screen in silence, something even more unreadable dancing in her face. After typing extremely fast—small sounds playing inside his ears much louder than how they were supposed to be as the room's structure made them echo—the phone returned to its original place. 

“What is it, Tash?” The Archer questioned, worried, making her purse her lips for a moment before inhaling and exhaling quietly, emptiness returning to settle on her features. 

“We need to go to the base.” She said without sentiment before she looked at them one by one. She did it like she was dreading to expose the remaining part of what she had learned, provoking a small pause that raised the tension in the air. A tension that exploded, removing the air from their lungs and the ground from under their feet when she actually finished talking. 

“The scepter has been stolen.”

********

Thor, as he followed the other Avengers in the base almost without opening his mouth—Banner and Stark had already been there when they arrived, looking quite disgruntled, heavy eyebags perfectly visible—could hear the unsaid in every person's stare that he met as they fell on him. 

He could sense the silent, immediate accusation as they jumped to their conclusion, a conclusion that he couldn't even deny—not really—because the exact moment the word ‘scepter’ had slipped from Lady Romanoff's mouth, his mind had gone there as well. Had attached the last pieces of the conversation they had just had with it, feeling his palm and his fingers burn in pain as the pushing and prodding had become almost instinctive and had started to be even more common to him, and as the rain outside just had kept falling faster and faster—the intensity of the storm didn't seem to diminish, not even as he willed it to do so. No, it kept raging. It screamed and roared and furiously attacked everything it met, flooding the ground, filling the almost empty rivers, mixing with the sea. 

They were almost sure that it hadn’t been him; that was what they said when they met them face to face. But they were still completely certain that it was an ally of his of some kind, with or without proof, because who else would have known about it? Who else could have wanted the scepter if not Loki and whoever was connected with him regarding the conquest? So, aye, an ally. An ally that they could only talk about while all the Avengers listened—ending up sitting in the heart of the SHIELD’s base so quickly that he barely noticed when it happened. One moment he had been walking, the next he was on a chair that was even less comfortable than the one he had sat on for hours in the Stark Tower—as there was no registration of the culprit to show. 

The SHIELD's technology system had apparently been overwhelmed by some things called viruses, some kind of technology sicknesses that had made everything go in standby—blocked them, Lady Romanoff had clarified—for something like half an hour for how heavy they had been. They were also the reason why Fury had sent them a message to tell them to come instead of doing a simple call, sharing with them any kind of notes in between. 

Everything was slow even now, malfunctioning at the smallest prodding. Even the elevator, which had obligated them to speed through corridors that were abnormally foul-smelling—"What is this about, pops?” Stark had asked, covering his face with his right arm, his entire face not hiding in the slightest the disgust. Fury had simply muttered a “Later,” speeding up his walk.

During those thirty minutes of black-out, that unknown someone had broken in—it wasn't entirely clear how, but there was a suspicion that they might have arrived through the sewers. Mostly because of a raised covering metal mesh that definitely wasn't supposed to be in such a position—and had been able to slip through the defenses, knock out eight Agents by taking them by surprise—mostly from behind, from their statements—and grab the case with the scepter. They had it easy at first as all the electronic alarms and traps had been shut down. 

They had also been extremely quiet, like a phantom, but as they had moved to reach the room with the Tesseract, they had eventually set off one of the not technologically advanced traps, ending up being surrounded by many more Spies than they probably had been able to handle, which… for one big reason brought Thor relief, even if not fully. 

The several weapons ready to fire at the smallest movement might have been their main issue, but an entire building full of alerted Agents might have done the rest, and—whoever the stealer was—they had been smart enough to decide that the scepter was enough of a prize, choosing to take their leave. And to do so, they quickly crushed a blue seed in their right hand. It had immediately exploded. 

Yellow, fetid smoke had come out of it—and that was the clear answer of why there had been such a pungent, disgusting smell in the building—then they had then flown away thanks to a jetpack—whatever that was—making a hole in the wall with some kind of weapon that had a melting laser. 

The person had been… Very anonymous from the description that had been given to them. They had been tall, but not too much, wrapped up by a heavy black cloak—decorated inside with half a dozen daggers, a taser, a few more blue seeds, and something else that the present SHIELD's Spies had had only a split second to see and none to actually focus on them—and clothes, always black, including his gloves. A theatre-like mask and dark glasses had been covering their face and eyes. There had also been glimpses of dark brown, straight, short hair and a few of the Agents had noticed the lack of one finger in their left hand, replaced by what had seemed to be black steel. 

During the entire situation the unknown thief hadn't said a word, nor made any kind of noise. They had just acted, swiftly leaving when the moment came, so, except for the missing finger, there wasn't much to identify them.

In any case, the SHIELD was—desperately, even if they wouldn't have admitted it, especially because of all the technological issues—scrambling to find a way to trace the energy of the scepter by using the scans—like those that Eir made, but less advanced—of the Aura of it, which apparently remained imprinted in the brains of those who had been mind controlled—when they had asked him before they had sat down, Barton had instantly permitted the use of his personal documents, almost without even blinking. 

They ended up using a technology piece that was Stark's.

And as they kept sitting there, waiting, they saw the Man of Iron’s screen—so stable in comparison to all the ones in the room that kept going on and off and on in bursts—show a map with the trace of the tracked energy which kept rising higher and higher in the sky, until it stopped there and vanished entirely, simply leaving the previous line. 

If there had been barely conceived accusing stares before, now they were clear and intense. Tense conversations started and began from an attempt to make the tracking start again, moving to quite the colorful curses and becoming more meaningless to him as the seconds went on, many scientific Miðgarðian terminologies being thrown in. 

Eventually, somebody—a woman with blonde hair collected in a bun—changed the argument. “We should follow the path the scepter had traced before disappearing. Send the Avengers in Space to get it back,” she said, her fingers hitting repeatedly against the table. 

“With the risk of many of them getting mind controlled or killed?” Lady May, sitting near Agent Hill, replied, her tone perhaps a little defensive. “It is not an option, for now. Attempting anything on an unknown territory without the right preparation could end in a trap with wounded at best and in a suicide mission at worst. Even for them.”

“Mister Stark already has shown himself to not be susceptible to the scepter's influence,” the blonde defended. “The others simply have to be more careful.”

“They cannot be careful if they go there blindsighted.”

“We can't leave the scepter in their hands.” A third—a bald, tall, muscled man with a weird necklace—shot back, a vein in his neck bulging out just a little. “Such a powerful weapon in their hands again is a problem that we cannot ignore. Lives are at stake and fighting our own allies will not help us win the war. You're trying to have us hide our heads under the sand like cowards, everyone and everything else be damned.”

“I am not. I am just saying that if you send them with little to no information, we might have to fight the Avengers themselves. Because, as I already previously stated, without more information, they cannot work to the best of their possibilities.” Before the man could respond again, she interrupted him. “Would you like to fight the Hulk, Mister Caddel?” She said harshly, visibly piqued. 

The discussion, after that, died down immediately, shutting down the man so intensely that when he closed his mouth, his teeth clicked. The blonde woman—just like many other humans in the room—paled, a shudder coming out of her as if she hadn't truly thought about it. 

Thor couldn't help but give a look to Banner, seeing how the man almost tried to shrink on himself at the words, a grimace all over his face.

“We don't have to lose our heads.” Lady May simply added. “We'll find a way to get the scepter back, but safety comes first.” She sat back, then gave a silent look to Fury.

The SHIELD Director immediately took the conversation into his own hands. “We have to move the Tesseract away,” he stated flatly. And from there, the planning started. 

More conversations—still slightly tense but definitely less angry and aggressive—followed, most of them being focused on listed places that he didn't know and in detail about the protected space that could be built as fast as possible, with listed names of whom it had to build them. And the exclusive team focused on its protection only was named as well. They also nominated a lot of non-technological defenses that the thief couldn't pass through as they had just done.

They also talked about needing to plan a trap of some sort—doing exactly what they hadn't wanted to do at first. The possibility that they had removed from the options since the start, mostly because of the scepter itself. Using the Tesseract as bait—and to find a way to cover hearts so the scepter wouldn't have worked at all instead of having to constantly keep distance with whoever—the “Loki” was almost implied. They had almost called him out several times in the conversation—held it… Because fighting from as far as possible to not get mind-controlled definitely had its perks, but it also had its disadvantages. 

When the meeting finished and the Avengers left to return definitively to the Tower, it was late—the sky was painted with a dark blue hue, covered by clouds that looked like big pieces of sculpted metal—and the rain had visibly subsided, going nice and slow, the lightning and thunder having completely stopped in between the discussions. 

As they reached the destination, after having a quick conversation with Banner and Stark, saying that they were going to share information on all sides in the morning—too tired to actually expose all the events of the days in which they had been separated and definitely too wired up to even want to, the situation they were in feeling like a whirlwind spinning out of control, destroying every single thing—they opted for a quiet, light dinner before ending the night and going to bed. 

The steady falling of the rain interrupted itself after he went under the covers, even though his mood was still extremely stormy.

********

He woke up panting, his heart hammering in his ribcage like a drum, his eyes a little wet, his stomach feeling all knotted and his arms trembling at his sides. 

He obligated himself to get up from the bed, which felt both hot and drenched with perspiration, noticing in between it all that a single cushion had somehow ended up on fire. 

He shut down the small flame in the fastest way he could, swearing a little under his breath, then, with his mind reeling from the dream he had just woke up from—which he remembered on this occasion, against all the previous ones—he quickly rubbed his hands against his eyelids and got dressed, grabbing the same clothes he had put on earlier. 

He walked out, feeling the room being way too stifling to stay. He was certain he could have suffocated there and then if he had attempted to. 

He moved forward. And even more forward. He went up the stairs, almost covering them two by two, departing from a floor to reach another one and so on, not even being sure if he wanted to get somewhere, until—in what felt like blinking once or twice and a full hour simultaneously—he found himself on the biggest balcony, gazing at the view of the city.

He breathed all the warm air he could get, even though it wasn’t as clean as he was used to—no, there were a lot of the toxic, nasty gasses there, which almost covered entirely the smell of petrichor—perceiving the wind of the first days of Skerpla’s month shake his hair and graze at his face.

Thor held the railing tight with both his hands for long, long seconds until he just moved to sit down, his back touching the wall, the cold steel pressing against his calves. 

He ended up staring at the reinforced glass between it all, almost hypnotized by how the moon—more than half but less than full—and the far-away constellations shined through it, recalling their full names and their singular stars, refusing to do anything else. Refusing especially to let pieces of his thoughts fall back inside small details that connected way too easily with his dream—just gazing down for a moment would have been enough to have his mind spiral into them.

So he focused on constellation after constellation. And when he finished, he started recalling the nearest ones that he knew and that he couldn’t see. Not from where he was. Not with so much gas.

He went on and on until a sound dragged him out of his absent-minded state, having him make a jerkish movement—almost ready for an attack of some sort—glimpsing at Rogers’ surprised face instead.

“Oh, hey Thor,” he said, not really moving from where he was. “Sorry. I didn't mean to scare you.”

“No need for any apologies, my friend.” He attempted a smile. “I was distracted. That’s all.”

Rogers nodded. Then, after looking left and right, he made a slightly hesitant movement, his feet shuffling in place. “Can I sit?” he asked. 

“Of course,” he replied, signaling at the empty floor near him. He didn’t really mind the company. "Do as you please.”

The man did, slowly and carefully, taking in a good amount of air and just staring down, his notebook—which Thor hadn't noticed beforehand—being trapped under his armpit until he was able to and especially until he found a better, more comfortable position. 

The quire finished then between the Captain’s fingers as he grasped at the pencil that rested in the middle of two empty pages, toying with it slightly before actually starting to sketch something quietly. Thor's gaze returned to go up, the wind and the sounds of the graphite scratching against the paper breaking the almost complete silence that would have surrounded them instead. 

They remained like that for a while, not needing much else, just letting the time tick away bit by bit without saying a word. 

Thor's gaze fell on the sketch from time to time, trying to not to let it linger too much to avoid disturbing, still finding himself a little intrigued as the lines stretched from only one page to both of them, depicting a city with quite a lot of details. Rogers sometimes stopped himself only to start again and to add something else or delete it with the rubber, which had apparently been in his pants pockets before. 

When Rogers finished his work on the piece, Thor felt him turn to a new empty page, staring at it without doing anything for several seconds, only to raise his gaze upon him. 

He felt him look and instinctively met his eyes, finding a question in them that was actually quite easy to understand even without being voiced. He simply nodded, bringing him to start sketching quickly once more, his lines running mostly on one page this time. 

“Do you prefer drawing landscapes or portraits?” he ended up asking, the words coming out even before he actually realized it—also snatching a new surprised expression from the other's face as he hadn't expected him to speak at all, either—still trying to stay as still as possible in between. 

He didn't answer at first—whether he went out from his surprise or had to think about it, Thor didn't know—but then he did. “Portraits,” the graphite scratched some more, his hand tracing a curved line. “Details of portraits, mostly. Like the hands or the eyes. The wrinkles in the clothes and… how the light plays with the hair.”

“Did you have any favorite subject before…?” He didn't finish the question, but he clearly didn't need to as Steve Rogers simply shrugged. 

“There was this man that lived above the bakery that was the nearest to my house. He had the curliest hair I had ever seen and a crooked jaw. I think I've never… I've never been able to draw him like I wanted. Every time, he looked different.” he smiled, amused. “I enjoyed drawing one of the florists, too. She always had the biggest bows in her hair and a different necklace every time I saw her.” More quiet sketching. “I liked to draw my best friend as well when he was actually able to stay still for enough time to let me. I never understood if he did it on purpose or not.”

Thor felt the chuckle build up against his throat, his mouth twitching to turn into a smirk, ending up suppressing it at the best that he could to not change expression entirely. “A few years ago, I would have been the same. The painters hated me for that.” A pause. “Still am, sometimes.”

“Just a lucky night, then?” The soft grin was clear in his tone of voice. 

A snort escaped him in response. “Aye, I suppose so…” he heard him run the graphite on the notebook more intensely. “What was your best friend's name?”

Rogers stopped moving almost completely, letting the quiet settle around them like a mantle. Ten seconds ran away in the night’s wind. “James.” He responded then. “He was Bucky to me, though.”

He felt just the slightest hint of confusion grapple at him. “I don't see many similarities between them?”

“His full name was James Buchanan Barnes.” His voice sounded just a little strained. Thor showed acknowledgment of his answer through a tiny nod. 

Not sure if he needed to just let the silence fall to change the argument or if he wanted to say something else, he fell silent again, letting him decide. 

It ended up being neither. Not the first, nor the second. They remained in the quiet nothing for the rest of the night, Rogers still sketching, Thor just letting him.

After several minutes—most of them passed by more and more yawning and drawing—when the sketch's base had been fully finished, they had both left the balcony to attempt sleeping at least a bit as it had been four in the night, two hours to the morning. 

As he had returned to his chambers, the first thing he had done had been to turn the burned pillow. Then he had touched the mattress and everything had gone black in a second.

********

The light shining against his face woke him up. 

He asked Jarvis the hour almost without really caring. He had instantly replied ten o’clock, but as he had raised the covers just an inch, everything had gone black and white once more, having he found himself in a completely different position, the pillow on the ground, the sun even more annoying than before. And this time the voice in the walls had said it was eleven and thirty, to which he had obligated himself to get up. 

Moving through the rooms, paddling left and right for enough time that his body woke up fully, he ended up reaching the others. A couple of light conversations dragged into the start of the lunch. 

He spent the whole evening with them in the city, helping out where and how he could—easily moving things that mortals couldn’t, flying in the air with Mjöllnir to reach things, shocking items into working—making short, small, rare pauses arbitrarily just to take a breath.

The time went by fast. Before he knew it, the sun started to go down and they were returning, all of them soaked in sweat. Dinner was eaten like it had been their last meal. 

He and Rogers had somehow ended up on the balcony again even that night. 

And the night after. 

And the night after that—Loki hadn't made any appearances. 

And the one that followed as well—all the days flowing almost in the same manner, even though he was able to wake earlier. Working on the repairs while waiting for any kind of news from SHIELD. Lady Romanoff only said that the team that protected the Tesseract had chosen the proper building to do so and was in position, but would have moved to another place at the end of the week. 

They stayed there casually, not really talking about the reason why they ended up there instead of remaining in their chambers. They made conversation, but in a short manner, just enjoying the peace and quiet. The relaxation that came with it.

********

On the sixth night, Thor arrived there earlier than usual, not really having the patience to attempt to remain in bed much longer when sleep seemed elusive. 

He could sense something different in the air even before seeing the other man’s face. 

When he did, it was just a confirmation. His skin looked almost translucent under the light of the moon and his eyes were slightly reddened. 

He almost retreated instantly, not knowing if staying would have been a good choice, but, at the same time, simply leaving him there felt wrong and displeasing, so he limited himself to keep walking, sitting near him without saying a word. 

The wind was particularly warm and intense as it filled the stillness with its movement. It and it alone kept filling it like it had to do so. As if the utter quiet would have been much worse for the wild Element as well. But when Rogers’ voice raised to speak, it almost seemed to disappear entirely.

“He died,” he said, his voice almost a whisper. “Bucky, I mean.” He inhaled air like he truly needed it. Like he would have choked if he didn't. “He died before I ended up in the ice.”

Thor couldn't help but frown, the words pressing against his tongue, pushing to come out. He hesitated, but they left his lips anyway, wavering just a little, exiting his mouth in a rasped but gentle manner. “How did it happen, if I may ask?”

“He fell,” Rogers replied simply, returning to the newest sketch, even if much more slowly, like he was forcing himself to. Thor froze instantly, feeling his heartbeat stop, paralyzing itself in his ribcage before it hurt so much that it seemed like it was being squeezed and broken apart piece by piece. A good part of him almost wanted to lament it. “Couldn't... We were on a running train and I couldn't…” he passed his hands through his hair, letting out a frustrated small noise. “I couldn't reach him in time.”

The agony flared inside Thor as if some Eitr poison had been dropped on his direct skin, eating away at it. Consuming it. Ruining it and then starting to get deeper and deeper, reaching his bones, slashing his stomach, stabbing and opening once again his biggest, inner wound. Even after a year and a month, it was raw as if it had been just the day before. 

“I… I am truly sorry, my friend.” He said, trying to offer some comfort, to share what he felt, patting as delicately as possible his hand on his shoulder, attempting at the same time to contain the pain that bubbled up. Trying to avoid how near he was to just sob, how near he was at turning his voice utterly, completely hoarse out of how it just resonated. 

His throat, still, felt extremely tight as he continued talking, perceiving Steve Rogers’ eyes on him. “I will not say that I know what you felt, but I can… I can imagine how it was. And I can tell you that… I am sure he wouldn't want you to fault yourself for it…” ‘But Loki does.’ “From what you said, I doubt there would have been a way to avoid it.” ‘I could have. I could have grabbed him. Could have found a way. Twas my fault.’

The man moved his head just a little, the devastation showing clearly in his gaze still before he let his arms dangle forward. He sniffed, remained quiet, and closed the notebook with the unfinished drawing. “I know he wouldn’t,” he said, his voice small, hurt, mixed with a small sob. “I know. But it's just… He has been all I had for most of my life. My family. I...” he paused. “I don't think I'll ever stop missing him.”

Thor nodded. “You won't,” he replied. “You'll bring him with you wherever you will be. And he'll look at you from Valhalla, or… From your Paradise, as you call it.” He saw his lower lip tremble. “He'll rejoice to see you living and remember him. And protect you from there.”

The man actually sobbed, even though he saw a tremulous smile on his face before he covered it with both his hands, folding slightly on himself. 

Almost complete silence stretched for a long, long time, more small hitching sounds reaching his ears. Then, they stopped entirely, his head returning to rise, his expression still a little broken, his cheeks flushed. 

He stared in front of him and Thor did the same, thinking that no more talk would have been raised out of them, that eventually, in a few minutes, like the other nights, one of them would have gotten up and announced the need to get back to bed. But the Captain’s voice filled his ears again. 

“Did it happen to you, too?” he asked, his voice still not too loud, but from the way it hit him, his question could have come out as a scream nonetheless. 

Thor—trying not to freeze again. Trying to ignore the images that immediately started replaying in his mind like a nightmare at open eyes, stabbing through it—made a small nod with his head, clearing his tight, dry throat. “He didn't die,” he said, voice low. Raspy. Strangled to an amount that its pitch broke in the middle of the second word. “But it feels like he did.”

“...What do you mean?” 

“My… My Brother,” he pursed his lips, seeing the surprise flash in his listener’s face as he looked at him, “He wasn’t like this before… I am aware that it’s hard to imagine, but this isn’t…” Thor looked up, his eyes burning like living flames, his chest paining him. “This isn't the Loki that I knew for centuries.”

Even though he didn't see it, still looking up, he heard—the silence being perceived oh so heavily all around him—as Steve Rogers’ mouth opened and closed before it opened again. 

“How was he, then?” he questioned, his voice soft. Softer than he perhaps expected, considering the subject of the conversation. 

As he returned to look at him, his shield brother's expression was just as soft. And it was kind enough that, even with his throat hurting, his heart beating loudly and unsteadily, and with his hands clenching frustratingly… the words started to pour out of him. 

“He was… observant.” He started, obligating himself to fidget with the cloth of his shirt to not just clench his fingers even more. “Sensible. Incredibly smart and curious, always busy trying to learn something new or noticing things that others didn’t, and often none of us even understood how he reached a similar conclusion in the first place,” a small pause. “He was great at strategies and much more interested in politics than in wars. Father used to bring us both to the Council even when we weren't of age yet, but while I found it a chore, he followed it like an active participant…” always being so frustrated at them when they returned, calling them names almost without any restraints.  

“He was stubborn and mischievous, his view of fun making him devious and bold, especially if bored, which wasn’t helped by how moody and whimsical he could be, but he was also much more reasonable and responsible than I was… even though he definitely had issues refusing bets.” He almost laughed at that. If he had, the sound would have been probably a little wet. “He could be mean and vengeful, his tongue vicious and poisonous in his rage, but he was also kind and affectionate. He adored entertaining, even though he had a tendency to be reserved and shy. Adored making people laugh, especially children. I…”  He shook his head. “I can recognize very little of my Brother in the person that appeared on Miðgarðr. The strategies, the viciousness, the vengefulness, and the poisonous rage? Aye. But that is all. The rest… I don’t see it. Or…” a frown settled on his face. “I can see echoes, but they are twisted.” 

Steve's eyes pondered on him with something inquisitive. No judgment. No harshness. Just a hint of confusion, as if he was trying to attach the Loki he had met to the one he had just described. Thor could see the sentiment expand and then vanish all at once. 

“What happened?” he asked. "How did he fall?”

He took a deep breath in. “We were having a fight.” His mouth and his hands twitched. “I had just returned to Asgarðr from my days of banishment, you see. He was… He had lied to me,” ‘He had tried to kill me.’ “ So I had been angry at him, but even then I could see that he was… Hurt and lashing out. He had just discovered being adopted. And not just… From another Æsir family, nay. He was a past enemy of Asgarðr’s kin. I didn't…” Thor sighed and grimaced. “I didn't even know why he was fighting me, why he was acting like that. Didn't really ask him. Should have asked.” 

He felt the saliva block itself inside his throat. “And then we… I broke the Bifrost and we were… We were sent flying. The open Void had been under us,  I was… Father was also there, he saved me. But Loki… Loki let go.” the words felt like poison in his mouth. He vaguely heard Steve's breath hitch under his own blood, rushing through his head in a sudden wave. “I wasn’t able to stop him.” He tried to stop his hands from trembling, glimpsing at the Captain’s widened stare. “He disappeared for a whole year after that.” 

“He tried to…” the man halted “Sorry, you said… The Void?”

“Aye. The vastness of space.”

“Oh,” he blinked. Seemed near to say something as he opened his mouth only to close it, clearly not knowing exactly what to say as a confused and horrified expression just left him staring silently for several seconds before inhaling and exhaling, his skin paler, his shoulder drooping as if the weight of gravity had suddenly increased upon him “I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this.” His expression twisted through several different, pained sentiments as his hand placed itself on his back before delicately rubbing on it as solace. “I am so sorry.”

Everything twisted inside him, the ache flaring, burning, killing his breath in his lungs. “I don't know how to mend this,” he said, his words returning to leave his mouth like a flooded river, his voice truly coming out all frayed. “I don't even know if I can.”

Steve remained silent for a moment. “Look, what he did… What he is still doing is very wrong,” he stated. Thor agreed wholeheartedly. “But if… Something definitely happened to him. He needs help. If he is still in there, somewhere… I think it's worth it to fight for it.”

********

The morning after, everything felt quiet. 

The eating—Thor had taken quite a liking to those pancakes that Lady Romanoff made when she wasn't immediately in the training grounds—was barely heard. 

The steps around the chambers, around the main rooms near the bar, upon and down the stairs were muted. 

The wind was lacking entirely, leaving a much more scorching sun, blazing upon a vivid blue sky. 

There was no chirping, no plane sound crossing above their heads, no sudden phone vibrating or ringing, no loud small talk about the first topic that jumped into mind. 

Even his thoughts could have easily been defined as peaceful, leaving his mind more empty than it had been in a while. 

But then, as some of them rose to their feet to clean the plates and the remaining looked at a previously rolled newspaper, Jarvis’ voice broke it entirely.

“Mister Stark is asking for all of your presence in the laboratory,” he said, his calm, limpid, cheerful voice trying and easily being able to share his good mood with each one of them. “He says that the Satellite has been finished.”

Chapter Text

It had taken him something akin to one day and four hours to get out completely from his frenzied, kind of hysterical and then utterly numb state—no sleep, no food, no anything, which he had regretted immensely later—that had stricken him after his meeting—if that could be really called a meeting—with Thor. 

The sudden, visceral need to leave the planet, to get the most amount of distance from him as possible—so, perhaps he would have stopped appearing in his mind with the same dark expression he had had while flying. Because far away from him? Far away from thoughts of him. Sure, it hadn’t worked on Sanctuary at all, but that had been an entirely different situation. It had lacked escapes of any kind. Being trapped into his own head between almost constant agony, regret and fear hadn't let him concentrate on much else—had then hit and helped him to snap out of it, bringing him first to have a meal, then a long, good sleep and then to return to the center of the city in the late evening of the day after, because he had more or less slept since then. He had got there to steal everything that had jumped into his mind and could have been useful. 

After returning, he had pushed himself to make a new Symbol of Chaos—always destined to end after two days, always to keep collecting seiðr, because even though it was in a better state now, it definitely wasn't enough—before sitting on his bed to proceed in new, quiet but kind of obsessive research. Because obsessing over things to plan and to do was ten times better than losing himself in dark thoughts that jumped in only to consume him little by little, bringing him to refuse to do anything else that wasn't staring at the wall, at the paintings, and at the creeping ivy. 

Hence, obsessive research. And questions crossed his head from time to time. One of the main ones that he had wasn't born by the book between his hands, but by the internet, which he had also checked in his stealing trip, even if not being noticed in the library this time had been so much harder than the time before, at least at first. 

He didn't understand why Miðgarðians occultists—Not the ones that weren't experts. Those could have been excluded, as they were ignorant of the material—called the Ancient Pathways ‘Ley Lines’. 

Power Lines would have made more sense. It sounded quite obnoxious, but it got straight to the point. 

Ley Lines didn't really land on anything. It felt more like a casual part of a long tongue twister, which he did not disapprove of, but still. It was out of context. 

‘Unironically out of line,’ Loki thought, sighing slightly as he followed the pattern with his index finger on the map. 

He moved his hand in an almost continuous movement on the main path, forming a long wave that grazed at destinations. He only briefly paused on those that were in the right exact spots. 

He started to slow down when he reached Mount Shasta, moving towards Nemiscau not hesitantly but just a little more carefully. At the Azores, he got even slower, and then he stopped definitively at Stonehenge. By going forward again, he would have ended up in Giza. 

Egypt was definitely at a far greater distance from Norway than England was. Even without Teletransporting—he always preferred to unwind and recuperate better, mostly through the mortals’ means of transport again, so as not to risk exhausting himself by Worldwalking once he got to his target—he did not intend to get through more roads than necessary. 

He had to compromise. It made him feel quite annoyed to get back to another airport when he was so used to blink, pull, and be right at the place he had wanted to reach, but it was a necessity that he couldn’t ignore. It was better for his seiðr, for his body's state—which wasn't at its worst anymore but definitely wasn't at its best—and it was definitely preferable for the start of his stay in Vanaheim, long or short as it was going to be—maybe long enough to complete his recovery, this time. He wouldn’t have made any bet on it, though. It was more of a hope. A hope that was based on how vexed the Norns were by his excessively prolonged, almost serenity during his existence. 

He closed the Geography book and made it disappear into his Pocket Dimension, then rose on his feet silently and started to do the same thing with all the books he had—even the new stolen ones. There were seven, one of which was about Norse Mythology. He was honestly pretty curious about it. His interest was especially piqued by the fact that he had ended up questioning himself if they still told the stories that he, ages before, had casually invented out of nowhere, mostly to amuse himself with the reactions as he told them—with the quire and consequently, once he reached the kitchen, with most of the provisions he had, keeping only the portions for that day and those few after, as he intended to start leaving at the exact hour the Symbol's effect ended. 

So, on the counter remained a package of Cauliflower soup, which he wasn't a fan of, but considering that it could have been worse—he had eaten much worse things. Just thinking about them made his stomach churn, and the expression on his face bent in visible disgust—he wasn’t going to complain, nor have it go to waste, putting it on the flame in the blink of an eye. 

He missed solid food, nonetheless—Wild boar's meat especially. From the smell crossing his nostrils as it was placed on the center of the table, to the consistency of it under his teeth as he chewed, to the sentiment of being utterly fulfilled once the meal was done—and he was already planning to start with the lighter ones at the start of the new week, attempting instead to pass to the heavy, regular stuff at the beginning of Sólmánuður’s month. 

It seemed like a good choice. He could only hope that it would be enough—It surely would not if he had started avoiding the consumption of it every time he didn't feel like moving, when he felt too much, or had a lack of… everything. He could not starve himself anymore. Even if he had to obligate himself, he had to feed himself. No matter how useless the action felt, considering everything that was going on and the fact that more often than not, he tried to calculate which death he could give to himself that would be the least painful. 

Loki gulped down the prepared soup, then waited just enough time to have an extremely drawn out, extremely hedonistic time in the bathroom between the most sweet-scented soap—black raspberry and vanilla—the most big shiny bubbles surrounding him like sheep's wool and some yellow rose petals that he had also stolen at the market out of impulses and not actual need. All to let out the stress as much as he could in the lukewarm water until his limbs felt all soft, every stretching movement resulting in quite a lazy.

During it, he also forcefully ignored sudden thoughts of attempting to drown, which jumped in just a couple of times… and how the ruined skin on his back itched terribly against the acrylic surface of the tub—he felt as if moving slightly would have opened the scars and the burned parts all over again—because only evaluating a tingling there would have made him revisit how the burns and the scarring had happened. How they had given them to him. It was enough to make him perceive his hair rising and the boiling, scorching metal pressing against the center of his spine, even if there was nothing there. So, yes, he kept ignoring and pushing everything bad down until even the sensation was vanishing into the transparent liquid, and he just felt like he was going to fall asleep. 

When Loki was finished, he dried himself up, got dressed in the lightest clothes he had available—they smelled like home, a part of his mind whispered, and he had to push down the sudden thought as well, gritting his teeth just a little—and fixed his hair as the best as he could since curls dominated all of them in a way that he found quite displeasing.

He had a particularly intense fight with his ruined braids, which he undid and plaited again until he almost felt satisfied—they didn’t feel entirely right.

And then he waited. He waited for the sun to fall, to meet the horizon, and let the moon rise. He waited, controlling a few times that he hadn't forgotten anything. He waited, starting to throw down some of the barriers he had barred the house with—the illusion regarding the state of the door being the first one—and repeating mentally the plan parts that he had to cover. He waited, thinking about Vanaheim as a whole to already have an idea where to hide and the places to avoid at all costs. 

Between all that waiting, he didn't even realize it when his eyes started to feel heavy, having him fall asleep all curled up on the couch; his arms closing around his shoulders, his face pressing down against the cushion.

********

He perhaps should have made the Symbol of Chaos keep going for only one day, not for two. Because, of course, the second day had been incredibly boring—his attention span being the lowest he ever had out of the tension of leaving again. To have to be truly on the run again until he Worldwalked and hidden well enough to not be bothered by any of the Vanir, the Halflings, or the Skraelings—and of course, the immediate plane to reach London in Bodø’s airport had been very much delayed due to England's terrible weather conditions. Between heavy rain, fog, and strong wind, the pilot had just set back the aviation for a whole hour. 

Absolutely marvelous. He couldn’t ask for better, truly.

But excluding such an annoying detail, he felt somehow luckier, mostly because of three reasons. 

The first was that the Airport was smaller and less frequented by tourists, definitely the opposite of the one in Queens. There must have been twenty, perhaps thirty humans walking around in it, for how much he had seen it.

The second was that no one was around him at all as he sat in the room with the screens and all the destinations. There was a family in it, too, but they were near the bathrooms and they were very quiet, discussing casually about getting to Oslo and then to Bargen to start a cruising experience that they had apparently hampered because of work for years. 

The third was that, really, he was quite fine right there and then. He wasn't tired. He didn't have a headache pounding against his skull as if someone had been repeatedly slamming a weapon against it or squeezing it like a grape. His body didn't feel like it was going to drop him from one second to another, only the adrenaline barely holding him up. 

He felt alright. Almost peaceful. And he truly wanted to stay in such a way. Truly wanted to keep the feeling near as long as he could, even if that meant staring at human technology and at the roof like they were the most important and beautiful things in the whole universe—Definitely not. They weren't. The ceiling was honestly quite ugly for his personal taste in its grayish, square tiles, a rectangular blue window appearing at the center of it. And the screens weren’t something extremely innovative. He had seen some looking much better.

Therefore, he was luckier… at least in that. 

If the plane he had to get on was not delayed again—or worse, canceled—perhaps he could have been even luckier. 

Patience was a virtue of his only when he had to learn subjects he was interested in—to let his abilities develop and officially bloom as he wished them to—not when he had to postpone purposefully a goal of his, wasting time to no apparent end. 

But no, evidently, feeling better was way too much luck in his personal scale. In fact, after the end of the extra hour, the plane ended up being delayed again. Not once, but twice, another hour the first, thirty minutes the second—the latter having him feel positively vexed to an insane amount, to the point that he almost got up and called it a day, resisting by starting to read a book, one of the fantasy novels that he had picked up for the weird title on the cover—before actually being in flight towards the town’s direction, to which he had silently thanked the universe, raised his eyes to the surface above him and sighed slightly—not being heard by anyone anyway as the family had already left and the couple that had appeared was too occupied discussing about money to care about anything else. 

Biding his time for it to land, reading some more, and acting like he wasn’t ready to just sprint forward, turned out to be slightly complicated. But reaching the aircraft as it arrived, in the end, had been one of the most unchallenging things he had done lately, as he knew perfectly where to go, having learned in between the first and the second delay, in which he had roamed around and studied the fastest course to take.

The VIP seats were still way too soft, though, when he sat on one of them… and then on another one to perceive any kind of difference. They made him feel like he was going to sink into them and disappear between the pillows. Not even getting into a rigid, unflattering position helped—He wasn’t sure if it was just a problem of his, being too used to hard surfaces to adapt again to very, very soft ones… or if they truly were uncomfortable—but in the end it didn't matter. 

What mattered was that, after a very agitated, shaky flight—new aggressive, intense currents pushing the craft around like a toy, making him look up and sharpen his senses to perceive anything in the rain, finding nothing—when he made it to London, the alright state of his had gone entirely to Hel, the tiredness slamming in again and making it quite hard to just move more. 

Especially thinking about reaching Stonehenge with more hours of travel felt like torment. So Loki reached the first clearly abandoned house he could find—everything on its looks, from the dirty walls to the broken gate called it out—not even needing to enter through a smashed window by turning into a magpie very shortly as new fog returned to cover everything around him, making it hard to see the stairs in front of the decrepit building. 

Just like he had done in the cottage, when he was inside, he cleaned a casual room and remained there. He did not even truly care about how the ceiling looked, so rotten that the ruined palings were the only things that remained of it… or that the chandelier was hanging down by a single gray—thick enough not to break—wire, almost touching the woody floor. He just got on his one-night bed and added a new barrier around the place. 

Between one slow, heavy blink and another, he woke up panting to an old mirror and to a light bulb suddenly exploding loudly—his seiðr had done that. Loki could feel it in the air—his face dominating his mind entirely like a curse, his heart thumping so intensely in response to it—so strong and fast in its unsteady rhythm—that he almost thought it was going to exit from his chest and land on the floor. 

And as if it wasn't enough, his blood felt as if it was all still and heavy in his veins, provoking a shiver that ran down his entire backside in the most unsettling way possible—reaching even the fingertips of his feet—adding a terrible sensation that started to pool inside his guts and that he couldn't truly define. It almost felt like a disease, but not quite. 

He got up, inhaling and exhaling deeply until he felt slightly better—his heart still hammering in his chest—focusing on his goal with everything he had. 

********

Getting on the bus that would have brought him from Central London to Stonehenge turned out to be a bit of a war. 

There were too many passengers, too many Miðgarðians who crowded onto it, rudely pushing through others, making the large but apparently not spacious enough means of transport feel terribly cramped and suffocating, almost claustrophobically packed, as the second floor was full as well. 

He ended up standing in a corner near the driver, his back pressing against the metal, his hand grasping at the pole as his eyes never left the road, his ears at first picking up casual conversations—the weather looking good, Windsor’s Castle, the historical facts regarding Salisbury’s Cathedral’s clock—and hearing the loud, screeching cries of a babe—destroying many eardrums in between. He could tell by some of their tones that many mortals were grimacing in annoyance—that the parents kept trying to silence somehow, the father sounding more upset the more the mother—tense and just as upset—attempted in vain. They were so close to actually having a fight over it.

But as the shuttle moved more and more on the asphalt, the sounds around him almost seemed to trail off—to disappear even—at a certain point. 

There was just him, his almost steady heartbeat, his thoughts about the map showing between a young woman’s hands, the strength that he had to use to not risk falling at the fast, sudden, brainless movements of the driver, especially when he had to hit the brakes. He felt them each time to a ridiculous amount, just like the clock ticking the time away so slowly that it almost seemed not to move at all. For the rest, he almost did not perceive them to exist at all, a caging bubble isolating him from them. 

…Until it did. Until everything halted at once, crashing down on him, all his hair outwardly rising at unison and something above him—that he couldn't see but he could still perceive perfectly, right in the atmosphere—seeming to break and shift, emptying his lungs as if someone had aggressively carved the oxygen out of them, leaving him almost gasping, a chill running down his spine as all the blood rushed towards his head. 

'Someone is here,' his mind whispered with the slightest hint of panic lapping at it. Panic that he tried to force himself to push down until it just felt like irritation, resulting in a miserably fruitless effort as he failed over and over. ‘Who is it?’

He moved forward towards the glass. Peered—his nerves frying, his heart feeling like a fluttering, trapped butterfly that kept trying to get out without results, his head feeling way too light—at the transparent surface, seeing very little for way too long, almost doubting his senses for a second or two.

But then an enormous dark shape erupted through the white puffy clouds, having him freeze in place, his eyes widening as his throat felt suddenly way too sickeningly dry, as if he hadn't drunk in days, which didn't make a lick of sense. He had done nothing but drink during them. 

The ship above his head wasn’t one that he recognized. It was long, almost triangular, and of a metallic light gray, the center of it showing a big circular hole with a thick layer just a little under that definitely had to be the main entrance—and exit for whoever was inside it. 

Just by looking, he could tell that there were going to be a lot of people up there. And all of them just for him. Which, hey, on a good day wouldn't have been that terrible, but… fighting all of them now? Now that he was so near to leaving the planet entirely? 

Absolutely not. 

Loki called on his seiðr—feeling it move into him just as nervously by perceiving the danger—then, forcing himself to focus forward—as much forward as he could handle without an open portal to push himself with—he Teletransported without thinking twice about it, not letting any questions rise either.

********

He ended up surrounded by woods, mostly made out of massive beech trees. He could already sense the muted energy of the Passage painting the air, several mellifluous voices calling out to him, whispering softly into his ears.

He started to run towards their direction, his body quickly shifting in between the action: his legs bones getting slightly shorter, his hands turning into paws, his fingers turning into claws, his ears changing shape, a slim tail and some dark fur slipping out from his skin as his skull flattened—his brain moving and making him see only white for a moment or two—and all his teeth became long and razor-sharp, some more than others. 

His sight and hearing had changed drastically. Lights and colors, as well as the insects flying, looked different. The buzzing was incredibly loud around him, and the small pieces of wood snapped under his weight with a cracking, vibrating noise that almost made him wince as it echoed inside his ears. The foliage rustled at every contact. And an alteration took his sense of smell as well, the concert of odors hitting in full force, almost stunning him a little.

Before he even knew it, though, he was running on all four, speeding through weeds, some rocks, and flowers with all his might, feeling his heart going faster and faster as well, thundering in it always a little louder as he just gave everything he had to run even faster. 

He was almost there. The voices weren't hard to follow, especially since the more he ran, the more demanding and resonant they got. They told him exactly how and where to move, instilling in him trust, a willingness to let them lead, and a desire to reach out to them. 

It was easy to let them. They were pure, friendly, and welcoming. But instead of being only a temptation—the Casket's voices begging him to be touched in the Vault; to be stolen away, which he had consequently done without thinking too much about it; to be used, even now, which he forced into silence because he refused to hold it even for a second, refused to give it another thought, refused to accept the effect it had on him—they meant safety, at least for now. 

But as he proceeded forward even more, following the trail by moving left and right and left and right again, feeling his joints starting to ache just a little like every time he attempted to push himself too hard, the above returned to splinter, to open upon his head, making him feel as if the time was stopping again, just like the muscle in his chest, which lost a beat. 

A new wave of anxiety and confusion just drowned his mind, reaching every single inch of his body as well, making him perceive himself as much clumsier than he was supposed to be in a similar form. And the questions that he had pushed away attacked him in full force. 

He was invisible! He hadn't dropped the enchantment since the moment he had left the house in London! How did they reach him? How were they following him? 

Were they following his energy? Or did they have a Witch on board that magically searched for him through something of his, like his chains, his handcuffs, his blood, some strands of his hair, his… No.  He had hidden from any of those by covering himself from Heimdallr's sight in the first place. So, no. 

How, then? They definitely had a way of some sort, but removing each one of those that he had personally blocked, he couldn't pinpoint any manner of tracking that they could have taken advantage of. 

His brain attempted to quickly form more hypotheses on the matter, but thinking too much almost made him slip while running. The wet ground definitely did not help. 

So he promised himself to bring the questioning to an eventual later, to focus more on where he was placing his paws, his claws leaving thick furrows in the dirt, some cleavers slamming against his legs as he advanced. 

He almost looked up for a moment, but ended up avoiding the gesture to run even faster, seeing the end of the trees in the distance, which was… not great for him. Because the only proper defense he had from that ship, at the moment, was the trees. 

But the voices kept talking to him. They weren't loud enough to convince him that he was going to arrive at his destination yet. Still, they wanted him to go there, to move more, to just give all he got from the first to the last drop of energy that he possessed, because just a little more, and he would have just needed to pull to be safe. 

Just a bit more. 

He couldn't give up. He refused to let them have him. 

He couldn't Teletransport either, though. No matter how much he desperately desired to. If he had, after Worldwalking, he would have been way too exhausted, way too easy to catch and put behind bars. 

The people of Vanaheim would have taken way too little to identify him and to contact Asgarðr. He might have been able to escape before any of them reached him, but that would have definitely taken away another place to hide in. If he had been able to run off again. Which depended a lot on his state, on his restraints, on Freyja, Freyr, and Njörðr's attitudes towards him… and on how fast the Guards would have taken to get there. How fast whoever was on the ship above him would have taken to reach him, too. 

He shook his head and attempted accelerating even more, aiming straight ahead—his entire body starting to scream at him so much that between one movement and another he almost feared something along his muscles or bones just breaking apart, having him collapse on himself like a castle of cards shook to its foundation by the wind—but, even without trying to look backwards, he felt something change in the air. 

Something was quivering upon him, pulsing so strongly that he, even not having a single full thesis—just a few ideas immediately rising through his thoughts—about what it could be, instinctively jumped and rolled at his left long enough to create a standing, still running clone of himself in his momentary form and to also feel his head spinning, being—as he saw luckily through the view of the other him—completely out of the targeting diameter. 

He had just avoided a large blue absorbing ray. A ray that had uprooted several of the trees around him from the ground, making them disappear. He would have thought that they had never existed if it hadn’t been for the enormous hole that had developed on the ground, showing the empty places that were supposed to be filled with roots. 

Half of him—while getting up on a stable way to restart running, followed by his clone—shuddered at the idea of being abducted so quickly in such a way. 

The other half, instead, started to feel very annoyed. And annoyance turned into anger. And anger turned into pure pettiness. 

Just the feeling made him want to stop running to throw raw energy at the engine of their ship and look at them plummet and crash against the ground, provoking an explosion. 

Alright, maybe not to truly stop running, but to create more clones and hit the craft while he kept moving, definitely. And the more the idea rolled inside his thoughts, the more his pettiness truly pushed him to want to do it, even if it meant wasting seiðr for it. But only after reaching the end of the woods, having a clear view of where exactly he had to make them hit. 

So, his paws returned to a decent, stable, fast racing, just advancing to cover the last empty space, the rest of his senses preparing for a second vibration. Which his second version saw as a blue light that started to form, the pulsing returning once more. 

He avoided it more or less in the same manner, the third copy appearing as he got up again, more plants and ground vanishing in between, the end of the woods being so near that he could see the last line without having his animalistic view focus even slightly. 

He covered that space in less than ten seconds, forcing his pained muscles to push again, acting as if the pain did not exist at all. And when he got there, the landscape opened up entirely in front of him. 

He could only see boundless plain ground and the far-away standing stones for a moment, overwhelmed by the sight. Then, as he just kept going in his run, he returned to direct part of his mind into his copies, Shapeshifting them back into his main form. And he looked. 

He looked much better at the massive ship that he had had above his head, when before he had just glanced at it… only to realize with slight horror that… It actually looked different from the ship he had seen through the window of the bus. 

It was similar in shape and size, but it was slightly darker in its gray and with some weird, small white stripes on the extreme corners of the motors. 

Which meant he was being followed not by one but by two ships, which could have belonged to the same group of people, just like it could have belonged entirely to a different one. Still, the result was the same. Many hunters and… A possible trap. 

Exactly at the moment the thought crossed his mind, the second ship started to get down and break through the atmosphere—at least, this time it was the same one that had been before, having him be right in the middle of the two. Trapped in between as they got slower just enough to let him know they were there and that they would have simply followed him if he had run more—he wouldn't have reached the monoliths and the passage in time. 

He immediately made the other two of him obtain seiðr to shoot at both, only for the raw green energy to slam against thick barriers composed of a series of adjacent, transparent hexagons. 

‘Hexagons that probably disappear at least a little when the ship sends the ray down,’ he thought, preparing his copies with more seiðr, while he, instead—turning back to his Æsir's skin in the blink of an eye, his bones changing all over again, his sight, hearing and smelling switching back to normalcy—created a shield made out of three layers. One of resistance, solid and stable, one like a cushion, malleable enough to reduce possible damage, and the last one… perfect to bounce back anything that it could have been hit with. 

As he finished the third layer, he already felt the pulsing starting again, this time from the second ship, while the first… Loki was pretty sure that it was waiting—which would have meant the two ships were allies, if not the same group—or recharging to attempt its ray—enemies or rivals, in such a case, but he somehow doubted it—because nothing was happening on their front. 

He saw the blue light shining above, and his breath hitched, stopped in his lungs as he just inhaled and prepared himself psychologically, knives appearing through his fingers in case the worst scenario happened, still moving forward, even if less fast, to possibly avoid the hit in the first place. 

But the ray vibrated even more and simply went down on the shield, fast like lightning. And, even if he felt his defenses tremble aggressively—the seiðr of which it was composed almost singing inside his ears—it got drastically repelled. Just like a flattened spring jumping into motion, the shield had it return exactly where it came from. 

The absorbing ray crashed into their defenses so quickly and intensely that he saw them shake in place, slightly bending backwards. They also almost looked ready to break, some of the shapes flickering unsteadily, a loud booming noise echoing in the air accompanying it. 

A few moments of pause passed, moments in which he started to move once again, transforming one of the two clones into a magpie and sending it flying up, perfectly in between the two ships, waiting for a new pulsing… Assisting how the round entrance of both of them started to open instead, in a gradual, fast way. 

Just a second after it opened, showing very little of what was inside, several people exited it together. And they started to get down incredibly fast as well, flying towards him thanks to jetpacks and getting more and more visible: Their figures were all so different… but they were all clearly dressed up with a very specific jacket that he had already seen before during some of his past, personal, secret journeys. 

Ravagers. 

The Mad Titan hadn't called only some of his allies to catch him as he had expected. He had literally put a bounty—which he doubted he was truly going to pay, as he saw death as the best treasure of all and gave very little importance to gold—on his head to have bounty-hunters and thieves doing literally everything they could to bring him back to Sanctuary. 

His hands started twitching against the weapons, something similar to a scream pressing against his throat as his heart returned to feel like a trapped thing. He called back the bird-clone—having it land in its man form on someone's back before just snapping the person's neck—while evoking more and removing the Invisibility Spell as clearly it was useless anyway, for whatever reason that he couldn't comprehend. There was something in him that they were tracking even without inner powers. Perhaps they were using some type of technology that they had personally developed and that worked perfectly even through his concealing spells. 

As the first attacker flew towards them, his aim moved from copy to copy, almost to search or to understand which one was the real him—which meant that he wasn’t certain in this regard?... Interesting. They perhaps knew his position, maybe in a general manner, maybe on the ship itself, too, but not out of it?—he made the copy at the center of the group send a vicious knife right through his head. And hit the one just behind personally by sending a wave of seiðr that smacked right against his chest, his body falling just as another copy went through another throat, one of those that was covering his back—shield of protection or not, he didn't intend to have any blind spots. Not even the smallest, most hidden one possible. Just the idea felt like asking for wounds. He honestly had had enough of them and didn't intend to add more to his collection. In his thousand years of life, he had never received so many of them as in the last one, truly. 

His mind ordering attacks around him and his own real self forcing itself into action, he kept adding more people to his body count as he could, only seeing more Ravagers leaving the ships in waves, making it very, very complicated to even simply have an idea about how many they were. That simple space of lowland was getting way too crowded and in a way that would have made that bus he had been on feel almost empty. 

If their technique was in the numbers, to tire him to the point of complete exhaustion…Even if he didn't like the idea one bit, they perhaps were going to have a possibility of victory. Not without a big amount of corpses and blood painting the grass under them, but still.

And as if it wasn't enough, he could sense three energies rolling in the air, excluding the one of the Passages. The first was normal, not too powerful but not weak either. The second was dangerous and completely rotten, to the point that just feeling it, even far away, made his stomach clench. The third was way too familiar and just sensing it sent his heart into a frantic, unstable rhythm, all his hair standing on end.

Chapter Text

He could actually say, drastically, honestly to God, head high in brazen confidence, that everything was going in complete, pure shit. The way only apparent, easy-peasy things could go. They drew people in with their fake plainness just to hit them right in the face before laughing out loud and leaving, middle fingers high for everyone to see. 

Defeating the short-tempered—clearly insane. As Bruce had said before, a bag of cats—homicidal Alien diva hadn't really been easy, but he hadn't expected it to be. 

Throwing the damn Nuke—such a pretty, thoughtful present by the World Security Council—in a space Portal had definitely been a risk, but he had expected that to be as such, too—not dying, after the terrifying view of the fleet appearing right in front of his eyes while his consciousness had been fading way too quickly, had been a surprise. Just like the weird, astonishing, uncomfortable fear that kept making him wake up with an agitated gasp, the air lacking inside his lungs, everything in him screaming danger even though there was none of it, except the hazard he himself could be. It wasn't as bad as the first few months after Afghanistan. It could have been much worse, all things considered. Still, the feeling repeating itself over and over was enough to make him feel a itty-bit hysterical.

Capturing the psychopath after he had been pounded against the floor like a guitar thrown around by an angry musician having a fit, well, should have been easy. A small job. A two-second, blink-and-you-miss-it kind of experience. Him free, him behind bars. End. Post-credit scene, roll of the red curtains, the applause as they all bowed to receive it. Hurray for the saviors of the planet. 

But it hadn’t fucking been like that. Tony honestly had no idea how the hell Rock of Ages had found the strength to get on his feet again in the first place. He had even less of an idea about how he had been capable of flying away, disappearing thanks to his weird, shady magic mojo, ending up who knows where. He should have folded like paper, but of course not—The ‘Hierba mala nunca muere’ proverb still worked, against anyone's wishes. 

Finding him should have been easy as well, after the sudden idea of creating SPACEY. Especially so by considering that the experimental Satellite was made out not only with perfected gold-titanium alloy… but also with melted alien-steel. It had been taken out from a singular anti-magic handcuff that Point Break had graciously given to him and Brucie Bear after the project had started moving forward from the simple pinballing of ideas left and right.

“My Brother can hide even from our Gatekeeper, who is gifted with the talent of sight on anyth… Almost anything,” he had said, quickly correcting himself, a frown so heavy on his brow that it had looked like it was going to be carved on it forever… And also being so near to pouting that he had looked like a kicked puppy. A big, muscular, fluffy Labrador puppy that had been booted pretty harshly. Only the view had made him feel a little bad for the guy, even though he probably would have never admitted it out loud. “This steel, liquid or solid, is enveloped by Runes. It might get through cloaking enchantments that might confuse your Space Eye. I don't have another pair, so I will give you only one of the two.” 

At that, they nodded and thanked him. And Tony had mentally named the new programmed creation SPACEY, all attached, removing the two extra E's, because it was funny, catchy, and useful enough as it was.

So, the Satellite was supposed first to diminish the search field through body warmth, then through added DNA, also removing whatever voodoo practice that protected the Evil Warlord from possibly being hidden from it, but still no. Not easy at all. 

After what had felt like years and a couple of days at most at the same time—while the others Avengers had been on the hunt because of the fake appearances around America—following the study of several samples of Dark, Tall and Insane’s blood taken from the hole that had been present in his favorite floor—which JARVIS had finished fixing, while DUM-E had perfectioned Mark VII, also adding some features under his strict surveillance. All of this while he had smoothed out some of the first pieces of the antennas—Brucey had noticed an anomaly. 

He had called him out, looking extremely weirded out and at the same time slightly fascinated. Once the screen had been rolled towards him, Tony had understood and shared the reaction almost immediately.

The DNA had been clearly incomplete, almost broken, the genes lacking parts like a puzzle, mostly at its center. They had been shaped differently, but at the same time, similarly to that of a human. It had looked as if there had been an intertwined middle party, but the said party had been missing entirely. No matter how much they had looked for it, staring at new samples—which they had quickly taken from the ruined, abandoned house's floor on the same day of the discovery—the third layer hadn't been present. 

There had also been parts that he had no idea what they were. Neither did Bruce. And something a bit more… Not alarming… or maybe a bit, but whatever. He had had and still had no intention to worry about the Psycho Killer for any type of reason.

It was just something unexpected. That was it. 

The glucose, the hematocrit, and the hemoglobin levels had been so low to almost be nonexistent, with also imbalances in phosphorus, potassium, and so many other parts that were supposed to be there but weren't, with also a lot of ketone bodies and… small metal cells, definitely alive. They changed color from time to time, passing from metallic dark green to a shiny purple and pitch black, pulsing weirdly. If poked, some kind of thick yellow-greenish pus came out of them and small, sharp, thorned branches raised almost aggressively, making them look like minuscules, a bit revolting, but definitely intriguing hedgedogs—Which, in complete delicacy, almost candidly, had made him spit out a choked “What the fuck?” when it had happened.

The view had made both of them pause. It had taken them a lot before they had exchanged a look and half shrugged it off simply as “Alien blood,” saying it together in a murmur, even though Tony still hadn’t been sure about what to feel in its regard—except for curiosity and disgust. That had been clear enough. 

“Different parameters. Different structure.” Brucie Bear had added after a bit, his face assuming the expression that he had personally started calling the ‘LIT look’, lost-in-thoughts, his hand moving towards his glasses. 

After that, new, never-ending pinballings of ideas had happened. They mostly had been there to have them understand how and if they were able to get the remaining fraction of DNA. But they had seemed to go in circles, often repeating phrases or actions only to become a little annoyed. And they had ended up staring exhaustedly at the pictures of the Reindeer until they had chosen to go to bed.

He had eventually woken up—alarm, fear, shivers, the empty nothing chilling his blood and his bones, the picture of the enormous army still branded into his brain, almost making him shake in place between raspy wheezes—and returned to the lab with almost mechanical movements. He could have gotten there easily, even with his eyes closed, which was a very helpful thing when he was so hammered that he couldn't distinguish shit. 

He had focused on the screen once again with a heavy, tiresome sigh, trying to ignore the insistent thoughts that had peeked through his head like unwanted guests. The type who just waltzed through the door, acting like they owned the place, and then started to be all unnerved when he did everything he could to get them to leave. 

Brucey had joined him a little later with a White Coffee, a Cappuccino, and a couple of plates full of Waffles covered in brown sugar butter syrup, which he had placed on one of the corners of the table, far away from anything of importance. And while munching on the food, staring more at the pictures that showered Alien Hitler in vibrant blue, something had finally hit and snapped into place—Maybe out of nowhere. Or maybe it had always been there, around his head, but his tiredness had hidden it from him before. He still couldn't say.

“His magic is inside his blood. That is what is missing. Remember? It's his innate power source. The thing that makes him himself. And what else makes him himself? DNA,” he had ended up saying, Thor's words jumping in and coming out from his mouth in a really fast rattling—As if the idea was going to exit his brain if he had not allowed them to get out quickly enough—almost slapping himself right in the face out of frustration. He should have gotten there much earlier. He could have. “And what is power? Of course it’s energy! Energy was in the Tesseract and in the Scepter, after all. And a concentration of energy is inside Loki all the time… And of course it crosses his blood but doesn't leave him when the blood gets out, or he would probably lose part of his mumbo-jumbo every time he bleeds.” 

Bruce’s face had shown that he was completely agreeing even before he had opened his mouth to talk. “So if we get the scans of his registrations in the Cage and we put them in the analyzer, we can find the pattern of the energy waves. And if we have them coincide in the empty spaces of the DNA…” 

“We can insert the full analysis into the Satellite when it's finished.” Tony had completed and was already starting to open the analyzer without thinking twice about it. 

“It can work.” The Doctor had gotten slightly nearer to him, looking almost in a good mood for a moment, but then, in a single beat, his face had darkened visibly. “We won't let it fall into SHIELD’s hands, won't we?”

That had made him pause just for a second or two. “Not even if they pay me. Or seduce me. Or both,” he had replied, shrugging, sounding completely nonchalant, as if the thing didn’t touch him in the slightest, even though he had seen him eye to eye on the matter. Who knew what they were going to do if magical Alien Blood had ended up in their hands? It surely wouldn't have stopped at casual studies.

He didn't dislike the one-eyed pirate—even though he could be very annoying sometimes, but who wasn't?—nor had any real feud with the Spies, but he trusted them all as long as he could throw them. Without Mark VII. Which wasn't much—another thing he would have never admitted out loud. 

Leaving both the Cube and the Glowing Stick of Destiny to them had felt incredibly wrong, but he had thought that a building full of Agents would have helped keep them away from the enemy, so he had reluctantly accepted—They all had very, very reluctantly accepted. The fact that even the two SHIELD Agents on their team had been on the same boat regarding that hadn't been reassuring at all. 

“You have enough money and enough way around with women that it wouldn't matter anyway with those conditions, Tony.”

“Exactly. They cannot buy me. What else can they do?” 

“...Revoke our Avengers status as a threat?” he had raised an eyebrow, with just the slightest hint of a tired smile on his face. 

He could have started laughing loudly at that. But he had ended up only snorting a little, vividly amused. They could have totally done that, alright. But it would have been drastically stupid for a group that was supposed to be focused on intelligence.

“If they do, they can save their own asses as much as they please when the next big bad lands on Earth.”

Bruce had made a face, but no comment regarding the ‘when’ instead of the ‘if’ in his answer exited his mouth. He had just shot him a small look that had seemed to talk a whole lot—he had blatantly ignored it, refusing to care about it—before quietly focusing again on the analyzer that had found the main pattern between a complete chaos of data—that he still had JARVIS make a full file of, just in case—scanned it and then cracked the case in less than ten minutes—One versus Zero for science against the very illogical chaos that occultism was. And Tony had totally enjoyed the win. He had even fist-pumped. 

He and Brucie Bear had still stared a bit too long at the full cells once they had completed themselves on the screen. They had started moving in an almost hypnotizing way, a multicolored light radiating inside them. They had also, almost casually, checked again all the blood values registered—The ketone bodies had started to slowly vanish in contact with the energy. The metallic hedgedogs did not. 

He had supposed that it was going to get easy right there, as he had returned to work on the antennas. It should have gotten really easy from his point of view. Even with the Scepter getting stolen—fuck. Oh, that sucked so bad. It was surely going to bite them all in the ass. He had thrown in all the curse words he had known when Robin Scherbatsky’s lookalike had arrived to share the news, inviting them to follow her—he had wanted it to become easy somehow.

And when SPACEY had been done and got sent into its new home, totally on its own—They had made it responsible for reaching and stopping at the destination they had selected—his hope had flared. The fact that it had been quickly tested after that, and the fact that it had worked like a charm, sharing the exact coordinates, had helped even more—Tony had analyzed his own blood and inserted his higher and lower limits of body temperature, choosing to leave the Tower and get wherever he wanted with a time limit of thirty minutes. He had simply given Rhodey a visit, as he had just returned from his mission in China. He had scared the soul out of him by popping in his parlour, having him act all cranky and visibly pissed before Tony had offered a peace treaty with a couple of doughnuts that he had grabbed on his way, since he had already imagined such a scenario. Rhodes was always more cranky when awakened from his beauty sleep. 

But when it had been the Defenestrator’s turn to be located, the easy-peasiness of it had shown its true colors.

First, two places had come out instead of one on the screen through a short, empty, bulleted list that had been loading, which had already been a terrible sign. And then, second, as they had scrambled to prepare themselves to check on both, just in case—Cap dividing them in two groups quickly with clear instructions, while JARVIS had started to write everything down, also downloading data as fast as possible—every light, every screen, every single AI and the elevators had gone out without any type of warning. And no matter how much he had tried to fix the issue, from going all the way down to the energy source to attempting to send the emergency system into working—and to the emergency of the emergency system—it just kept shutting down. Just like what had happened to SHIELD.

The only luck was that he had the emergency of the emergency of the emergency system, the EMEMEM; an anti-virus that had been completely detached from anything connected when the highly destructive virus had been sent to his technology, passing through the defenses. But the EMEMEM would have only activated lights, the elevator, and the Quinjet in its main functions at the moment of its use. And they only had available the coordinate numbers of one destination—Natashlie remembered it perfectly, which was great, because he had been more focused on trying to fix the Tower, JARVIS, and everything else to mind them—instead of the two that they were supposed to follow. No true information about them at all. No possible preparation. Nothing.

So, yes. Pure shit already. He totally needed a drink. One of those that wrecked him completely, to stop the incessant, particularly loud, internal cursing that turned into screaming more often than not.

They could only hope it was the right one, but by how easily things turned around lately, he doubted it immensely. Especially because by the time they got there, the Psycho might have already left—Or he might have never been there at all. 

Getting on the Quinjet, Tony felt more annoyed than determined. An annoyance that enveloped him fully, but that, no matter how strong, couldn’t stop him from thinking. 

It was suspicious. The timing was oh-so suspicious. Because it was very, very anomalous and weird that just after activating SPACEY to find Loki, the virus had hit out of nowhere… Like he had somehow known. Like someone had told him. Or said unknown someone had just decided on their own to block them from finding him.

Except for the Avengers and SHIELD, nobody knew about the project. Nor anyone had known about the Scepter and the Tesseract being in the heart of the Spies’ base. Those two facts just fully, heavily stank of betrayal. 

From who exactly, he had no idea yet.

********

They all stepped into the Cottage quietly—even Legolas entered, because hiding on the roof or just outside to see if the bastard exited the building carefully to escape them was stupid to consider at this point. If he could teleport whenever he pleased, there was no need at all to even attempt it—to be as least noticeable as possible, as carefully as possible, to not make any noise, as if something was going to explode the moment they attempted to. But nothing happened, and in the open space of the ground floor, there was no one. Only furniture, plants, paintings, and a piano. 

After Steve made quick, quiet, clear gestures to subdivide the checking of every possible point of the house—person, direction. Eyes meeting and small nods after the message was received, almost to say count on you, call if in need without actually opening his mouth—Tony had ended up flying towards the room that had been silently assigned to him, trying not to grimace at how the door creaked just by pushing it forward and entering—he doubted it immensely, but had Rock of Ages been there, he would probably have heard the sound that very instant and left just as fast. 

It was a simple, empty bedroom that had almost nothing in it. There were two stuffed foxes with very expressive features—one red, one white—cut in half, attached to the wall through wood frames; a wardrobe with several coats and clothes of both sexes—the female dresses looked all identical in their shapes, only the color making them different, and even the coloring wasn't that much distinguished as they were mostly of shades of brown, orange and black. They were also quite ugly and smelled that kind of smell that he associated with very old grandmas—a double-sized bed, hard as a rock… and two small, empty nightstands just at its sides.

Everything was so clean that there wasn't even a hint of dust. It was impossible to say that no one had been there. Which meant Bag of Cats had been there before, maybe for a while, but wasn't anymore. 

He gave just a few quick looks around—even under the bed, which only had quite the sexual stuff inside a black briefcase, previously hidden by the long covers that Tony had moved out of the way. Whoops? Well, congrats to the kinky couple—before he, almost subconsciously, sped up to leave the room, the door lamenting even more as he closed it behind himself, seeing most of the others doing the same but with less sound, slightly shaking their heads in front of the unspoken questions. 

Different from the others, SHIELD member number one and SHIELD member number two were exactly where they were supposed to be: the main room. But they both were at its center, crouched and looking down.

He went back to the ground floor without touching a single stair, staring at them and trying to peek what they were gazing at, failing since JARVIS couldn't help him zoom in—he had almost asked the AI by instinct, opening his mouth to share the request, but he had remembered the lack of him before he could even attempt…—so he had simply questioned the two Spies themselves. 

“Whatcha got there?” His voice had them both raise their heads in a very hasty movement, still showing little to no surprise on their faces. 

“Blood,” Natasha answered after just a moment, getting up and backing away, moving backwards very slowly. Clint rose to his feet as well, but didn't move much more than that. “It's colder than it was last time. But it's only partly encrusted in the floor.”

“That… Doesn’t make much sense.” Bruce said, staring at her, fully in the LIT face before something like clarity arrived, crossing his gaze. “...Unless it's actually kinetic.”

His viewpoint struck right at the target inside his mind. “Like in the values.”

Robin Hood cleared his throat. “Meaning?” 

“Remember when we told you that we studied his blood cells?...” Most of them nodded, and Brucie Bear started to talk again immediately after. “Apparently, the cells inside Loki start moving faster and faster the more he uses his… uh, seiðr. And when they do, instead of getting warm, his temperature becomes even lower as the DNA automatically lets out most of the… If you can truly call that… warmth. Also, it gets more viscous.”

“And if it is like this right now, it means that he can also bleed magical blood, which we kinda had supposed that it couldn’t happen. Will the surprises ever end?” Tony sighed. He threw a look towards Thor as his eyes just fell on him at that point, almost expecting a reply of some sort, but receiving none. He only saw the blonde look around with a very absorbed expression, his mouth shut, no real tension in his body, his mind definitely having gone somewhere else.

Such a view made him stare at him just a little bit more, the suspiciousness that he had tried to ignore returning to his mind, only to push it away as forcefully as possible because he refused to think about it for too long—even though it was a possibility, considering who was the Reindeer to him, unless he A) had somehow changed his point of view in the situation, B) was really good at appearing different from who he was, C) informed himself secretly on SHIELD's base structure when he had gone in New Mexico the first time… Well. He doubted it. Very much—deciding to just focus entirely on something else. 

And so Tony got near to the sticky red pool on the pavement, bending as well to look at the almost perfectly round shape. As Natashlie had said, only part of it had dried up and—after he took away his gauntlets personally, placing them on the floor—he felt it under his fingertips, moving the hand away almost immediately. Cold was a damn understatement. It wasn't the burning type of cold, but it wasn't pleasant to the touch either. He should probably have expected it—And yes, it was definitely kinetic.

He got up, more or less meeting every gaze—even Point Break, who had returned to face them all with new attention, snapping out from whatever had been on his mind—in between the movement. “And now we know why we had two trails instead of one,”  he quipped, a bitter smile spreading on his face. 

“We do?” Cap looked at him in slight surprise, uncrossing his arms. 

“SPACEY followed a minimum of twelve to a maximum of twenty degrees Celsius. And it also searched for his full DNA, magic included. All the points of research have been found. That the blood was not attached to a body wasn't something that the Satellite could expect, considering that it had been programmed by us, and we didn't expect it to be possible.” he shrugged. 

“Well, we lack the second set of coordinates at this point,” he stated. “Is there a way to get them?”

“The Tower probably won't be fully fixed ‘till tomorrow. Nor SPACEY. And I doubt that the Satellite will take little time.”

“We have been sabotaged, so I doubt it, too.” Natasha declared flatly, tilting her head. “There is a mole in SHIELD’s ranks. Maybe more than one.”

Steve frowned. “Do you have any ideas?”

She didn’t even think about it much before replying. “Someone new. Someone who might have been able to stay under the radar enough to gather information, but not as much as necessary to share about all the physical traps in the base.”

“Why would they do that?” Thor asked, looking visibly confused. “Loki attacked your planet. Why would they try to help him if not under the control of the Scepter?”

No one answered the question. No one even tried to—even though ‘some promises that he might have made to them?’ was just upon Tony’s tongue—because a familiar vibration made them all go rigid in place instead, every gaze running towards Natashlie.

The phone was grabbed by her with a completely unreadable expression. She kept it without even the slightest hint of nervousness breaching through as she brought it to her ear and listened, the call being actually shorter than how he would have expected. Nothing changed in her features even as he shot the call down, but Tony would have sworn that something in her skin looked just a little paler. 

“Two airships have been spotted just near Stonehenge,” she shared with them all before moving her gaze immediately to him. “Also, the analyzer that you have lent to SHIELD found the track again.” 

Something inside him snapped open, a strong inner alarm starting to explode everywhere between his mind and his chest. 

‘The timings,’ he thought. ‘The fucking timings.’

The red flag was impossible to ignore.

“Let me guess…” he ironically started, smiling even more bitterly, the expression broadening on his face as the inner cursing returned to throw in a new dose of aggressive, fast swearings. None of them repeated themselves. “The Scepter is on one of the two.”

The way she exhaled—almost getting out all the oxygen from her lungs. Or maybe it was just an impression that she had given him as the danger sensation was rising and rising and rising like the tide of a tsunami—even without answering, even without moving her head as a nod, was a reply in itself. 

“Jesus,” Bruce muttered, stealing one of the many words that could have rolled inside his brain. A single word that made them all start running—he took the gauntlets that had been on the floor before starting to. 

They had entered the building slowly and carefully before. Right there and then, they ended up leaving it as if the whole place was on fire. 

********

Trying to reach Stonehenge as fast as possible felt like psychological torture. The journey hadn't been slow, but it hadn't been as quick as they clearly all had wanted either—heavy breaths, legs hitting the floor repeatedly, bows and arrows getting controlled several times, straps being pulled and fixed into a better position, the re-loading of pistols sounding with that familiar metallic twack and click that played when the bullets went in or out, Mark VII still lacking JARVIS, all the hypotheses about its state being brought by the scanners, the earpieces being distributed between them all and readied—and when they eventually got to the Wiltshire, the air was so thick with tension and expectations to make it hard to inhale it. 

They had flown fast, trying to not get stuck between trees by moving towards the destination horizontally, their bodies swinging—like they all were going to fall and hit the flank of the transport, being stopped only by the secured belts—the Quinjet wings up and down—the low one almost leaving a long, thick line cutting through the ground—before returning to normalcy and properly landing in a spot where the beeches were less thick, parking not too far away nor too extremely near to the two enemy aircrafts, being partly hidden by the foliage. Then, everything was fully set for the party that was going to welcome them; they had left it there. 

As they fully exited it, Thor was clearly ready to transport Cap and Clint. Tony prepared to do the same with Natasha and Bruce, spreading his arms, just a little hint of deja vù rising inside him.

“Ready to be swept off your feet?” He flirtily, jokingly quipped towards the two of them. “I swear that even if both of you look like angels, I'm not going to let you fall from the sky. Pinky promise.”

“How kind of you,” Natasha replied, rolling her eyes but smiling as she occupied the part on the left. 

“I live to serve,” he said with a grin, seeing Bruce's face as he proceeded to reach him on the right. “Okay, no, that's a lie, but don't call me out like that.”

After a surprised blink and a weirded-out expression, the Doctor replied. “I didn't say anything.”

“Your eyebrow said more than enough…” Tony grasped around them tightly. “Now, hold on, sweet cheeks.” 

He powered on the propulsors and rose in the air, not even counting to three. The sudden departure made one of the two—Bruce, definitely—let out a mangled, choked noise that made him smirk just a little bit. 

The flight was very short. So short that he barely had the time to actually absorb the fact that he was flying—but that was pretty much the whole point. They were already way too late; they didn't need to be even more—and they stopped just behind some tall bushes to check on the situation before throwing themselves into the action.  

The view when they all were right there, feet and hands touching the leaves, the branches, the weed, and the soil—all of them really wet and slippery with rain—was different from any type of scenario Tony could have imagined by himself—ever. In the history of forever—making him freeze, his eyes widening so much that he could feel pressure in and against them, a slight burn running upon the sclera—considering that no one moved or said anything for a while, it might have been a common reaction and not just him. 

In the middle of a sea of unfamiliar faces—some skins being in regular human tones, some completely out of that scale, touching vibrant magenta, yellow, blue, and many other different shades, even mottled ones. Most of the eyes looked weird, whether for one reason or for another. His gaze also landed on some of the most terrifying teeth he had ever seen—there were seven Lokis, all of them very much occupied fighting for their lives. Knives darted left and right as each of them seemed to quickly dance from a fighting position to another, mutating like water. 

Tony couldn't focus on any of them specifically, not truly, as they moved in tandem. 

In the same moment that Loki number one to the left twisted on himself, Loki number two made a—way too fucking graceful, if he had to personally share his opinion. He did it like he had done it thousands of times, which he probably had—swiping movement, followed by a fake to sever a leg tendon. 

All after Loki number three had given a double elbow strike to the enemy that two was attacking, also hitting the dude that he found himself fighting in the same manner, just a trickle of green sweeping down his arm as the assault landed, sending said dude's body to the floor just as fast, no attempt from him to rise on his feet again—nada. Not even a twitch. Out like a light—acting the opposite of the enemy of Loki number four. The said enemy looked like a way too tall, walking snail, and they had fallen after avoiding a weapon stabbing them right in the chest, but they got back on their feet immediately and threw themselves against him fiercely. 

Loki number five was occupied, throwing repeated waves of magic somewhere that he couldn’t tell where it was, slightly floating in the air. Six and seven, instead, were having no issues in switching between each other to offer perfectly coordinated, deadly fight moves, helped out by more knives and by a long, sharp shaft that was sometimes planted in the ground and sometimes used to stab or to make people lose their footing. 

It was absolutely insane to look at. 

The first logical, comprehensible thought that crossed his mind was a breathless ‘Holy shit.’, because, seriously, holy shit. He had believed Thor when he had listed his Adopted Brother's abilities; he had had no reason not to, and the mix altogether had seemed very intimidating, but holy shit. 

The second thought was a shocked 'They are fighting against him?’ that enclosed many more questions, which he just pushed aside, shaking them out of his system to try to concentrate instead on the Captain's order, seeing all the others doing or starting to do the exact same thing. 

Steve's expression was absolutely stony, and it actually remained stony as he began to talk. “We’re not here for petty vengeances,” he declared. “We’re here to bring Loki to justice and to get back the Scepter before someone starts to use it again.” His gaze moved all around them, focusing on Point Break. “Do what you can to get to him, Thor. We will clean the way as best as we can. Natasha, focus mostly on finding out which of the airships might have the Scepter. Tony, try to not be noticed and search for any type of possible entrance. Once she tells you, if we haven’t gotten to Loki yet, try to get in. Be careful. Leave immediately if you feel like the situation is getting out of hand. Clint, keep the explosive arrows for the motors. Bruce…" he inhaled. “Whenever you are ready.”

Brucey nodded. Not even ten seconds passed before he stepped out of the bushes and started to become green, his clothes breaking apart like paper left in the water as he got taller and totally ripped.

Tony couldn’t help but grin at seeing the Big Guy fully appear in front of his eyes, some of the Aliens that were adding themselves to the fight noticing him and actually freezing just a little, confusion written on their faces before putting themselves in defensive position, pushing others already on the field to do the same. 

Tony immediately took advantage of it to detach the scanners from his armor, having the two spheres pop out and fly backwards first thing first, pressing several buttons to make them circumnavigate the battleground to reach the two different ships at more or less the same time. Most of the others, instead, took it as an invitation to join the fray, only Natashlie remaining, her eyes fully focused. As they did so—as Thunder broke through the air as a warning—a whole lot of the Aliens moved, clearly attempting to create a wall, the rest of them more or less doing the same around Crazy Pants.

As he tried to stop himself from getting in a fight as well, waiting for the scanners to return and for Natasha to give him a definite choice, hell broke loose. He momentarily could only look as enemies upon enemies started to get knocked down like pins; Steve, Clint, the Hulk, and Thor moving through them like an unstoppable force, even though the opposite group fought back with just as much fervor and without any restraints.

********

“I think it’s in the one with the white lines,” Natasha stated, communicating the news through the headphones as well, just a few seconds before both the scanners planted themselves in Tony's hands, his fingers pressing on the buttons again to put them back into his armor. “They probably don't even notice it themselves, but their entire body language shows more defensiveness towards it.”

“That's great,” he replied cheerfully, staring just under his left palm, making a flickering gesture with his hand. “Now… We just hafta check what this little jewel registered and hop on. Unless there is some happy news to share. Cap?”

The projection started almost the exact moment Tony stopped and Steve began to talk, “Negative, they are doing everything not to let us move forward.” His voice said. “They are very...” The sound of a slamming shield and of a groan of pain played in the background, followed just by a small sigh. “Very stubborn.”

“Agree,” Legolas replied as Space Ship number two's surface was shown, first way too far, then at less and less and even less distance, zooming on the cannons and then rising as if it was walking on it. “Seems like he pissed them off that much…” There was a small pause. An arrow whistled through the air. “...How much for the entrance?”

Tony stared at the registration, which was getting more and more detailed as the seconds went on... and then it actually reached what looked like the main door.

“Little, hopefully,” he answered. Stared some more, his eyes widening slightly as the scanner proceeded to zoom in again, seeing something that he would have liked to forget immediately. “Jeez, Aliens have cameras as well…” very weird-looking cameras, but still. “Definitely no sneaking in from here.”

“Even if we did it very carefully, no, I don’t think we would get much forward before alarming them.” Natasha asserted. “Next option?”

“Just a sec.” She hummed as he pressed on the armor's buttons once again, having the projection move slightly faster, the view returning to the surface of the ship in the blink of an eye. 

He could see gray, gray, more gray, a thick metal pipe, even more gray—what an absolute surprise!—and as lightning struck, finally what looked like a small square door, positioned in a way which clearly said there were stairs under it or that you would just fall down until you hit the floor. 

The scanner proceeded to analyze it as well, showing what looked like some—slightly taller than usual—air conductors, no disgusting, weird eyes—with many pupils each—that randomly blinked, positioned in the corners, and that spied upon everyone who got in. He clicked on another button to make it show as much as the scanner could. The start of the maze parts that were the nearest were shown, the floor looking solid, with several small, hollow sections and what looked like cranks at the sides. 

He looked at Natasha. She tilted her head a little, and then she nodded. 

“We got it,” Tony stated to the comms, already feeling her grab his shoulder nonchalantly and just gazing once more at the blue projection before shutting it down. “We just have to get there. Hold on again.”

“Sure.” Natashlie shrugged, both eyebrows raised. “Was already doing it, but sure.”

“So sassy, Miss Romanoff...” Once more, just after finishing talking, without considering countdowns, he had the propulsors going off and started flying, finally moving away from his hidden spot—and from the itchy small branches peeking through the foliage—to return to circle around the battlefield in the most unseen way possible, keeping his distance from everyone and everything that weren't the trees, still throwing in a few looks to the fight, noticing the Hulk slam an Alien almost as tall as him on the ground, getting then bitten and so roaring loudly before attacking again, much more harshly, probably knocking out a few teeth as his fists impacted on his face.

He also saw the Reindeer number five throw a green shockwave towards a red-skinned, tall, worm-like enemy, who replied with more yellow magic mojo. Which…. Looked really weird, with those big hands appearing out of shiny circles, but that wasn't the point. It definitely was a surprise seeing a one-on-one Wizard versus Wizard fight. Not that he had expected Wizards going hand in hand with positivity, but his brain had trouble wrapping around it out of a film concept. But again, even fighting against Aliens wasn't exactly an everyday occasion for everybody. Not everyone had a collection of armor either—Yey, sudden mindfuck trip. Amazing. 

The other Lokis were still occupied fighting in a mostly physical manner. But he noticed one of the two that had been responding to assaults with the long spear had vanished, so they were six instead of seven. And just as he blinked, Loki number one also disappeared, so, five and something in Loki two’s look half told him that that copy wasn't that far away from vanishing either. 

Tony ended up mostly ignoring what wasn’t important regarding his and Natasha’s mission, knowing perfectly that the comms would have shared anything they might have needed to know, in the—definitely unwanted—case that nasty stuff went down. He focused on flying quickly, being attentive to how and where he moved.

Even though he did his best, some of the Aliens still popped behind the ship and noticed them, but before they could have shouted, hit them with their best shots or said anything, they ended up with a bullet in the middle of their heads, the silencer helping a lot, Tony stopping their bodies from dropping down to earth as quickly as he could manage, just leaving them on the ship’s surface, having them look like they were just sleeping.

They got to a body count of four before they actually reached the small door and—thanks to just a couple more analyses of the scanner—pressing on it where a concentration of fingerprints was accumulated—the same ones, which he sent back through his scanner on the top of his armor’s fingers—having it open with a soft whoosh noise, black and gray welcoming them as they went in and carefully closed it behind.

Chapter Text

They had the Mind Stone. 

He could feel it. Could hear its soft, tempting, cruel whispers running through the air, tainting it as it called for him, requesting his full attention. 

He could sense the way it made his heart stutter severely in his chest, his head spinning in a way that felt completely out of control. Could perceive the familiarity of it, blooming the worst kind of rawness in his core as he tried to push it away and not start stiffening, stopping himself from involuntarily responding to it. He forced himself as hard as possible to close up internally to avoid creating space for it inside him again. Shivers ran up his spine just at the thought. 

He detected the unwanted panic spreading into him, not being able to put an end to it. The feeling made his mind go blank for more than just a moment, his body forgetting where he was and how he had gotten there, his eyes showing him an entirely different scenery.

Numerous metallic dodecahedron plates were shot by rectangular, large guns, powered by fluorescent neon purple energy—they tried to reach all seven of him at the same time, clearly—but he did not even respond to the attacks as they came in his direction. He didn't need to, since they ended up hitting the barrier and being thrown aggressively backwards—The Ravagers jolting and getting out of the way to avoid being hit by them—but it had definitely been risky.

Luckily, the attempted assault was enough to have him fully return to the present, inhaling a slightly stuttering, but still deep enough breath. This before making each copy show all his teeth towards them in the most savage manner he could achieve, as if he was going to bite their throats off—the desire to see them all in pain did start enveloping him internally little by little as the seconds went on, eating at each part of him until the other feelings seemed to vanish, so it made the threat real enough.

Loki returned to focus entirely on them, forcing himself to ignore the anger and the energies in the background that kept lapping at his senses, trying to distract him all over again. He quickly gave more seiðr to his copies, the single thread of his mind connecting them all being reinforced in between. 

As he did so, his eyes almost seemed to split, to open and expand as his view saw everything around him. Every enemy movement near him was visualized and registered, every face and weapon absorbed and catalogued, orders reaching each of the copies as he himself prepared for his own battles.

A Greys—a sturdy-looking being with a pearl gray, slightly scaled skin—was the first he personally attacked after the analysis, deciding in very little time that he had to go before he could provoke any real damage. 

His dagger, though, instead of hitting him right in the middle of his chest like he had planned, ended up landing upon the spinning—clearly electric—baton that he possessed, which the alien slammed against his barrier aggressively immediately after having deflected the blade. The weapon almost slipped out of his grip on impact as his arm bounced backward with the same amount of force used, making him hiss between his teeth as he also had to take several steps back to not fall before throwing himself into a second attack. 

Loki did not lose much time before throwing another dagger at him, almost mechanically—much higher, much faster—while part of his attention focused on the copy on his left for another order, much different from the ones earlier, making him move a bit further from himself… and then on the ground, a small trickle of energy fluttering into it. 

The Ravager avoided the second attack as well, just like he had somehow expected—he definitely had fast reflexes—even if it grazed his cheek nonetheless, green blood leaking down from the small scrape that barely traced it. Then, as he quickly advanced towards him again, the baton high in the air, ready to be stubbornly used against his defenses again, he suddenly stopped, his body jerking as if he had touched something electric.

There was no electricity involved, though. Not even the smallest amount. The weed under him had attached itself to the soles of his boots, starting to climb them, to reach higher and higher, tying him up like a present. The Greys had only the time to make a horrified expression before the long grass vine snapped his spine and just dropped him nonchalantly.

He got replaced by a second opponent in the blink of an eye, who was careful not to walk on the ground, but still went down much faster as she wasn't able to avoid the sharp blade that he threw at her, unlike the first. It reached the center of her throat, leaving her agonizing, a choked noise slipping from her mouth as she spat blood and crumpled upon the first body, giving space to the third newcomer.

The said newcomer had the same fate in more or less the exact timing: appearance, hit, fall. And so did the fourth. And the fifth, even though the male Wugin attempted to still walk forward in an act of resistance before dropping down. 

Not the sixth, though. 

She could have almost been mistaken for a Miðgarðian between her small stature, the deep hazelnut skin adorned with numerous freckles, the wild, cropped, chocolate brown hair, and doe-like chestnut eyes. She could have been, yes, if it had not been for the small red crystals that protruded in the middle of her forehead, shining with a vivid, scarlet light.

She, with something like a flicker of panic on her face as her gaze met his—which was a pretty curious thing, to be honest—tried to shoot him—or tried to make a hole in the shield around him—with what looked like several large yellow plasma bullets, which actually vanished instead of being blasted towards the sender like it was expected. 

He attacked her back with a wave of seiðr, but by clicking a button on her arm, she raised her own barrier. It was hexagonal, orange and shiny; solid enough not to break instantly… but not sufficiently resistant to not crack when, after a quick command, the second copy to his right—following a spinning motion on Lævateinn just as he had taken down another foe—slammed against it as much new seiðr as possible, the sound of the impact and the singing energy echoing in the air even with all the battle sounds playing around him. 

She didn't even have the time to be surprised when it did—she only made a noise similar to a terrified whimper as it happened—and he wasn’t even able to actually make his new evoked knife reach her because the normal energy he had felt and pushed aside before—but not forgotten, no. Just like he hadn't forgotten the rotten one and the pulsating flare of the Mind Stone. It was impossible—enveloped her entirely.

It was vibrant. It was lukewarm and yellow, the exact same shade of yellow that the plasma bullets had been. And it made her vanish inside what was a visible, round portal. Just the view halted him a little, but did not truly surprise him. A Witch or a Wizard in their ranks, the Ravagers surely had. He had already been aware of that. Maybe said Sorcerer wasn’t part of the reason why they had found him, or maybe he had been, finding a way that he wasn't aware of. He wasn't sure about it. In any case, right now, it wasn't of extreme importance.

No, it did not surprise him… If not because of the gesture itself on a battlefield. Because why protect her from death and not the others? A major attachment? Or did she have an important role of any kind in such a scenario? Had she panicked because he had seen her, and he hadn't been supposed to, whatever type of plan they had?

He attempted to search for her, but couldn't focus on the matter for long. A muscular Badoon started to speed towards him almost as soon as he tried to concentrate on the full view around himself. Also, he had to correct a movement on his first copy to the left, which had risked crashing into the second one because of specific, unexpected timings from an attacker. 

The Badoon threw at him a weird-looking fruit—he had never seen it before—that literally exploded before even hitting the barrier, having it first tremble unsteadily then loudly screech in offense. But it still resisted. 

Loki’s grass vine thanked the Alien for the unwanted gift the exact moment he attempted to throw another one, focusing mostly on wrapping itself around his neck. Then it threw him backwards, hurling him so strongly that he only saw the path he moved in, which had him slam against many of the enemies and make them hit the ground as well.

He stabbed two more attackers before the woman with the crystals appeared again, the jetpack having her fly steadily at very little distance from the higher part of his defenses. He saw her, easily, his head snapping in her direction and always seeing how frightened she looked at being seen so fast. But she still shot two more plasma bullets against the higher side of his defenses, always before he could truly trap her or attack her, being quite trigger happy for such an innocent, childish face—well, looks could be deceiving. He was completely aware of that, considering his history and his own essence. He had used it for his own gain when he had been younger, more often than not, especially after provoking mayhem.

Another portal took her away just as fast when she was done. And she didn't reappear for a possible third attack. But she didn't need to. 

A few seconds passed, still full of stabbings left and right. Then, the shield around him started crackling and vibrating weirdly, his seiðr sounding almost strangled for a moment. 

Between one blink and another in which he looked everywhere he could and in the quickest way possible, slightly agitated, trying to understand how to bring it back to normalcy, miserably failing, his defenses fell apart one by one—layer after layer, like a castle of cards which had lost stability—leaving him completely unprotected, a feeling of dread forming in the pit of his stomach, squeezing it from the inside.

The opponents started to become even more frenetic and insistent after such a feat, coming at him and at the other copies with much more ferocity. Some of them were clearly smirking as if he had suddenly turned into easy prey. Others showed him their teeth just like he had done before, which felt extremely mocking. Their gesture made him perceive a hint of annoyance, but instead of showing the feeling, he ended up grinning back wildly at them in response. He tried to look like a combination of Andromeda and Nebula as he did so, showing something between pure feralness and sadism… and it worked since, essentially, he was able to swipe away the expressions they all had at once.

So, even without the barrier, he and the other copies of himself still replied at each attack like nothing had happened, his thoughts pushing out even more tactical instructions to have them move more smoothly, with all the fast dynamicity needed to survive and kill, trying to ignore the rest, no matter how suffocating said rest was. 

He made an effort to pass over how his stomach clenched, how his breath became a little ragged, even if not too much. He struggled to silence the small voice in his head, even though it wouldn't shut up, whispering to him that it was too soon. Too soon to lose something so important. Too damn soon. 

He hushed it firmly, but not because it was a lie. It was actually true. 

The fact was that he didn't have the time to create another one. Nor could he waste energy or get too distracted while trying to form it. So he just slighted it and prepared himself to defend every inch of his own entity physically instead of through seiðr. 

He had to stop them, if possible, in a definitive manner, before they could hurt him in one way or another. Just that. Even though his brain literally wailed against it as he hated every single detail of it, it was better like this.

So, he took a small intake of breath and then moved, silent and as fast as he could, evoking a sword from his Pocket Dimension. Then he started to swing it from one Ravager to another, covering his copies’ backs like they were doing with his, on second thought sending the nearest one to his right flying, floating upon the others.

Loki focused on said copy in searching for the energy of the creator of the Portals. And to respond—immediately, this time, like in an instant reaction to her face—if the woman with the crystals decided to make another appearance, perhaps with a whole different weapon than the one she had used since clearly, it had already reached its purpose.

He stopped counting the corpses after that. He stopped himself from even trying to. He just moved, his weapon cutting livers, necks, passing through sternums, wrecking limbs apart before they could shoot or stab, and then moving to more lethal spots, the gore splattering and staining the ground as pieces of his mind switched quickly from copy to copy. His own body, in between it all, started to hurt again, even though the adrenaline helped to considerably soften the sensation, his respiration becoming faster once more.

Then, suddenly, just as a Ciegrimites attempted to attack him, his levitating copy sensed the Sorcerer's energy—not the Sorcerer itself—as it attempted to throw a sleeping hex upon him, perhaps thinking that that must have been the real him… or perhaps attacking the seiðr itself to have it spread into him as well.

Just as the other him responded to it, his own senses perceived someone coming his way, the radius of distance becoming less and less way too quickly. Like when he had been in the abandoned house the day after returning to himself. Like when he had flown towards him—towards the fake him—to attack him.

His heart stuttered a little again in his air-lacking, seizing chest, the nervousness immediately rising so strongly that it was hard to focus on what he was doing—on what each of him was doing—even though he imposed himself to persist, to carry on no matter what.

But it was Thor. And just because it was him, the situation felt impossibly more complicated. He was coming to capture—to kill?—him again. He was. And Loki definitely wasn't in the condition to fight him as well. He was holding up more or less alright against the Ravagers, but Hel, he wouldn't have held much against him. He didn’t have enough firepower to. Not right now.

A curse played, loud and aggressive, inside his mind before he quickly threw a few more orders left and right, and he gritted his teeth, refusing to think about it much longer.

He moved the sword momentarily backwards, all to break through the new dodecahedron plate that a Ravager behind him had attempted to shoot towards the floating copy, then threw a knife at the Ciegrimites in front of him before he could attack in any kind of manner, seeing him dodge and fall backwards only to get up like he hadn't fell at all—Which was impressive considering the heavy weight that he had against his shoulders, round, colossal and all.

After he sent a real bullet back to the Alien that shot it, having it pass through the big, snail-like opponent as well without even blinking, taking him by surprise, something—someone—entered his view. And almost gave him an instant heart attack.

Even more panic made his thoughts race—to the point that he risked forgetting the new instructions to give, to the point that he almost blanched once more—as every inch of him begged him to run away as fast as he could, to vanish from the whole planet like he had never been there in the first place, because… Because the Beast was there, too. 

He was just as green, as tall, and as muscular as Loki remembered, his face showing rage instead of the simple irritation. It wasn't a completely murderous expression, but the anxiety still drowned him, filling his veins in response, a new type of chilling cold crushing every inch of him. 

He couldn't handle fighting against Thor. He could even less handle being slammed against the ground like that again—just remembering it made his spine hurt as a small grimace almost painted his features—but he had little to no way out. 

He knew that he was going to get a beating. Of course he did. Another round, yes, maybe two. Not worse than what the Children had done, but it would still have been extremely painful. 

Whether from his br… from the oaf, from the monster, from the remaining Avengers—the Hawk, most certainly. He also saw him appear far, far away, small but not small enough, making his stomach close up even more—or from the Ravagers in case they had been able to grab him once he had been too exhausted to keep his consciousness, it didn't matter. The result was the same.

He tried to calm down, regularizing the rhythm of the oxygen entering and exiting his lungs, pushing himself to lock the fear and the mental pictures inside as deeply as possible—the feeling so loud and powerful that he could barely do it—getting only faster in his movements to fight back, thoughts flying left and right again as he couldn't lose concentration. 

The dread and the sensation of having his fate already written for him felt impossibly despairing, but the sheer stubbornness he possessed blocked him from simply raising his hands and accepting defeat instantly. 

He could have done that, truly, but… There was a part of him—hidden under all that ruction, but still there—that said that perhaps… Perhaps the two enemies that he had could have tired each other until exhaustion? Or, even better, they could have distracted each other enough to somehow let him slip away from the ugly position he was in… to truly attempt Worldwalking?

The lack of energy for the ‘after’ was going to be an issue, one big enough to be hard to pass over, but at this point, he actually preferred being momentarily captured by the people of Vanaheim than by the Ravagers or any of the Avengers, if he really had to choose.

…Maybe he could even hide in the Cliffside Ruins without being found out immediately. The possibility was extremely low—so small to barely resemble a spark, hard to use to light up a flame—but it was still there. 

The main issue—the Elephant in the room, the Mortals would have probably said—was that almost surely the situation was going to repeat itself eventually. The place might have been different, his own preparation for it could have been better—or worse. So much worse—but the matter in question wasn't going to change, and his choices weren't going to increase from one day to another. 

Unless he actually, somehow found a way to not be caught again by those damned ships, the hunt would have repeated like a time-loop until he had given in… But it was a problem for another day, he decided. He was going to try anyway.

********

When the normal energy and the Sorcerer fully showed themselves, he felt it. And his eyes, through his copy's attentive, expecting gaze, found him, just the slightest edge of curiosity following the view, making him tilt his head almost imperceptibly. 

The Ravager Mage was lacking the usual leather jacket with the symbol in favor of a slightly loose, black armor pectoral piece that was connected to his arms protectors through fine straps, the bib showing both on his right shoulder and on the center of his chest, the flat silver shining with just the slightest hint of vibrant green in it, like small stones embedded in it. 

He was a Lem; red, with entirely white oculi, his body slim and long as his entire torso just merged into a tail, which was at least five times more lengthy than the rest of him, showing numerous veins in the lowest part of his muscles of his flanks—especially because they were more pinkish than red—and having folds everywhere, which almost made him look like an accordion.

Loki had never met one face-to-face before. He had only read about them in books—several—as they were one of the oldest sentient species in the Milky Way Galaxy, so, truly, it wasn't really that complicated to find material about their race—from details of their history, to their difference in body showed through genders or roles, to their main diets, also to their usual cities’ structure and... He had actually liked their philosophies—and he had somehow expected it to remain as such, considering his life perspective, but no. Apparently, there was still a first thing to everything, even in a drastically negative situation such as his… and with the center of the novelty being one of the carriers of his possible doom.

The Lem evoked some energy as he got closer and closer, letting it shine and move upon his knobby fingers until circles were fully formed, a mystic bolt immediately coming out of it and throwing itself at his copy, who responded just like Loki wanted him to: blasting it back to the sender thanks to a quickly evoked shield before launching a shock wave that the Sorcerer absorbed into one of his Portals like nothing. All the while, he forced himself to focus on everything else again, just the most infinitesimal flare of a headache pulsing annoyingly on his brow, his seiðr bringing him solace—sweetly, almost—just a moment later.

As his floating copy attacked again by giving once more power to the ground to raise new living vines, he quickly slammed a blast of energy against the wings of a Shi’ar, who was coming towards all of them with something in her hands—a… black ball? She clearly had planned to attack with it from above—having the Ravager lose quota, flailing as if she was submerged by water and not falling normally—he did not look at her much. The part of him that still pushed nightmares about the Void into his nights couldn't stand gazing at it… The hurled Badoon had been different and hadn't affected him, but the way she almost seemed to crawl to not disappear, to raise again, definitely did.

In a split second, after he quickly stabbed another foe in the middle of their stomach, also assisting the copy at his right in a fast maneuver by letting him roll upon his back and giving more energy to the other hims—all of this accompanied by the loud sound of thunder echoing in the air with Thor’s seiðr, both of them feeling like a curse, like a warning that way too clearly said “I am here and you can't escape me.”—he decided to diminish the amount of his clones. 

He did it for two simple reasons.

The first was that, as he had evoked and shared more seiðr with his clones, he had perceived it spasm, his energy lamenting in a way that Loki didn't appreciate, vividly upset and, consequently, the spasming made his body fully feel the aftereffects of it, something along his arms and legs’ feeling much weaker and tired—like the adrenaline had left him all at once—his lungs begging for air even more, almost feeling aflame.

The second was that if he truly wanted to vanish—maybe after defeating the Sorcerer? Or after getting him far away? Because he wanted to be sure he wouldn't feel anything that could betray him—he had to start collecting himself to create one. One and only one, in the exact spot he was, as he turned invisible again, floating away and trying as hard as possible to avoid running into Ravagers, leaving only the copies fighting. Making them think that the other Lokis were all vanishing against his will definitely diminished the possibility of them supposing that he was attempting to make another one. He hoped they wouldn't.

So, he started removing one of the two that were using Lævateinn—feeling all the seiðr given to it rush back into him, bringing so much relief that he could have sighed in pleasure—letting the other spin around it and having him kick the enemy right in their nose as aggressively as possible, hearing the sound of the bone breaking and the muffled, colored curse words that exited the mouth of the—perhaps? The imprecation had definitely been from it—Xandarian. 

Then, as he slashed his sword against an Alien with a very thick, vivid-pink skin—that he had no idea what species it was and he was completely sure he did not want to know anything about it considering the amount of dripping, clear, stinking liquid that covered it—and as the Sorcerer broke through all the tall vines to throw another sleeping hex to his floating clone—who had it hitting a Kronan instead—he took a small, almost imperceptible breath and made another disappear. 

New energy rushed in like waves—his legs feeling stronger again—but with it, so did the voice inside his mind. 

It returned to attack him, mostly whispering repeatedly that he was making a horrible mistake. Some parts of him agreed with it, even though he knew that the plan wasn’t that terrible—He wasn't even sure why they did, why they were so alert—but he still kept going with his plan.

He had another of his clones waver on purpose—not fully vanishing yet as all of them disappearing too fast might have raised some suspicion—making the remaining ones change expressions to look just slightly more tense for a couple of very short instants before appearing determined and completely focused all over again, as if it had been an unwanted slip up and nothing more than that.

But he risked slipping up for real as his eyes—still split open, still able to see perfectly all around him—actually met specific golden hair between all the fighters on the battlefield, his figure pushing through enemies like he had seen him do often. There was something in his face that he couldn't read at all, and he was also much closer than he wanted him to be.

He almost shook his head as a nervous, manic pattern of fast ‘No…’ crossed his thoughts. Almost. He remained still enough and focused on having his floating clone throw new seiðr at the Lem and on getting a dagger inside someone’s stomach, whom he didn't even look at the face of, the other copies moving slightly more in a defensive position without changing the spot they were on.

As the seiðr inside the third copy that he removed from existence returned to crash into him, he had two more clones attack the Sorcerer. One from under him, the other clone on his right, as the floating one did the same in front of him. All of them at the same moment.

The Lem was surely taken by surprise, but not enough to stop him from creating a yellow egg-like barrier that covered him entirely, defending himself from every single hit. But not repelling them, sending them back. Just blocking, making them slide around its surface like water. And so he wasn't able to respond to the extremely charged air blast with which he, personally, pushed him away—the new light annoyance of his inner energy trying to attract his attention.

The hit had him fly backwards for several meters without a single noise emitted from the Mage. A long open line formed as the Ravagers behind him moved out of the way, and he ended up colliding with the bark of a tree with a loud, reverberating noise, breaking through it.

As it happened, Loki first made his clones return to the regular fight, then, as he stabbed another Xandarian, he pushed out enough seiðr to create the base of the new copy, and he contemporarily manipulated the light around him, focusing hard with everything that he had to not let anything show to any curious eyes. Because if he didn't do it well enough, it was definitely going to be noticed. And if it got noticed, his plan would have gone to Hel even before properly starting it. Sure, he could have attempted masking it in some other manner, but it was better not to risk it.

When he was fully done, he gave several orders to all the Lokis and, once finished in that, too, he focused on himself entirely again.

Loki let his seiðr run inside him up and down like a sea wave, the gravity around him—feeling hard and stubborn at first—giving in, slowly diminishing. This until he felt light like a feather… And he wasn't touching the ground anymore.

Careful and tense, he went up and up and up again until he slipped just behind the floating clone, the surreal feeling of just levitating—drifting, falling, hanging between constellations, wandering into nothing, the cold eating at him—being strongly unsettling, almost making him regret not having Shapeshifted and flown instead. 

But he kept going anyway, letting his fingers cut through the wind and then just having his palms shove him forward. He did it more than once, moving as much as he could manage without risking crashing against enemies. 

His heartbeat started to become faster and louder as he did so, echoing inside his head and chest. His gaze moved from body to body as he obligated himself to give them attention and not to look at the destination he was ardent to reach, the desire trying to engulf him. 

Loki moved, barely avoiding two Ravagers flying in his direction to join the others and attack his clones. He thrusted his legs backwards as if he was kicking someone behind him, just as his arms pushed again at the exact moment. 

He glanced around again, his eyes noticing details—a very specific shield grabbing his attention for just a moment as it pummeled against a head—and searching for the best empty spaces, also noticing how the Lem hadn’t returned to appear in the periphery of his vision yet, a roar playing inside his ears.

Just the sound made him soar in the sky slightly faster. Especially as he got out of the main line of landing, he began to speed up almost instinctively, a frenzied sensation starting to pool in his stomach as he was getting even closer. Closer enough that he could almost taste the energy from the Passage, the voices not hidden anymore under it all, being clear and even more welcoming.

But then a gun went off. Someone—whom he didn't even see—shot in his direction what looked like a black ball, one that he knew he had already seen before and which he avoided immediately, seeing it go already way behind him, preparing for a second attack, refusing again to let his question rise because truly, the answers were almost inexistent for his agitated mind. He almost expected to hear it explode.

No sudden boom almost wrecked his eardrums, though. Not even the smallest sound came out of it… But it didn't just keep going in its line of action, either. It opened up in half instead. 

He saw it take place—and it seemed to pan out almost in slow motion—with the corner of his eye. Then, something large and long shot out of it, closing around him like a maw, fast and unexpected. 

Immediately after it happened, with his hand opening instinctively to throw a wave to make it move in the opposite direction, his head was hit hard before he could do anything about it.

The pain blackened his view and shattered his concentration, leaving him simply free-falling, not even conscious to be able to panic.

********

There was a loud, high-pitched, bothersome, ringing cacophony inside his ears when the blackness mostly faded. It wouldn't leave him alone. 

There was also… a painful throb in his head. An ache that stubbornly pulsed, not letting him open his eyes properly, even though he wanted to—‘I’ve been attacked,’ a small part of his brain, the already working one, no matter how weakly, whispered.  

He still tried to look around himself anyway. The brightness assaulted his gaze aggressively with his first attempt, but he still insisted, blinking repeatedly until they both were fully open.

The result wasn't pleasant. Everything was too full of light—even with several shadows breaking through, surrounding him—and it was spinning. The ground was up and the sky was down. Then it tilted dangerously to the left, then to the right, then to the left once more. It was nauseating. So incredibly nauseating. 

He felt like he was choking on bile, tasting the vomit already forming on the back of his tongue. And the sensation of sickness wasn't helped by the weird warmth that was focused on his face, just upon his nose, maybe slowly creeping towards his cheeks. He wasn't sure if it was real or if it was just him that had it slowly extending by trying to give attention to it. His senses felt all in disorder, as if they were spinning as well, blurring to the point of becoming numb and incredibly distant between one second and another. Every single feeling, every single sensation, every single small thought that crossed his slowed, pained mind was discordant and unrecognizable. 

He attempted to move to touch his forehead, but wasn't able to. His arms felt impossibly heavy and weak. A bit like they were made out of lead instead of bones, flash, and blood. It was a perception that felt actually familiar, like when… like when he had had… when he had had the handcuffs and the collar on.

New nausea rose inside his throat like a repulsive flood. He was so close to actually throwing up everything he had inside his stomach that he had to force himself to inhale, gulp cautiously, and keep his head up to stop it from happening.

It proved to be quite hard with the Mind Stone being there as well. It was the only clear thing that he was perfectly aware of among the unknown. Even without fully seeing it, without needing much to feel it, he just knew. It was underneath all the screeching, even more complicated to shake off than the unwanted noise. 

‘Hel. Am I… am I in Sanctuary? Is that why?...’ he inhaled a shaky breath, his eyes closing up again. But before he could truly panic, the soft, weakened, whispering, working part of his head replied a swift ‘No. That's not it. You're out, remember?’ 

And the voice was right, he realized—still in a way too slow manner for his personal taste—as the high-pitched sound inside his ears seemed to start to become less loud, even if still perfectly capable of breaking his eardrums. 

He returned to open his eyes, getting blinded once again. There was too much light. The vivid green was exquisite, but too harsh. The blue was luckily a little less intense as it was getting more bleak because of the gloomy grey clouds. But the weird mixture of the two was the most confusing part of it all as it kept rolling, rolling, and rolling, almost hypnotically, getting even more distorted by the shadows. His eyelids started to feel heavy—just like the rest of him—the more he attempted to follow the movement, his view filling itself with dark spots again, the dizziness slamming inside his being once more. 

But then he attempted to slap himself to get out of the state, and… oh. He still couldn't move—he had already forgotten about it somehow. How had he been able to do it so quickly? Norns.

His body did twitch, though. The most it had done since being hit—attacked, yes. While floating? Also yes. That was right. He still was on Miðgarðr… the Ravagers had stopped him before he could leave. He remembered.

His limbs did strive to follow his request as he pushed them to give it another try. They attempted to smack some lucidity into his own skull, but it failed nonetheless. And not only out of how enfeebled it was.

There was something… Something else. He couldn't understand what. It was cold? But it was getting slightly hotter little by little? Or that seemed as such to him? True or not, he couldn't tell.

Instead, he felt and fully understood it when his whole body was pushed against his will in some kind of unknown direction—‘Dragged,’ his mind supplied. It wasn't the first time either, probably, but there was a high chance that he had been unconscious… or not truly capable of perceiving it—with new pain pulsing along as something started to press hard against his body, especially against his chest and against his face, as if it wanted to go through them and cut them apart.

Loki blinked several times in a row, over and over, his head rising even higher. It didn't help much as he couldn't keep his neck so strained for long, but once he opened and closed his eyes for the last time, with the most eager effort, it still did enough. 

His view stopped spinning almost entirely. It did tremble a little, almost swinging left and right like a pendulum, but it was stable enough to let him understand what the shadows around him were.

A net. He was stuck in a metallic, thick net, just like a trawled fish. Which was also the reason why he could barely move, as his arms and legs were entangled in it, so stuck between the lukewarm threads that—with his still way too blurred senses—he did not even have the smallest idea about how to free himself. Still, he tried to move anyway once again, calling his seiðr instinctively to help.

A few seconds passed, but nothing came. Not even the smallest flare of energy trickled in. Not even as he attempted to focus a little more, feeling the pain return in the middle of his head and so ending up inhaling sharply in agony, his breath burning in his scraped, acid-tasting throat, all the while the places where the metal scratched at his skin felt even more violated than before as whoever was dragging him returned to pull—closing it even more around him in the process—and move him, the tufts of grass slapping against him harshly but still more kindly than the way the metal upon him just feasted on him, going in without mercy and seemingly pressing deep inside until it reached his bloodstream. And... 

His brain halted as recognition hit fast and hard—the ringing inside his ears finally vanishing, pretty much at the same time as the idea reached him, leaving only the calling of the energies all around him, some of them even more powerful than before, surrounded by the loud noises of a fight—the concern blooming and becoming even stronger, turning into an eruption of anguish under the confusion and the pain that thrummed inside his head. 

The net was made out of anti-seiðr material. 

He had already known that they had come at him more than a little prepared. He just hadn't expected how much—since when had they planned it? When did the Mad Titan put the bounty on his head, exactly? Immediately after he was defeated?

He immediately felt a new shiver run down his spine and started—no matter how weak he still felt—to writhe, squirming and attempting to free at least something, anxiety and fear sliding and flaring inside his chest and mind, hearing screams and more chaotic battling—between blades, bullets and loud crashes—play in the background, but at the same time not really being able to listen to them.

Loki, as violently as he could manage, trashed and ignored every type of sickness that pierced through his veins, even using his teeth to try to break it, only succeeding in raising the acridness in his mouth as the taste of the metal was absolutely disgusting. Also, it wasn't lukewarm anymore. It was starting to get warmer, almost hot to the touch, which left him all the more unsettled, the knot tying his stomach returning to form.

He continued to stretch, jolt, and try to kick anyway, fighting as fiercely as he could and trying not to think about it. Trying to convince himself, he was simply imagining it.

He kept biting into the anti-seiðr material and stubbornly began to press his own weight onto the ground. All to make it harder for whoever was still pulling him, having him crawl through the soil like a damn worm. 

Loki saw very little of them. The sun only permitted his eyes to see that they were two, with strongly shaded bodies in the position they were in. Even when their head moved backward to gaze at him, he was capable of only seeing the shape of a flat nose from one and a half split open mouth that showed gums and teeth under—long, triangular shaped and slightly shiny—from the other.

He didn’t even find their hands. Couldn't gaze at them as they were holding onto the net to get his body to move further. They were probably in front of their chests, the furthest away from him as possible, maybe on purpose, maybe only for technicalities. It was good for them—not for him—as he surely would have attempted to bite the first fingers he had seen if he had been able to. But he didn't see any, so he wasn't. And it took away the easiest possible way out, leaving him contorting and pressing forcefully against the unyielding structure, passing over how liquid his body still felt.

He heard them mutter something as his teeth slammed into the mesh yet another time, pulling it so hard that his jaw pained him. He did it until the warmth became absolutely scorching, making him move backwards abruptly, letting out a wail of pain as it burned him more—chains digging into his skin came to mind almost instantly, the collar pressing against his neck suffocating him, the fire licking and devouring his body piece after piece, his mind shouting at him to not scream at the prickly torture as it would only get worse… So much worse. They would have been so amused… 

A roar—a word, perhaps. Surely shouted, filled with… rage? Panic? Both? He didn't know. He didn't even connect what the word was as the burning had just disconnected his thoughts—rose and cut through the air, bringing him back to reality. It was followed by the sky thundering like an angry creature in a too familiar way, reaching his ears so suddenly that his head just snapped in its direction, giving him a new aggressive headache and more explosive pain as his chin hit the metal involuntarily. 

He tried to see him more out of habit and instinct than because he wanted to, feeling his heartbeat in his throat when before it had run—fast, unstable, terrified, completely overwhelmed—at the center of his ribcage, where it was supposed to be.

A small trickle of relief crossed his chest as his gaze fully met his, the emotion as fast as the lightning that was zapping from Thor's fingers into Mjöllnir. It was there, but it was totally unwanted. And unnecessary. And also absolutely ridiculous, but weirdly powerful, even after everything—even knowing that it shouldn't be there as it reminded him of feelings from years ago that he despised and loved at the same time, as it just brought more unwanted, unhinged, contrasting emotions that crowded into him without any respite.

It was powerful enough to bring his mind almost to call for him. To beg for him to come with a desperation and a childishness that in another situation—in another state of mind—would have made him feel deeply ashamed, the fear and the need to stop hurting—to stop feeling his skin flare where it was not covered… and even where it was as the high temperature passed through his clothes like they weren't there at all—confusingly fighting against any kind of better judgement, against the facts that he couldn't ignore, shouldn't ignore. 

The two Ravagers behind him immediately answered to Thor’s reaction by raising him from the ground level and activating the jetpacks that they had not used before—the sharp, abrasive, but at the same time shaky movement they made once they were turned on, resulting way too unsteady as they started flying, told him that it was hard to use them while having a heavy weight to transport—speeding in their flight as much as possible while their companions attempted to put themselves in between, one way or another, their bodies receiving, for what he could see, non-caring, fast assaults to get them out of the way. This, before the God of Thunder just lunged forward brusquely, his hammer hitting even more strongly against the new flying enemies that still tried to interrupt his advance.

Loki was so occupied staring at him between dazed and petrified—the hot metal still brutally heating his clothed skin as he tried to get distance between the unclothed parts and the surface even in such a horrid position, being perfectly capable of making him gasp under the excruciating aches—that he didn't even try to look up as as his abductors moved towards one of the airships. And he was taken completely by surprise when he captured the sound of an arrow slithering through the wind before stabbing someone, the body falling, and his part of the net dropping down, gravity suddenly becoming much heavier. 

He ended up slamming his full face against the blazing metal as, in between it all, he bounced down, trying to bite back the scream that bubbled up against his throat, his eyes closing up and tightening as he did his best to jerk backwards, just meeting more red-hot net as it had shaped up like a pyramid; the Ravager still holding onto him pulling at it even harder—he could feel it happen, gritting his teeth and almost biting his own tongue to not let out a single sound—and then yelling words to the others, clearly asking them to help him out, slowly descending towards the ground and fighting against it, the jetpack’s motor loudly spurting, having them both shake like it was going to cease from one moment to the other. 

Many of them did move to support him, but Thor was faster than any of them. Loki perceived the way he sped up, the way his seiðr almost hymned, perfectly in tune with the howls of the storm. He also saw him face to face as he carefully raised his eyelids anew, watching him as he fully approached and hit the thief right in the nose, a shower of blood splattering from it, proceeding then with an attack on his shoulder, making him—definitely against his will—depart, gliding in the sky with a strong blowing echo on impact, just as he felt himself fall again as he had stopped holding him, even if only for a short moment.

Thor caught him before he could plummet further. He heard him hiss as the net seared the skin of his arms as well—the metal planting itself even more into Loki’s clothes as his back just coincided with it in the new position he had ended up in, to the point that the grimace on his face seemed to have carved itself on his features, a choked whimper way too near to slip from his mouth—his expression flashing with pain. But he still did not drop him.  

He instead just started to quickly advance towards the ground, in the direction of the woods, the arm not occupied holding him up receiving Mjöllnir in its palm as the other started to tug at the metal to break it—Loki doing the same on the opposite end again, even though the pain was getting harder and harder to ignore, his skin bleeding as it had opened under the burns and the rubbing.

That one hand, though, clearly couldn't do much, even though the results were still better than his own, considering the clanking, shrieking sound that it emitted when he did. But it was quite difficult to give full force when crushing the mesh made the fingers and the palm sizzle, and even more when a swarm of Ravagers followed every move of his like flies on the meat, insisting even as the lightning attacked them from the sky and as the whipping wind shoved them backwards, trying to form a wall of bodies around them.

Still, they kept flying in the sky, Thor's arms holding him with even more rigidity and stubbornness, also touching his earpiece to communicate that he had him. But…  

The bolt that he threw as he avoided a new Kronan trying to block his way came in a little later than he intended, surprise crossing his features. The fast flight wobbled slightly as he quickly avoided a couple of bullets shot by the woman with the crystals—who returned to appear out of a new yellow portal, which made Loki hold his breath, a ‘Damn…’ playing inside his head—still risked hitting them, and if it hadn’t been for the wind, perhaps they would have. Another wobble happened just a little later, just as another black ball was thrown near them, a small noise of distress being snatched from his throat against his will, which was supposed to be a warning of some sort, but was so choked to be utterly incomprehensible. The unsteady swaying was almost a movement of luck as it got them out of the way, out of the new net’s length.

Still, he could see the truth painting itself right in front of his eyes. The oaf's seiðr was beginning to shut down, to work less and less in contact with the metal. The longer the touch lasted, the less it would have worked. And by how tense the God of Thunder became, by how he commenced to move further towards the ground, pulling even harder at the mesh, he had realized it as well.

So, they ended up landing, two Avengers out of five—the third was occupied, slamming enemies against the soil, not too far away, if not way too near—surrounding and staring at them. He could feel their gazes on him, but refused to meet them as the situation truly sank in—the panic of the burning still there but somehow softer and covering it less, maybe because with it he had had the fear of being brought on the ship—especially after he was placed on the grass. 

He had just switched from one captor to the other. Perhaps they were the lesser of the two bad options, but they were still bad for him. They would have sent him to a cage in the same way. 

The oaf said something—probably replying to some sort of silent question?—just as he released the storm again and repelled most of the Ravagers still coming their way, where the Hawk, the Captain, and the Beast weren’t already operating, the wind rising loudly enough that his words disappeared under it. Or perhaps it was because his consciousness risked fading again as the remaining dizziness and the excruciating heat just made it harder to stay awake, the lack of senses seeming so much more pleasant—and so did the reply… and the reply of the reply, if there had been any. 

He saw him bend on himself, though. Followed him with his gaze as much as he could and stared at him as he used both his hands to pull, his brute strength finally provoking a crack in the net, even if not big enough to let Loki pass through it. No, he could barely make a hand and a piece of his arm slip in it, not any more than that. But—after another attack on the enemies—another aggression to it, on both sides simultaneously, had made it much larger. Large enough that his head could.

After the third effort, his full body—trembling, enveloped in pain everywhere all over again, as if he had returned to the start, not healed at all, completely lacking in strength and balance—was finally out, still on four, stumbling out of it as if blind since his legs refused to cooperate in moving correctly or even holding him up slightly… and his seiðr didn't rush in quickly enough to let him be able to do so. 

…It was, instead, perfectly capable of feeling the danger spread through the air, the normal energy returning, also having an unpleasant company.

He felt the portal form under him quickly enough to react, obligating his muscles to move, no matter how clumsily, rolling out of the way. His arm was grabbed immediately after—the burns screaming—and he almost lashed out on contact alone, stopping himself only as he realized that the hold was helping him get up on his feet, not having the time to truly throw a look at him as another shiny yellow opening placed in the ground was avoided just by a whisker, every inch of him yelling to regain control on himself.

More and more portals formed as he tried to stand as steadily as possible, but instead of being under him, they were now floating around on all sides, no one coming through them at all. Not even the Sorcerer himself.

‘Distraction!’ his mind screamed, looking up and down first, then left and right, his stomach feeling impossibly closed, the daggers returning to pop through his fingers as his seiðr just let him evoke them, suspecting eyes placing themselves on him once again, his mind ignoring them as the time ticked by and the company—the toxic power so sickeningly rotten that he just couldn't help shivering—flaring like a blaze in the night, but somehow still being able to hide, making it hard to be pinpointed.

Then it appeared, as if breaking through the shadows. It was a figure dressed entirely in black, wearing a mantle, a long sword—the energy right there, stored inside that damn blade—between his gloved hands, one of them lacking a finger, a mask placed on his face. And exactly as it appeared, he shoved the sword in the middle of Thor's stomach from behind him.