Avengers Fic: Ask Me No Questions 5/6
Chapter 5
“You’re alive,” Tony observed when Bruce came into his apartment.
“Yeah,” Bruce said, sitting at the bar and putting his head in his hand. “Did you eavesdrop on that conversation you promised me you wouldn’t eavesdrop on?”
“No,” Tony answered. “Scout’s honor,” he added, holding up three fingers. He saw no need to mention that he had had Jarvis send the recording to his secure server, just in case he wanted to review it later.
“Good. We probably want to keep a close eye on Loki, the next couple of days.”
“What did you do?”
“I kind of…reminded him that he hadn’t tried to kill any of us recently.” At Tony’s sharp look, Bruce explained, “He was moaning about how he didn’t have any choice other than to be Thor’s lapdog. I was …making a rhetorical point. But he might take it as a challenge.”
“Great,” Tony said grimly.
“And-I really shouldn’t be telling you this, but if I don’t tell somebody, I might go out of my mind.”
“Hypothetical?” Tony suggested.
“No, my brain is too fried for that. Just, don’t be an asshole, and keep this to yourself, okay?”
That was a pretty tall order, but Tony figured he owed Bruce one, if not several, by this point. “Okay.”
“It turns out he didn’t just find out that his parents adopted him from an enemy race and never told him about it. He was adopted-he prefers the term ‘stolen’-from an enemy race that they taught him-or allowed him to be taught, same difference-are animalistic monsters that eat children.”
“Dude,” Tony said, impressed despite himself. “That is unimaginably fucked up.”
“I got the impression he figures the baby-eating thing isn’t really true. But I asked him all kinds of questions about the Jotun, and…as far as I can tell, he’s never heard anything remotely positive about them. They’re stupid, they have no culture of any kind. The only things they do have are disorganized armies-‘like packs of wild dogs’ is what he said-and ice magic, which is, of course, nowhere near as good as what they have on Asgard. It’s like if a black kid was raised by the KKK. And then dropped a nuke on Africa. I don’t know what the fuck else they expected him to do. The other guy wants to go to Asgard and crush Odin’s head like a grape.”
“Really?”
“No. I want the other guy to go to Asgard and crush Odin’s head like a grape. The other guy--” Bruce’s eyes went out of focus for a moment. “The other guy mostly feels sorry for him.”
“He can do that?”
“Yeah,” Bruce said, scrubbing his hand over his face. “That was the other thing we talked about. Monsters, and what it’s like to be one. You should talk to him.”
“About what? Being a monster?”
“Self-loathing.”
“I have no experience with that. I know exactly how awesome I am.”
Bruce stared at him. “You-you know what, just keep telling yourself that. I hate psychiatry. Give me a nice, clean case of Ebola any day.”
Tony made a show of looking over the row of bottles. “All out of Ebola. Want a Scotch?”
“Please.”
#
“Brother?” Thor asked, surprised to see Loki in the sitting room of their apartment. When his spar with Captain Rogers had ended, Jarvis had advised him that Bruce and Loki were having a personal conversation in that room, and it would be wise for him to delay his return. In doing so, he had ended up watching a movie with Clint and Natasha, and when it finished, Jarvis informed him that Bruce was long gone from their sitting room. He had expected that Loki would have retreated back to his bedroom, as he usually did if Thor did not make a point of drawing him out.
Loki glanced up at him, then turned his eyes back to the Starkpad. Sometime over the last few days, he had ceased hiding it when Thor approached. Thor hoped that was a good sign, though of what he was unsure.
“How have you occupied yourself this evening?” He hoped, but did not expect, that Loki would mention Bruce’s visit.
“Reading. As usual.”
“Ah.” Bruce had advised showing an interest in Loki’s pursuits, saying that asking about them would show that he considered them worthy activities, even if they were not ones he himself often engaged in. “What are you reading about?”
Loki’s eyes flicked up to his face again. “Monsters.”
“Oh.” Thor was not entirely sure what to make of that. “What of interest have you learned?”
“The mortals are fascinated with them. There is a saga-a real saga, like our-” He stopped, and started again, “Like the Asgardian ones. It was first written down around the time we were born. About a hero called Beowulf. Some nine centuries later, another mortal undertook to re-tell the story from the point of view of the monster the hero slew. Can you imagine such a thing?”
“I cannot,” Thor admitted. The point of tales was to glorify the hero, that others might learn from his example. “What could be learned from a story that centers on a monster?”
“I don’t know,” Loki said.
“Why, haven’t you read it yet?”
“No. I’m still reading the hero’s side of the tale.”
Sitting on the sofa opposite Loki, Thor rested his elbows on his knees, and thought. “Perhaps we should try it. With one of our adventures.” He didn’t quite dare suggest their battle against the Jotun. “The time we slew the fire-drake. What tale would a fire-drake tell of that day?”
Looking at him strangely, Loki set the tablet aside. Had Thor actually managed to ask a question that intrigued him? Such things seldom happened. “Perhaps they’d say, Listen, little ones, this is what happened to your Good Uncle Skull-crusher the Red, and I tell you that you may know.” Loki fell easily into the rhythm of storytelling, narrating how Skull-crusher decided to explore the world, to see what lay beyond the mountains where they traditionally made their home. As he flew over the forests and plains, he grew hungry, but found first only stringy hares, then hairy boars, until finally he stumbled across a magnificent feast-which Thor recognized only with difficulty as the small village the fire-drake had been terrorizing before they defeated it. Skull-crusher ate one delicacy after another-first a plump sow, then a tender calf, then a tough but flavorsome ox.
The fire-drake had begun its assault by devouring a family-young mother, toddling infant, and gray-bearded husband.
In Loki’s tale, Skull-crusher slept, dreaming of bringing a bride to this feasting table, of raising a brood of hatchlings on the ample fare the new land provided. He woke again as another meal walked right up to his maw, and thought of how right it was to eat these creatures that did not know to fear him. He roasted one with his flame-that had been Hogun, Thor remembered-when, suddenly, one bullock rose up from the ground, swinging a weapon no larger than a hatchling’s egg-tooth. Skull-crusher’s world exploded in pain and darkness as the bull’s tiny weapon lodged in his eye.
Loki described the six of them swarming over the dying drake’s body like ants on the body of a mouse, dealing one tiny blow after another until it was dead, then cleaving off its claws and scraping away scales, for whatever unknown, animalistic purpose they might have.
“So that, little ones, is why Father weeps when he speaks his brother’s name. His brother, who was torn apart by monsters that lurk beyond our mountains, laying false feasts as traps for hungry dragons.” Loki sat back, his posture signaling that the tale was finished. “And then perhaps there would be drinking, and the drake’s nephews would race around the feasting-tables, pretending to slay tiny monsters.”
Thor knew that fire-drakes did not have feast-tables, and he was sure that Loki knew it too. But the image recalled him to their shared childhood, when at feasts they would listen to the adults’ tales for as long as they could bear to remain still-or, to be more accurate, for as long as Thor could bear to remain still; Loki had always had more tolerance for tales than he did-then leave their benches to enact the tales’ most dramatic moments.
They had, of course, slain a great many imaginary Jotun, there in the feasting-hall.
Cravenly shying away from that notion, Thor said, “Did you truly weave this tale just now, brother?”
“Of course.”
“I marvel at your skill.” Loki hadn’t quite managed to make it rhyme-that would be quite a feat, on the spur of the moment-but that difference, combined with the usual rhythm of sagas, made the tale seem at once both familiar and strange, and though it had in reality been translated from an alien tongue. “I never thought to wonder what the fire-drake was doing so far from home.” In truth, a fire-drake was unlikely to have so complex a motivation as exploration, but he recalled how the beast’s one remaining eye had rolled in terror after Thor’s initial attack, as though in confusion as to why such terrible things were happening to it. The drake would not have thought them heroes. “And of course it would be a warning-story, since the drake did not win.”
Loki smiled, with what Thor thought-hoped-was genuine pleasure.
“Later-after you’ve read it-will you tell me the tale of the monster Beowulf and the hero that he slew?”
“Perhaps,” Loki answered.
#
Tony did go to talk to Loki, a few days later. Not about self-loathing-he wanted to see for himself what had moved Bruce to rage and the other guy to pity. Before he went, he took the precaution of asking Thor what Asgardians thought about Jotun. He wouldn’t have put it past Loki to be trolling the shit out of them, geas or no geas, but from what Thor said, if anything, Loki had been under-selling it. “We are taught that they are mindless beasts who wish only to destroy,” Thor had said, shaking his head. “But it cannot be true, can it? My brother is the cleverest man I know.”
“Present company excepted, I hope,” Tony quipped, but Thor had shaken his head.
Now he activated the door chime and stepped through into the brothers’ apartment at the same time. “Loki?” he called out. He knew Thor wasn’t here-he and Steve were busy planning more community-based superheroing. Tony had a feeling Thor was also trying to guilt Steve into helping with Loki’s redemption; between the two of them, Tony had no idea who would manage to out-earnest the other.
“He’s in the first guest bedroom, sir,” Jarvis said.
“Thanks.” Tony headed for it. It felt a little weird to be wandering through Thor’s space uninvited, but he wasn’t about to ask Loki’s permission to go where he pleased in his own tower.
Loki sat up on his bed, propped up on several pillows, a tablet on his knees. He glared up at Tony like a teenager whose mom had just come into his room.
“Hey. I want to talk to you. You can come out, or I can come in.”
Stiffly, looking murderous, Loki stood and brushed past Tony, heading for the living room, tablet in hand.
Catching up to him, Tony took the tablet out of his hand. “Whatcha reading?” he asked, glancing at it. He knew from Jarvis that Loki had somehow stumbled across the syllabus for a literature course called “The monster inside of us: representations of monstrosity from Beowulf to the present,” and was working his way through the reading list.
“Frankenstein,” Loki answered, as Tony handed the tablet back.
“You know, the mere existence of the Starkpad Kindle app causes me real, physical pain. I pretty much had to let them develop it-market share, blah-blah-blah-but would it kill you to get your content on Starktunes? And how is it you can install apps, but you haven’t figured out typing yet?” Loki was still starting his internet browsing sessions with the Wikipedia alphabetic index; Tony didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Loki blinked at him slowly. “The geas,” he finally said. “Does not permit me to type.”
“Really? Shit.” Somehow, Tony had never thought of that. In that case, the Wikipedia thing was actually a pretty decent work-around. He’d bookmarked it, along with a handful of other useful sites, when he was setting the tablet up for Thor, and he supposed if you had to, you could get almost anywhere by following link trails out from Wikipedia. Still, “There has got to be a better solution than that. Let me think about it.” Loki could talk to Jarvis when Jarvis asked him questions, so maybe a search engine that displayed a question above the text box? “Let me see that again.” He took the tablet, opened a word-processing document, and typed, What do you want to search for?
When he handed the tablet back, Loki frowned at it.
“Does that work? It’s an experiment. See if you can type something.”
Loki glared at him for a moment, then sat on the sofa, putting the tablet on the coffee table in front of him.
Right, broken arm would make it a little difficult to hold the tablet and type at the same time.
Loki poised his fingers over the virtual keyboard for a moment, then shook his head. “No.”
“That’s weird. It can’t be that the question’s too vague. You answer vague questions all the time. And you answer questions from Jarvis, too-I’ve seen you do it. What’s the difference?”
It was a rhetorical question, but Loki answered, “Perhaps it is that Jarvis is a…being, and this is a thing.”
Maybe. “Would the geas make that distinction? How does it know?”
“It doesn’t. The geas isn’t a being, either.”
“I know it’s not a being,” Tony answered, not entirely truthfully. It was more that it had never occurred to him that it might be. He was glad it wasn’t, though-that would make the whole thing about a hundred times creepier. “But what is it? How does it distinguish between when you can talk and when you can’t?”
With a sigh that suggested it was the stupidest question Loki had ever heard, he explained, “It is…a set of rules-‘if that, then this.’ Like one of your computer programs, perhaps.”
“Awesome. If it’s a program, we can hack it,” Tony said, forgetting for a moment that he didn’t really want this particular program to be hacked. “How do we get at the source code?” Loki might not understand that. “What are the rules? The if-then statements?”
“I don’t know.”
“How can you not know?” If there was a program running in Tony’s head, the first thing he’d do was look at the source code.
“Odin has concealed it from me,” Loki explained, as if to a small child, “because if I could access it, I would, as you say, hack it.”
“Oh.” Tony didn’t mind the idea of a program running in his head, but the idea of a program somebody else had put there was pretty unpleasant, and a program somebody else had put there and he couldn’t read was downright nightmarish. He always let Jarvis look over code alterations before he installed them; as far as he was concerned, that was just basic decency. “So you’ve been trial-and-erroring out the workarounds.” No wonder some of them were pretty kludge-y. “What about the-what is it, the binding?-on your magic. Is that the same kind of thing? A program?”
“No.”
Right, those had all been yes-or-no questions. “Where am I wrong?”
“My magic isn’t bound. It’s gone. Amputated.”
That sounded pretty nightmarish, too. “How does that even work? I’ve been thinking, since you and Bruce worked on that medication, magic is kind of like science. You couldn’t just reach into my head and scoop out all the science. Or could you? With magic? Or not you, since you’re, you know, mojo-less. But could someone? And, follow-up question, how?”
Loki’s lips twitched. “Perhaps. It would be difficult to do so without removing a great deal else and leaving you a drooling idiot. One would have to remove your understanding of the principles of science, and your memories of having learned them. And perhaps even the mental machinery which would allow you to independently derive them. It would be quite a challenge.”
“So that’s not what Odin did to you,” Tony mused. “It’s different, somehow. How’s it different?”
After thinking for a moment, Loki said, “Magic is a body of knowledge, like science, but it is also…the closest analogy would be a set of tools. You spoke of the spell-the molecule I described to Dr. Banner. Magic allows-would have allowed-me to sense the necessary…what you would call the necessary elements…and to draw them from the surrounding-what Aesir would call elements. Earth, water, air, and so on. And then to form the…” He paused to search for the unfamiliar term. “The chemical bonds necessary to unite them into the molecule.”
“So Odin…took away your toolbox,” Tony said. “But you’d still know how to use the tools if you had them?”
That, apparently, wasn’t enough of a question to complete the if-then statement. It apparently wasn’t right, either-Loki made a small, wordless sound of disapproval.
“Where am I wrong?”
“You forget that the tools are part of one’s being. It is-you would not understand.”
“Maybe not,” Tony agreed. “It sounds like it sucks donkey-balls, though. Which, you know, considering you attacked my planet, I’m kind of okay with. Is it permanent? The-amputation?” if it really was like an amputation, Tony was a little less okay with it than he pretended. Maybe it was the only way to make Loki safe to be around, but the idea of taking away part of somebody’s self as a punishment was…kind of icky. Morally and physically.
“I’m not certain.”
“That sucks, too. Odin didn’t tell you?” Normally, Tony would have said “your dad” or something like it, just to piss Loki off, but after what Bruce had told him about Odin’s racism, that didn’t seem funny anymore.
“No.”
“So that’s…that’s rough. Your mojo was like your main thing, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“So what, uh, where do you go from there? What do you have going for you now?”
Loki stood, very quickly. “Nothing. Is that what you want to hear? I am going to my chamber.” He started for the hallway.
“Wait, Loki,” Tony called.
Loki turned and glared back at him, venomously.
“I wasn’t trying to bust your balls. I was trying to do, you know.” Loki stared at him. “Empathy. I don’t know if you guys have that. Understanding, what somebody else is feeling? Maybe it’s a mortal thing. I’m not very good at it. Which is fine, because I’m awesome at so many other things,” he added, just in case Loki shared Bruce’s misconception that self-loathing was something they had in common. Reaching across the coffee table, he picked up Loki’s tablet. “You forgot this.”
He held it out, and eventually, Loki returned and took it out of his hand.
“I feel like Snow White,” Tony quipped. At Loki’s look of confusion, he explained, “She’s a cartoon character. Birds eat out of her hands. I think. Since we’re pals now, you really should offer me a drink.”
Loki gave Tony his are you fucking with me look, then flashed some kind of Asgardian gang sign at the corner of the room.
“What may I do for you, Loki?”
“You can offer Stark a drink.”
“Mr. Stark, would you like a drink?” Jarvis asked.
“Jarvis does hand signals now? I’m not sure whether to be creeped out or impressed. I’m going to go with impressed. Since we’re pals and everything. Yes, I would like a drink. Do you have Scotch?”
“No,” Loki said.
Leaning back in his seat, Tony clapped his hands. “Yes, you do. Cupboard above the refrigerator. I hid it there before you moved in so I wouldn’t be stuck drinking Budweiser if I visited Thor. Go, look.” He motioned with his hands. Loki checked the cupboard indicated, and found the bottle Tony had left there. He brought back two glasses along with it.
“You know what else this tells us? The geas makes you say what you think is true. Maybe you already knew that? I kind of suspected, but the only way to be sure was to run the experiment.” Tony took the bottle from Loki-he didn’t seem to know what to do with it-and cracked the seal. Then he gestured from the glasses Loki still held to the table. “Set ‘em up.”
Loki set the glasses down, and Tony poured. Handing one to Loki, he held up the other. “L’chaim.” He drank, and after a moment, Loki did too, cautiously. “See?” Tony said. “Here we are, having a nice, civilized drink. Nobody got thrown out of a window, nobody got pounded into the floor by a Hulk…it’s progress.”
Loki apparently agreed; at least, he sat back down on the couch, drink in hand.
“How come Jarvis calls you ‘Loki’ anyway? He usually does Mr. Lastname.”
“I have no surname,” Loki said loftily. “I commanded him to call me Prince Loki, but he refused on the grounds that he is an American AI. We compromised on Loki.”
“Good for you, Jarvis,” Tony said.
“Thank you, sir.”
“While you’re up, give us a whiteboard,” Tony added. “Let’s get started on that search interface.” Part of Tony’s eagerness was that he really did want to help-as far as he was concerned, internet access was a human right-and partially, he figured Loki would be a bit more forthcoming about how magic worked if there was something in it for him.
#
Stark swaggered into the sitting room. “As though he owned the place” was the mortal expression, but Loki suppose it didn’t quite capture the flavor of the moment, since Stark did, in fact, own the place. “Tablet,” he said, snapping his fingers and holding out his hand.
He had failed, on his first visit, to find a way of overcoming what he insisted on referring to as Loki’s “typing disability.” Since then, he’d returned several more times to try out new ideas, all of which likewise failed. As much as Loki would have appreciated being able to search the internet more effectively, he was somewhat relieved that he didn’t have to live with the shame of seeing Stark easily overcome the geas that thwarted Loki so thoroughly.
Loki raised an eyebrow at Stark; he rolled his eyes and said, “May I please see your tablet, oh mighty god of not being able to type?”
Hoping that name didn’t catch on, Loki surrendered it. “I suppose.”
Stark took the tablet, saying, “So it turns out there’s no way I can trick the geas into thinking the tablet’s alive.”
Stark also insisted on referring to the geas as though it had volition of its own, despite knowing that it did not. He claimed that referring to it in that way was “easier” than finding the words to describe his feeble understanding of how it actually worked. It was a baffling habit, since Loki’s investigations into mortal science suggested that it depended as thoroughly on precise definitions as magic did.
“So the only option, really,” Stark went on, inputting something into the tablet as he spoke “was to put in something we already know you can talk to. There! Meet your new Jarvis app.” He handed the tablet back.
There was a new icon on the screen. Propping the tablet on his knees, Loki tapped to open it, and a black box popped up. Script appeared, one character at a time, reading, “What may I help you with?”
Another tap brought up the virtual keyboard-fortunately, he remembered how to summon it, even though it was useless to him. One-handed, he typed, “I would like to see the periodic table, please.”
The internet browser opened a tab displaying a list of Google results-something else Loki was familiar with, but had not previously been able to use.
“Does it work? Do I really have to ask? Of course it works,” Stark babbled.
“It works,” Loki confirmed.
“I could have just done that from the beginning,” Stark said, “but frankly, I didn’t think Jarvis would be up for it. Apparently he likes you or something. I set it up to just punt your searches to Google; his search engine is better, but you don’t really need that kind of power. This way the drain on his processing power is insignificant. And the gooey-the interface-is pretty minimal, because who cares? Gets the job done, and it’s not like I have to market the thing. You want to thank me, or something?”
“No,” Loki answered.
“Let me guess-is ‘want’ too strong a word?”
“Yes.”
“Would you rather die than thank me?”
“No.”
“Okay. I’m going to take that as a thank-you, because you’re…you. ”
In truth, if Stark had thought to ask if he was thankful, he would have been forced to answer, “Yes.” To fumble through the internet through groping, twisted, half-blind paths, when he knew how easy it was for others was entirely too reminiscent of how he had felt when he first faced the world without his magic. He’d felt half-blind and crippled, as though he’d gone from having keen sight to seeing only light and shadow, and from having his own deft fingers to fumbling with bloody stumps.
He’d gotten used to it. But he didn’t particularly like being reminded.
“Right, so I have some real work to do now. Any questions, before I go?” Stark asked. “About the…” He gestured vaguely at the tablet.
“Yes.”
“Really? It’s pretty straightforward. What don’t you understand?”
Loki wished that he had phrased the question slightly differently. “Why did you do this?” He understood that Stark had been intrigued by the technical challenge, and likely curious to expand on his pitifully scant knowledge of magic. But linking Jarvis to the tablet was an obvious solution, offering no particular challenge.
Stark didn’t seem any more pleased to be asked the question than Loki had to be forced to ask it. “Really? We’re going there? I was being nice. I do that sometimes. On alternating Tuesdays. Is that everything?”
“Yes.” Loki nodded curtly, and Stark-thankfully-took himself out.
Being nice. Of all the insults Loki had been forced to swallow, that one was the most bitter. In truth, many of the Avengers had been being nice to him of late. Banner, with his talk of monsters and choices and excuses for Jotun barbarity. Stark, with his empathy and his apps. And Thor, of course, but he was in a category all his own. Cajoling Loki into telling him tales, as if they were children still, and trying, in his dim way, to understand. Even Rogers, who had been surprisingly, refreshingly hostile had been looking on him with something like pity.
Only Romanoff and Barton saw him with clear-eyed hatred. If they, too, succumbed to sentiment, to sympathy for the monster in their midst….
With a snarl, Loki shoved the tablet away from himself, and got up to pace.
“Loki?” Jarvis asked. “Are you well?”
“No,” Loki snapped. Next to the television, there was a particularly ugly statue of a dragon. Loki swept if off its pedestal; the resulting crash and spray of ceramic fragments satisfied him somewhat.
“Shall I summon Thor, or Dr. Banner?”
“No!” Loki waved his hand in the direction of Jarvis’s camera, making the gesture he’d once used to end a spell. Jarvis knew it meant that Loki had no further need of him-but whether he would obey the command was a different story. Stark’s servant was not bound to obey him. Was not even bound to obey Stark himself, if what the construct said was to be believed.
“Do you require assistance?”
“No!” Picking up a marble sphere, Loki hurled it in the direction of the camera.
#
“Brother, what is the meaning of this?” Thor had hurried back to the apartment when Tony had notified him that Loki was “having some kind of tantrum.” Loki was now standing in the middle of a scene of minor destruction, breathing heavily.
“My temper overcame me,” Loki said, kicking away a shard of pottery that Thor recognized had once been a figure of what the Midgardians imagined a dragon looked like. It had been red; lately, Thor had been thinking of it, privately, as Skull-crusher.
“Thor, do you need backup?” Captain Rogers’s voice came through the speaker in the kitchen; the one in the sitting room had been caved in by some heavy object.
“No,” Thor answered. “My brother is upset. I will deal with him.”
“I’m standing by, and Tony’s suiting up,” Rogers said. “If we get any sign you’re not in control of the situation, we’re coming in.”
“Very well,” Thor agreed. He was not particularly alarmed. Bruce had explained that his efforts to help Loki might provoke such an outburst at first. “He’s carrying a lot of anger,” Bruce had said. “Some of it very justified. Something tells me guys where you come from usually deal with their feelings by ignoring them or getting violent.”
Thor had had to admit the truth of Bruce’s words. So he had been expecting something like this-and really, compared to the scale upon which Loki was usually able to wreak destruction, a few broken ornaments were of little concern. “Loki, what troubles you?”
Loki looked away from him, breathing in sharply through his nose. “Oh, you know,” he said, his voice deceptively light. “The usual petty grievances and imagined slights, as you would say.”
Thor sighed. “I regret saying that your grievances were petty and imagined. As I have told you many times now. Did something happen to-lead you to feel our apartment needed redecoration?”
“No.”
Stepping around piles of debris into the kitchen area, Thor opened the freezer and took out the bottle of Midgardian liquor that was traditionally stored there. “Perhaps this will cool your anger,” he suggested, pouring two measures. After a moment’s thought, he transferred Loki’s share from the heavy-bottomed glass into a flimsy plastic tumbler. The glass would not do serious injury, if Loki chose to fling it at his head, but it would not be particularly pleasant, either.
For a moment, after Thor handed him his drink, Loki looked as if he would fling it at Thor’s head, but in the end he sighed, sat down on the low table between the two couches, and drank. Perhaps taking this as a sign that the mayhem was over, one of Stark’s cleaning robots emerged from a hatch in the wall and began ingesting shards of glass and pottery.
Thor sat on the sofa facing Loki, close enough that their knees were nearly brushing. “What troubles you so, brother?”
“I do not need your pity,” he answered, cutting his eyes away sharply. “Or desire your kindness.”
Thor suspected his clever brother was mistaken on that point, but chose not to pursue it. “What do you need?”
Loki gave him the look of amused disdain he wore whenever Thor fell for one of his stalest tricks. “The restoration--”
“Of your magic,” Thor finished. “Yes, I know. As you know that it is not within my power to grant. Although if it were, I could not do so until you have regained your reason and are no longer a danger to yourself and others.” Loki rolled his eyes at that; Thor ignored it. “What else do you need? Or want?”
“A realm. An army. And I’ve always fancied a temple of vestal virgins. Well. Not virgins, exactly.”
“That is also not within my power,” Thor noted. Clearly, Loki was not ready to give him a serious answer to that question. “You must find more appropriate ways to release your anger.” That was something Thor had been reading about in the materials Bruce had provided. Unfortunately, all of the article’s suggestions-punching a pillow, writing in a journal, or drawing a picture of how one felt, for instance-Thor would have been embarrassed to suggest. “If you wish to throw things, you could do so in the sparring-room.”
Loki’s look of contempt showed what he thought of that idea.
“What if I summon a sudden thunderstorm? You can go out on the balcony and laugh at all the people scurrying about trying not to get wet.” Loki had always enjoyed that, though it had been quite some time since he’d asked Thor to do it. “Would that cheer you?”
“It might,” Loki admitted.
“Then let us try,” Thor said.
#
“Can I take the suit off yet?” Tony asked Steve plaintively, as yet another rumble of thunder shook the building. They were all gathered in Steve’s apartment-it happened to be closest to Thor’s-waiting to see if it would be necessary to subdue Loki by force. A holographic display showed Jarvis’s camera feed of Loki and Thor, sitting on the edge of Thor’s balcony with their legs dangling over the edge, passing a bottle of Stoli back and forth. Loki looked pretty calm, and while Tony loved the suit, it was not at all comfortable for lounging.
“It looks like the emergency’s over,” Steve agreed. Gesturing at the display, he said, “I’ll keep this up for a while, just in case something changes, but you guys can go.”
“That’s it?” Clint asked. “We’re just going to…pretend this never happened? We should throw him in a cell, for at least a week. Teach him a lesson.”
“Clint,” Bruce pointed out, “he got pissed off and threw some stuff around in his own apartment. Is there anybody in this room who has not done that?”
“Me,” Steve volunteered. “I haven’t.”
Natasha added, “I don’t remember anyone rewarding me with a drink and a light show when I did it.”
Tony had to admit, Thor changing the weather to entertain Loki was a little bizarre to contemplate. And he was supposedly more responsible and level-headed now than he’d been even a little while ago. Maybe Thor had been in the habit of whipping up tornadoes or hurricanes when he had a temper tantrum. “Yeah, well, gods. What are you going to do? As long as he’s done throwing paperweights at my AI, I’m happy.”
“As am I, sir,” Jarvis said through the suit interface. “It was most disconcerting, having my camera suddenly taken out.”
“I’ll fix it as soon as it’s safe to go in there,” Tony promised him. The others looked at him a little oddly; Tony realized they hadn’t heard what Jarvis said. “Jarvis,” he explained. “He’s unhappy about his camera.”
“Thank you, sir,” Jarvis said, this time using the room’s speakers for everyone’s benefit.
#
Loki stayed out on the balcony for a while after Thor went inside, watching the storm die down. The method Thor had chosen for calming him was condescending-it had been decades since he’d asked Thor to entertain him in that way; the last time had been well before he came of age-but the gentle cushion of inebriation kept him from minding too much. On the streets below him, mortals folded their umbrellas and turned off the windshield wipers of their cars.
Now that he was calmer, Loki was embarrassed at his loss of temper. It seemed like something Thor would have done. Getting angry and throwing things had never been his style; he considered it much more effective to keep an outward air of calm, and quietly plot revenge.
He would have to teach the mortals a lesson about feeling pity for gods, but there were much cleverer-and more effective-ways to do it. Admittedly, all of the ways that sprang to mind were impossible in his current state: he couldn’t turn their hair-care products into snakes, or teleport them naked into different parts of the Tower, or even spread embarrassing rumors about them. But surely he could think of something.
Picking up the empty vodka bottle, Loki lurched to his feet and went inside. There was a brand-new camera in the corner, replacing the one Loki had broken earlier.
That, Loki really did almost feel bad about. Mother-Frigga-had never had any tolerance for throwing things at even the lowliest of servants, and Jarvis was, as near as he could tell, equivalent to majordomo of the house. In an ordinary house, he’d have expected at least a week of smoky fires and cold food in return for such an insult. He met the camera’s glittering single eye and nodded, doing his best not to look sheepish.
“May I help you?” Jarvis asked.
“No,” Loki said, and made the gesture dismissal, with thanks at the camera. It was ordinarily used for banishing a summoned spirit, but it was one of the ones he had taught Jarvis, and it was the thing he had to an apology.
#
A week or so later, what Bruce said Tony absolutely could not call Operation Tame The Savage Jotun (“That’s racist, Tony!”) seemed to have gotten back on track. Loki was back to skulking around, alternately being silent and as annoying as the geas would let him, but there were no more tantrums-at least, not any alarming enough that Jarvis felt the need to tell Tony about them.
Thor invited everyone to a movie night in their apartment, and apparently, this time Loki knew they were coming-Tony smelled his hand in the playlist, a double feature of the film version of Beowulf and the 1931 Frankenstein. Bruce suggested, tentatively, that it might be a good sign that Loki was interested in sharing his exploration into monstrosity with the rest of them.
They didn’t plan to all show up at once, but when Tony got off the elevator on the Asgardian brothers’ floor, the rest of the team were all loitering in the bland, lobby-like space outside the apartment. There was a small couch there-Tony had no idea why; the decorator he’d hired for the corporate levels had ordered dozens of them-and Natasha was sitting on it, Clint hovering at her shoulder. “Here I thought I was going to be fashionably late,” Tony joked.
Natasha unfolded to her feet. “Might as well get this over with.”
“Team movie night isn’t mandatory,” Steve pointed out, shooting her a sharp look.
“I like Thor just fine,” Natasha answered. “I’ve got no call to throw his invitations back in his face.”
They went in. Thor lollopped over like a great big Labrador puppy, grinning. “Friends!” he said, as if he hadn’t already seen most of them at various points earlier in the day. Scooping up a sixer of Bud from the coffee table, he offered them around. “Loki has made popcorn,” he added. “With-what did you say it was, brother?”
Loki emerged from the kitchen area, holding a large blue plastic bowl. “Fleur de sel,” he answered, setting the bowl down in the center of the coffee table.
“It, uh, looks great,” Bruce said.
“You have some kind of gizmo you can use to scan it for poison?” Natasha asked Tony in an undertone that, nonetheless, carried. Loki stiffened up a little at that, looking hurt, but honestly, Tony thought it was a sensible precaution, and reached for his phone.
Before he could get it out, Steve reached down and plucked a kernel out of the bowl. Popping it into his mouth, he chewed slowly. “It’s fine,” he said, after he had swallowed. “Super-senses, remember? I’d be able to smell or taste poison.”
Natasha nodded, and Loki relaxed. They all sat down with beers and handfuls of popcorn, and Thor started the movie.
Tony wasn’t very familiar with Beowulf-he’d skipped it when it was assigned in high school-but the movie was okay. It seemed right up Thor’s alley, lots of burly Viking types drinking heavily and fighting some kind of hideous troll-thing. The part where the main Viking guy fought the monster buck-ass naked was a little weird, but whoever shot and edited the thing had managed to avoid any dick shots, so it wasn’t as weird as it could have been.
Then, on the screen, Beowulf ripped off the monster’s arm. And, more or less simultaneously, the popcorn bowl exploded with a flash of green fire.
#
“Fire suppression system activating,” Jarvis said, and flame-retardant foam sprayed down from the ceiling onto the smoldering coffee table. “No further explosives have been detected.”
Sticking his head up from behind the sofa, Steve got his bearings. All of them had reacted instantly when the explosion went off. Steve had grabbed Tony-who happened to be nearest, and who his combat reflexes read as “civilian” out of the suit-and dove over the back of the couch with him. Clint had done likewise on the other sofa, though he hadn’t grabbed the closest thing nearby to a civilian-that would be Bruce-to take with him. Thor was on his feet, Mjolnir in hand. Natasha was pinning Loki down in a manner that Tony would probably make a lewd remark about as soon as he could manage, holding a knife to his throat.
Bruce, though, was still sitting where he had been on the opposite sofa, lightly coated in fire-retardant foam. Steve couldn’t tell if he was looking a little green around the gills or not.
It took Steve only a fraction of a second to make his own assessment of his team-no one down-but he asked anyway, “Is everyone all right?”
Tony popped up next to him. “I think you wrenched something throwing me on the floor,” he answered, rubbing the small of his back theatrically. “Jarvis, cut the movie. What the hell just happened?”
The movie stopped. “Analyzing,” Jarvis said.
“Cap, you got any orders for me?” Natasha asked.
“Stand by,” Steve told her. “Loki, did you do this?” It seemed pretty darned likely, but Steve didn’t want to jump to any unfair conclusions.
“Yes,” Loki answered.
That answered that. “We’ll take him down to the cell. Romanoff, Barton, you’re with me.”
Steve thought that Thor might object, but he just shook his head, lowering the hammer as he did so, and said, “Brother,” in a sorrowful way as Natatsha hauled Loki to his feet.
Loki raised his chin and glared at him, then turned for the door, not even waiting for any of the Avengers to hustle him along. He didn’t give them the least bit of trouble on the way down to the cell, walking along like they were his bodyguards or something, an irritating half-smile on his face.
“Put him in here,” Steve ordered, opening the cell opposite the one where they’d previously stashed Loki. If he wanted to be down here for some reason of his own, that might make a difference.
“Jarvis, I want constant monitoring on this cell,” he continued as Natasha shoved Loki inside. She wasn’t particularly gentle about it, but Steve wasn’t in the mood to call her on it. “If he does anything even remotely suspicious, notify me and Tony immediately.”
“Yes, Captain,” Jarvis said.
They went back upstairs to Thor’s place. Bruce and Tony were standing at a holographic display; Thor was cleaning up the scattered popcorn and casting sheepish looks at the blackened crater in the middle of what used to be a coffee table.
“Report?” Steve asked.
“Chemical explosion involving a previously unknown compound,” Tony answered. A gesture at the display brought up a molecular diagram; Steve figured it probably meant something to Bruce and Tony. “Planted on the underside of the bowl in two packets, separated by a dissolving membrane. When the membrane dissolved, the two agents combined, and-boom!” Tony spread his hands, miming an explosion. “It’s pretty good stuff. I’ll have to do some experiments, but I think we can use it in the next batch of exploding arrows,” he added to Clint.
“Where did he get it?” Steve asked.
“Synthesized it, I’ll bet,” Tony said. “Jarvis is still going through his video footage to see when and how, but it’s made out of all common elements. Our old friend carbon-or should I say, bones-of-giants-oxygen, nitrogen, sodium.” He shrugged.
“One of the kinds of magic he does-used to do-is basically chemistry,” Bruce added.
Tony nodded. “Except he uses magic to pull the elements he needs out of-wherever-and to hook them up into molecules. He must have figured out how to do it the puny mortal way. He didn’t get into any of the labs, did he, Jarvis?”
“No, sir,” Jarvis responded. “My review of the surveillance recordings indicates that he performed most, if not all, of his experiments in the kitchen.”
“How’d you miss that?” Tony asked.
“He’s also been teaching himself to cook,” Jarvis explained. “I’m afraid I did not monitor his activities in that area in sufficient detail.” It might have been Steve’s imagination, but he thought the AI sounded almost embarrassed. “I also failed to recognize the import of his researches into basic chemistry.”
“Aw, don’t be too hard on yourself, J,” Tony said. “Let me see some of that footage.”
The molecular diagram was replaced by video of the apartment’s kitchen. Most of what Loki was doing-mixing things, measuring things, heating things-looked like normal kitchen activities, except for a small bowl full of what looked like water, that Loki periodically fussed with for no apparent reason.
“In retrospect,” Jarvis said, “it is obvious that he is using direct oxidation to extract chlorine from table salt.”
“And making scrambled eggs,” Bruce noted.
“That’s pretty damn sneaky,” Tony said, sounding admiring.
“My brother has always been clever,” Thor said, joining them. “I did not realize he was planning this, either. It is fortunate that no one was hurt.”
“It could’ve been a lot worse,” Tony said, nodding. “If he’d given us each individual bowls, or used about twice as much explosive, we’d be having a really different conversation. Consisting mostly of screaming.”
“Now can we keep him locked up?” Clint asked.
“I think we have to,” Steve said, with an apologetic look at Thor. “He--”
Before Steve could complete the thought, Tony interrupted. “Did anyone hear a single word that I just said?”
“Yes,” Natasha answered. “Loki could have killed us.”
“Exactly,” Tony said, snapping his fingers and pointing at her.
Natasha batted his hand away. “Don’t do that.”
“Green fire is, like, Loki’s signature move, right?” Tony asked Thor.
“It is one of the first magics he learned,” Thor agreed. “Mother despaired that he’d ever stop setting the curtains on fire when one of our friends annoyed him.”
“So I’m betting he has a pretty clear read on the difference between ‘enough to blow a hole in the coffee table’ and ‘enough to kill us all.’”
Bruce said slowly, “You’re suggesting he didn’t actually want to do any real harm.”
“Welcome to the end of the thought process!” Tony spread his hands. “Exploding popcorn bowl. Classic prank. Had a buddy in college who pulled shit like that all the time. No, wait, that was me.” He grinned like they all ought to congratulate him on his cleverness.
“It’s a little bit more than a prank,” Bruce pointed out. “Even if he planned on it not doing any real damage, it could have gone wrong-and if he knows this stuff as well as you think he does, he knew that, too.”
“Mother chided him often of the danger of such pranks,” Thor confirmed. “I will speak to him in the morning, after he has had time to think about what he has done. If he is unrepentant, I will not object to keeping him confined for some time. I like it not, but I know it is your way of punishing wrongdoers,” he added.
Steve was glad Thor was being reasonable. With Tony seeming more amused than anything, if Thor had objected to taking any actions against Loki, the team would have been seriously divided. “How would he be punished on Asgard for something like this?”
“Now?” Thor said. “Likely he would not be; he is already under a heavy sentence. Though the All-Father would remind him that he has not yet been declared outlaw, and still could be. When we were children, Mother would have insisted that he make good the damages himself and tender an apology to the victim of his prank.”
“Good,” Steve said. “We’ll do that.” If Loki was going to act like a child, they’d treat him like one. “He can come out of the cell when he’s ready to clean up this mess and apologize. Tony, you and Jarvis figure something out so this doesn’t happen again.”
“Will do,” Tony said cheerfully.
#
“No,” Loki said, enjoying Thor’s look of confused disbelief. That the Avengers asked only that clean up his mess and apologize showed how laughably they misunderstood him. If an explosion in the middle of their gathering was not enough to convince them that he wasn’t an errant child to be corrected and cosseted, he didn’t know what would.
Destroying their city, perhaps, but he’d done that already, and they seemed determined to overlook it.
Somewhat to his surprise, Thor had left him to stew in the cell all night. It was incredibly tedious-he didn’t even have his tablet-but, knowing he was being monitored, he was careful to project an air of complete unconcern.
Thor had come calling in the morning, bringing with him a tray of coffee, toast, and porridge. Loki was careful not to show too much interest in that, either-the cell he occupied as not stocked with food and drink, as the other one had been, and he was hungry, but he wouldn’t give Thor the satisfaction of seeming grateful.
After urging him to eat, Thor presented the terms for Loki’s release from the cell. “Why will you not do these things, brother?” Thor asked after he refused.
“I do not wish to,” Loki answered coolly.
“You will remain in this cell until you do,” Thor warned him, as though Loki might have missed that.
He shrugged his good shoulder.
Sighing heavily, like a tired hound, Thor pushed aside the tray that Loki was ignoring and sat beside him on the cell’s cot. “Such a jest could have seriously injured our friends. What say you to that?”
“They aren’t our friends. And it was not a jest. If you are truly thick enough to believe it was, I’m glad you are no kinsman of mine.”
“I didn’t, really,” Thor admitted. “Although Tony believes that the size of the explosion was calculated to avoid serious harm.” Looking at Loki sidelong, he asked, “Was it?”
“Yes,” Loki said, trying not to show that he minded being asked.
“Why?”
“I have no particular desire to die,” Loki answered. “As I expect would be the result if I killed or maimed one of your friends while I’m still captive.”
“I am glad that you do not desire death,” Thor said, missing the point as usual. “Dr. Banner feared that you might.”
Dr. Banner, Loki thought, was entirely too invested in the idea that he and Loki had anything in common.
“Why did you carry out this-attack, if not to cause injury?”
“Because that’s what enemies do,” Loki snapped. How obvious did he need to make it?
Thor just looked at him sorrowfully, and eventually got to his feet and left.
Which was fine. Precisely what Loki wanted, in fact.
#
Two days on, Loki was still refusing to cooperate. Clint wasn’t the most emotionally perceptive guy around, but he could tell that Thor was pretty bummed about it. The way he kept bringing up the video feed from the cell on any nearby screen and sighing lugubriously was a big clue.
“The way I see it,” Clint said as Thor divided his attention between a pizza lunch and the Loki-cam, “if I can stomach apologizing to that fucking psychopath, he can damn well stay in there until he rots if he doesn’t feel like apologizing to us.”
“He’s choosing to be in there,” Bruce added to Thor. “Although ‘fucking psychopath’ might not be the most, uh, most useful description.”
“Clint has the most cause of any of us to be wary of my brother,” Thor said, like it was real fucking big of him.
It reminded Clint of the way Thor was always making excuses for Loki-he’s troubled, he was bullied, our dad was a racist shitbag.
Not that Thor said “racist shitbag,” of course, but that seemed to be the gist of it. He had to admit, teaching a kid that his entire race were monsters was all kinds of fucked up, but Loki wasn’t a kid anymore. “Personal responsibility,” Clint said. “It’s not just for puny mortals.”
“The geas makes it harder for him to apologize,” Bruce pointed out. “I mean, he can’t just totally fake it.” He didn’t come out and say, Like you did, but Clint figured it was strongly implied.
“Trickster god,” Tony reminded them. “If he can’t come up with something that’ll get past the geas, he’s not trying hard enough.”
“I’m afraid he is not trying at all,” Thor added, with a shake of his head. “He says that he does not wish to make good his wrongdoing. If he could but begin with this one small thing, perhaps….” He trailed off, shaking his head again.
“That’s the thing,” Bruce said. “You can’t want it for him.”
Link to Part 6
“You’re alive,” Tony observed when Bruce came into his apartment.
“Yeah,” Bruce said, sitting at the bar and putting his head in his hand. “Did you eavesdrop on that conversation you promised me you wouldn’t eavesdrop on?”
“No,” Tony answered. “Scout’s honor,” he added, holding up three fingers. He saw no need to mention that he had had Jarvis send the recording to his secure server, just in case he wanted to review it later.
“Good. We probably want to keep a close eye on Loki, the next couple of days.”
“What did you do?”
“I kind of…reminded him that he hadn’t tried to kill any of us recently.” At Tony’s sharp look, Bruce explained, “He was moaning about how he didn’t have any choice other than to be Thor’s lapdog. I was …making a rhetorical point. But he might take it as a challenge.”
“Great,” Tony said grimly.
“And-I really shouldn’t be telling you this, but if I don’t tell somebody, I might go out of my mind.”
“Hypothetical?” Tony suggested.
“No, my brain is too fried for that. Just, don’t be an asshole, and keep this to yourself, okay?”
That was a pretty tall order, but Tony figured he owed Bruce one, if not several, by this point. “Okay.”
“It turns out he didn’t just find out that his parents adopted him from an enemy race and never told him about it. He was adopted-he prefers the term ‘stolen’-from an enemy race that they taught him-or allowed him to be taught, same difference-are animalistic monsters that eat children.”
“Dude,” Tony said, impressed despite himself. “That is unimaginably fucked up.”
“I got the impression he figures the baby-eating thing isn’t really true. But I asked him all kinds of questions about the Jotun, and…as far as I can tell, he’s never heard anything remotely positive about them. They’re stupid, they have no culture of any kind. The only things they do have are disorganized armies-‘like packs of wild dogs’ is what he said-and ice magic, which is, of course, nowhere near as good as what they have on Asgard. It’s like if a black kid was raised by the KKK. And then dropped a nuke on Africa. I don’t know what the fuck else they expected him to do. The other guy wants to go to Asgard and crush Odin’s head like a grape.”
“Really?”
“No. I want the other guy to go to Asgard and crush Odin’s head like a grape. The other guy--” Bruce’s eyes went out of focus for a moment. “The other guy mostly feels sorry for him.”
“He can do that?”
“Yeah,” Bruce said, scrubbing his hand over his face. “That was the other thing we talked about. Monsters, and what it’s like to be one. You should talk to him.”
“About what? Being a monster?”
“Self-loathing.”
“I have no experience with that. I know exactly how awesome I am.”
Bruce stared at him. “You-you know what, just keep telling yourself that. I hate psychiatry. Give me a nice, clean case of Ebola any day.”
Tony made a show of looking over the row of bottles. “All out of Ebola. Want a Scotch?”
“Please.”
#
“Brother?” Thor asked, surprised to see Loki in the sitting room of their apartment. When his spar with Captain Rogers had ended, Jarvis had advised him that Bruce and Loki were having a personal conversation in that room, and it would be wise for him to delay his return. In doing so, he had ended up watching a movie with Clint and Natasha, and when it finished, Jarvis informed him that Bruce was long gone from their sitting room. He had expected that Loki would have retreated back to his bedroom, as he usually did if Thor did not make a point of drawing him out.
Loki glanced up at him, then turned his eyes back to the Starkpad. Sometime over the last few days, he had ceased hiding it when Thor approached. Thor hoped that was a good sign, though of what he was unsure.
“How have you occupied yourself this evening?” He hoped, but did not expect, that Loki would mention Bruce’s visit.
“Reading. As usual.”
“Ah.” Bruce had advised showing an interest in Loki’s pursuits, saying that asking about them would show that he considered them worthy activities, even if they were not ones he himself often engaged in. “What are you reading about?”
Loki’s eyes flicked up to his face again. “Monsters.”
“Oh.” Thor was not entirely sure what to make of that. “What of interest have you learned?”
“The mortals are fascinated with them. There is a saga-a real saga, like our-” He stopped, and started again, “Like the Asgardian ones. It was first written down around the time we were born. About a hero called Beowulf. Some nine centuries later, another mortal undertook to re-tell the story from the point of view of the monster the hero slew. Can you imagine such a thing?”
“I cannot,” Thor admitted. The point of tales was to glorify the hero, that others might learn from his example. “What could be learned from a story that centers on a monster?”
“I don’t know,” Loki said.
“Why, haven’t you read it yet?”
“No. I’m still reading the hero’s side of the tale.”
Sitting on the sofa opposite Loki, Thor rested his elbows on his knees, and thought. “Perhaps we should try it. With one of our adventures.” He didn’t quite dare suggest their battle against the Jotun. “The time we slew the fire-drake. What tale would a fire-drake tell of that day?”
Looking at him strangely, Loki set the tablet aside. Had Thor actually managed to ask a question that intrigued him? Such things seldom happened. “Perhaps they’d say, Listen, little ones, this is what happened to your Good Uncle Skull-crusher the Red, and I tell you that you may know.” Loki fell easily into the rhythm of storytelling, narrating how Skull-crusher decided to explore the world, to see what lay beyond the mountains where they traditionally made their home. As he flew over the forests and plains, he grew hungry, but found first only stringy hares, then hairy boars, until finally he stumbled across a magnificent feast-which Thor recognized only with difficulty as the small village the fire-drake had been terrorizing before they defeated it. Skull-crusher ate one delicacy after another-first a plump sow, then a tender calf, then a tough but flavorsome ox.
The fire-drake had begun its assault by devouring a family-young mother, toddling infant, and gray-bearded husband.
In Loki’s tale, Skull-crusher slept, dreaming of bringing a bride to this feasting table, of raising a brood of hatchlings on the ample fare the new land provided. He woke again as another meal walked right up to his maw, and thought of how right it was to eat these creatures that did not know to fear him. He roasted one with his flame-that had been Hogun, Thor remembered-when, suddenly, one bullock rose up from the ground, swinging a weapon no larger than a hatchling’s egg-tooth. Skull-crusher’s world exploded in pain and darkness as the bull’s tiny weapon lodged in his eye.
Loki described the six of them swarming over the dying drake’s body like ants on the body of a mouse, dealing one tiny blow after another until it was dead, then cleaving off its claws and scraping away scales, for whatever unknown, animalistic purpose they might have.
“So that, little ones, is why Father weeps when he speaks his brother’s name. His brother, who was torn apart by monsters that lurk beyond our mountains, laying false feasts as traps for hungry dragons.” Loki sat back, his posture signaling that the tale was finished. “And then perhaps there would be drinking, and the drake’s nephews would race around the feasting-tables, pretending to slay tiny monsters.”
Thor knew that fire-drakes did not have feast-tables, and he was sure that Loki knew it too. But the image recalled him to their shared childhood, when at feasts they would listen to the adults’ tales for as long as they could bear to remain still-or, to be more accurate, for as long as Thor could bear to remain still; Loki had always had more tolerance for tales than he did-then leave their benches to enact the tales’ most dramatic moments.
They had, of course, slain a great many imaginary Jotun, there in the feasting-hall.
Cravenly shying away from that notion, Thor said, “Did you truly weave this tale just now, brother?”
“Of course.”
“I marvel at your skill.” Loki hadn’t quite managed to make it rhyme-that would be quite a feat, on the spur of the moment-but that difference, combined with the usual rhythm of sagas, made the tale seem at once both familiar and strange, and though it had in reality been translated from an alien tongue. “I never thought to wonder what the fire-drake was doing so far from home.” In truth, a fire-drake was unlikely to have so complex a motivation as exploration, but he recalled how the beast’s one remaining eye had rolled in terror after Thor’s initial attack, as though in confusion as to why such terrible things were happening to it. The drake would not have thought them heroes. “And of course it would be a warning-story, since the drake did not win.”
Loki smiled, with what Thor thought-hoped-was genuine pleasure.
“Later-after you’ve read it-will you tell me the tale of the monster Beowulf and the hero that he slew?”
“Perhaps,” Loki answered.
#
Tony did go to talk to Loki, a few days later. Not about self-loathing-he wanted to see for himself what had moved Bruce to rage and the other guy to pity. Before he went, he took the precaution of asking Thor what Asgardians thought about Jotun. He wouldn’t have put it past Loki to be trolling the shit out of them, geas or no geas, but from what Thor said, if anything, Loki had been under-selling it. “We are taught that they are mindless beasts who wish only to destroy,” Thor had said, shaking his head. “But it cannot be true, can it? My brother is the cleverest man I know.”
“Present company excepted, I hope,” Tony quipped, but Thor had shaken his head.
Now he activated the door chime and stepped through into the brothers’ apartment at the same time. “Loki?” he called out. He knew Thor wasn’t here-he and Steve were busy planning more community-based superheroing. Tony had a feeling Thor was also trying to guilt Steve into helping with Loki’s redemption; between the two of them, Tony had no idea who would manage to out-earnest the other.
“He’s in the first guest bedroom, sir,” Jarvis said.
“Thanks.” Tony headed for it. It felt a little weird to be wandering through Thor’s space uninvited, but he wasn’t about to ask Loki’s permission to go where he pleased in his own tower.
Loki sat up on his bed, propped up on several pillows, a tablet on his knees. He glared up at Tony like a teenager whose mom had just come into his room.
“Hey. I want to talk to you. You can come out, or I can come in.”
Stiffly, looking murderous, Loki stood and brushed past Tony, heading for the living room, tablet in hand.
Catching up to him, Tony took the tablet out of his hand. “Whatcha reading?” he asked, glancing at it. He knew from Jarvis that Loki had somehow stumbled across the syllabus for a literature course called “The monster inside of us: representations of monstrosity from Beowulf to the present,” and was working his way through the reading list.
“Frankenstein,” Loki answered, as Tony handed the tablet back.
“You know, the mere existence of the Starkpad Kindle app causes me real, physical pain. I pretty much had to let them develop it-market share, blah-blah-blah-but would it kill you to get your content on Starktunes? And how is it you can install apps, but you haven’t figured out typing yet?” Loki was still starting his internet browsing sessions with the Wikipedia alphabetic index; Tony didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Loki blinked at him slowly. “The geas,” he finally said. “Does not permit me to type.”
“Really? Shit.” Somehow, Tony had never thought of that. In that case, the Wikipedia thing was actually a pretty decent work-around. He’d bookmarked it, along with a handful of other useful sites, when he was setting the tablet up for Thor, and he supposed if you had to, you could get almost anywhere by following link trails out from Wikipedia. Still, “There has got to be a better solution than that. Let me think about it.” Loki could talk to Jarvis when Jarvis asked him questions, so maybe a search engine that displayed a question above the text box? “Let me see that again.” He took the tablet, opened a word-processing document, and typed, What do you want to search for?
When he handed the tablet back, Loki frowned at it.
“Does that work? It’s an experiment. See if you can type something.”
Loki glared at him for a moment, then sat on the sofa, putting the tablet on the coffee table in front of him.
Right, broken arm would make it a little difficult to hold the tablet and type at the same time.
Loki poised his fingers over the virtual keyboard for a moment, then shook his head. “No.”
“That’s weird. It can’t be that the question’s too vague. You answer vague questions all the time. And you answer questions from Jarvis, too-I’ve seen you do it. What’s the difference?”
It was a rhetorical question, but Loki answered, “Perhaps it is that Jarvis is a…being, and this is a thing.”
Maybe. “Would the geas make that distinction? How does it know?”
“It doesn’t. The geas isn’t a being, either.”
“I know it’s not a being,” Tony answered, not entirely truthfully. It was more that it had never occurred to him that it might be. He was glad it wasn’t, though-that would make the whole thing about a hundred times creepier. “But what is it? How does it distinguish between when you can talk and when you can’t?”
With a sigh that suggested it was the stupidest question Loki had ever heard, he explained, “It is…a set of rules-‘if that, then this.’ Like one of your computer programs, perhaps.”
“Awesome. If it’s a program, we can hack it,” Tony said, forgetting for a moment that he didn’t really want this particular program to be hacked. “How do we get at the source code?” Loki might not understand that. “What are the rules? The if-then statements?”
“I don’t know.”
“How can you not know?” If there was a program running in Tony’s head, the first thing he’d do was look at the source code.
“Odin has concealed it from me,” Loki explained, as if to a small child, “because if I could access it, I would, as you say, hack it.”
“Oh.” Tony didn’t mind the idea of a program running in his head, but the idea of a program somebody else had put there was pretty unpleasant, and a program somebody else had put there and he couldn’t read was downright nightmarish. He always let Jarvis look over code alterations before he installed them; as far as he was concerned, that was just basic decency. “So you’ve been trial-and-erroring out the workarounds.” No wonder some of them were pretty kludge-y. “What about the-what is it, the binding?-on your magic. Is that the same kind of thing? A program?”
“No.”
Right, those had all been yes-or-no questions. “Where am I wrong?”
“My magic isn’t bound. It’s gone. Amputated.”
That sounded pretty nightmarish, too. “How does that even work? I’ve been thinking, since you and Bruce worked on that medication, magic is kind of like science. You couldn’t just reach into my head and scoop out all the science. Or could you? With magic? Or not you, since you’re, you know, mojo-less. But could someone? And, follow-up question, how?”
Loki’s lips twitched. “Perhaps. It would be difficult to do so without removing a great deal else and leaving you a drooling idiot. One would have to remove your understanding of the principles of science, and your memories of having learned them. And perhaps even the mental machinery which would allow you to independently derive them. It would be quite a challenge.”
“So that’s not what Odin did to you,” Tony mused. “It’s different, somehow. How’s it different?”
After thinking for a moment, Loki said, “Magic is a body of knowledge, like science, but it is also…the closest analogy would be a set of tools. You spoke of the spell-the molecule I described to Dr. Banner. Magic allows-would have allowed-me to sense the necessary…what you would call the necessary elements…and to draw them from the surrounding-what Aesir would call elements. Earth, water, air, and so on. And then to form the…” He paused to search for the unfamiliar term. “The chemical bonds necessary to unite them into the molecule.”
“So Odin…took away your toolbox,” Tony said. “But you’d still know how to use the tools if you had them?”
That, apparently, wasn’t enough of a question to complete the if-then statement. It apparently wasn’t right, either-Loki made a small, wordless sound of disapproval.
“Where am I wrong?”
“You forget that the tools are part of one’s being. It is-you would not understand.”
“Maybe not,” Tony agreed. “It sounds like it sucks donkey-balls, though. Which, you know, considering you attacked my planet, I’m kind of okay with. Is it permanent? The-amputation?” if it really was like an amputation, Tony was a little less okay with it than he pretended. Maybe it was the only way to make Loki safe to be around, but the idea of taking away part of somebody’s self as a punishment was…kind of icky. Morally and physically.
“I’m not certain.”
“That sucks, too. Odin didn’t tell you?” Normally, Tony would have said “your dad” or something like it, just to piss Loki off, but after what Bruce had told him about Odin’s racism, that didn’t seem funny anymore.
“No.”
“So that’s…that’s rough. Your mojo was like your main thing, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“So what, uh, where do you go from there? What do you have going for you now?”
Loki stood, very quickly. “Nothing. Is that what you want to hear? I am going to my chamber.” He started for the hallway.
“Wait, Loki,” Tony called.
Loki turned and glared back at him, venomously.
“I wasn’t trying to bust your balls. I was trying to do, you know.” Loki stared at him. “Empathy. I don’t know if you guys have that. Understanding, what somebody else is feeling? Maybe it’s a mortal thing. I’m not very good at it. Which is fine, because I’m awesome at so many other things,” he added, just in case Loki shared Bruce’s misconception that self-loathing was something they had in common. Reaching across the coffee table, he picked up Loki’s tablet. “You forgot this.”
He held it out, and eventually, Loki returned and took it out of his hand.
“I feel like Snow White,” Tony quipped. At Loki’s look of confusion, he explained, “She’s a cartoon character. Birds eat out of her hands. I think. Since we’re pals now, you really should offer me a drink.”
Loki gave Tony his are you fucking with me look, then flashed some kind of Asgardian gang sign at the corner of the room.
“What may I do for you, Loki?”
“You can offer Stark a drink.”
“Mr. Stark, would you like a drink?” Jarvis asked.
“Jarvis does hand signals now? I’m not sure whether to be creeped out or impressed. I’m going to go with impressed. Since we’re pals and everything. Yes, I would like a drink. Do you have Scotch?”
“No,” Loki said.
Leaning back in his seat, Tony clapped his hands. “Yes, you do. Cupboard above the refrigerator. I hid it there before you moved in so I wouldn’t be stuck drinking Budweiser if I visited Thor. Go, look.” He motioned with his hands. Loki checked the cupboard indicated, and found the bottle Tony had left there. He brought back two glasses along with it.
“You know what else this tells us? The geas makes you say what you think is true. Maybe you already knew that? I kind of suspected, but the only way to be sure was to run the experiment.” Tony took the bottle from Loki-he didn’t seem to know what to do with it-and cracked the seal. Then he gestured from the glasses Loki still held to the table. “Set ‘em up.”
Loki set the glasses down, and Tony poured. Handing one to Loki, he held up the other. “L’chaim.” He drank, and after a moment, Loki did too, cautiously. “See?” Tony said. “Here we are, having a nice, civilized drink. Nobody got thrown out of a window, nobody got pounded into the floor by a Hulk…it’s progress.”
Loki apparently agreed; at least, he sat back down on the couch, drink in hand.
“How come Jarvis calls you ‘Loki’ anyway? He usually does Mr. Lastname.”
“I have no surname,” Loki said loftily. “I commanded him to call me Prince Loki, but he refused on the grounds that he is an American AI. We compromised on Loki.”
“Good for you, Jarvis,” Tony said.
“Thank you, sir.”
“While you’re up, give us a whiteboard,” Tony added. “Let’s get started on that search interface.” Part of Tony’s eagerness was that he really did want to help-as far as he was concerned, internet access was a human right-and partially, he figured Loki would be a bit more forthcoming about how magic worked if there was something in it for him.
#
Stark swaggered into the sitting room. “As though he owned the place” was the mortal expression, but Loki suppose it didn’t quite capture the flavor of the moment, since Stark did, in fact, own the place. “Tablet,” he said, snapping his fingers and holding out his hand.
He had failed, on his first visit, to find a way of overcoming what he insisted on referring to as Loki’s “typing disability.” Since then, he’d returned several more times to try out new ideas, all of which likewise failed. As much as Loki would have appreciated being able to search the internet more effectively, he was somewhat relieved that he didn’t have to live with the shame of seeing Stark easily overcome the geas that thwarted Loki so thoroughly.
Loki raised an eyebrow at Stark; he rolled his eyes and said, “May I please see your tablet, oh mighty god of not being able to type?”
Hoping that name didn’t catch on, Loki surrendered it. “I suppose.”
Stark took the tablet, saying, “So it turns out there’s no way I can trick the geas into thinking the tablet’s alive.”
Stark also insisted on referring to the geas as though it had volition of its own, despite knowing that it did not. He claimed that referring to it in that way was “easier” than finding the words to describe his feeble understanding of how it actually worked. It was a baffling habit, since Loki’s investigations into mortal science suggested that it depended as thoroughly on precise definitions as magic did.
“So the only option, really,” Stark went on, inputting something into the tablet as he spoke “was to put in something we already know you can talk to. There! Meet your new Jarvis app.” He handed the tablet back.
There was a new icon on the screen. Propping the tablet on his knees, Loki tapped to open it, and a black box popped up. Script appeared, one character at a time, reading, “What may I help you with?”
Another tap brought up the virtual keyboard-fortunately, he remembered how to summon it, even though it was useless to him. One-handed, he typed, “I would like to see the periodic table, please.”
The internet browser opened a tab displaying a list of Google results-something else Loki was familiar with, but had not previously been able to use.
“Does it work? Do I really have to ask? Of course it works,” Stark babbled.
“It works,” Loki confirmed.
“I could have just done that from the beginning,” Stark said, “but frankly, I didn’t think Jarvis would be up for it. Apparently he likes you or something. I set it up to just punt your searches to Google; his search engine is better, but you don’t really need that kind of power. This way the drain on his processing power is insignificant. And the gooey-the interface-is pretty minimal, because who cares? Gets the job done, and it’s not like I have to market the thing. You want to thank me, or something?”
“No,” Loki answered.
“Let me guess-is ‘want’ too strong a word?”
“Yes.”
“Would you rather die than thank me?”
“No.”
“Okay. I’m going to take that as a thank-you, because you’re…you. ”
In truth, if Stark had thought to ask if he was thankful, he would have been forced to answer, “Yes.” To fumble through the internet through groping, twisted, half-blind paths, when he knew how easy it was for others was entirely too reminiscent of how he had felt when he first faced the world without his magic. He’d felt half-blind and crippled, as though he’d gone from having keen sight to seeing only light and shadow, and from having his own deft fingers to fumbling with bloody stumps.
He’d gotten used to it. But he didn’t particularly like being reminded.
“Right, so I have some real work to do now. Any questions, before I go?” Stark asked. “About the…” He gestured vaguely at the tablet.
“Yes.”
“Really? It’s pretty straightforward. What don’t you understand?”
Loki wished that he had phrased the question slightly differently. “Why did you do this?” He understood that Stark had been intrigued by the technical challenge, and likely curious to expand on his pitifully scant knowledge of magic. But linking Jarvis to the tablet was an obvious solution, offering no particular challenge.
Stark didn’t seem any more pleased to be asked the question than Loki had to be forced to ask it. “Really? We’re going there? I was being nice. I do that sometimes. On alternating Tuesdays. Is that everything?”
“Yes.” Loki nodded curtly, and Stark-thankfully-took himself out.
Being nice. Of all the insults Loki had been forced to swallow, that one was the most bitter. In truth, many of the Avengers had been being nice to him of late. Banner, with his talk of monsters and choices and excuses for Jotun barbarity. Stark, with his empathy and his apps. And Thor, of course, but he was in a category all his own. Cajoling Loki into telling him tales, as if they were children still, and trying, in his dim way, to understand. Even Rogers, who had been surprisingly, refreshingly hostile had been looking on him with something like pity.
Only Romanoff and Barton saw him with clear-eyed hatred. If they, too, succumbed to sentiment, to sympathy for the monster in their midst….
With a snarl, Loki shoved the tablet away from himself, and got up to pace.
“Loki?” Jarvis asked. “Are you well?”
“No,” Loki snapped. Next to the television, there was a particularly ugly statue of a dragon. Loki swept if off its pedestal; the resulting crash and spray of ceramic fragments satisfied him somewhat.
“Shall I summon Thor, or Dr. Banner?”
“No!” Loki waved his hand in the direction of Jarvis’s camera, making the gesture he’d once used to end a spell. Jarvis knew it meant that Loki had no further need of him-but whether he would obey the command was a different story. Stark’s servant was not bound to obey him. Was not even bound to obey Stark himself, if what the construct said was to be believed.
“Do you require assistance?”
“No!” Picking up a marble sphere, Loki hurled it in the direction of the camera.
#
“Brother, what is the meaning of this?” Thor had hurried back to the apartment when Tony had notified him that Loki was “having some kind of tantrum.” Loki was now standing in the middle of a scene of minor destruction, breathing heavily.
“My temper overcame me,” Loki said, kicking away a shard of pottery that Thor recognized had once been a figure of what the Midgardians imagined a dragon looked like. It had been red; lately, Thor had been thinking of it, privately, as Skull-crusher.
“Thor, do you need backup?” Captain Rogers’s voice came through the speaker in the kitchen; the one in the sitting room had been caved in by some heavy object.
“No,” Thor answered. “My brother is upset. I will deal with him.”
“I’m standing by, and Tony’s suiting up,” Rogers said. “If we get any sign you’re not in control of the situation, we’re coming in.”
“Very well,” Thor agreed. He was not particularly alarmed. Bruce had explained that his efforts to help Loki might provoke such an outburst at first. “He’s carrying a lot of anger,” Bruce had said. “Some of it very justified. Something tells me guys where you come from usually deal with their feelings by ignoring them or getting violent.”
Thor had had to admit the truth of Bruce’s words. So he had been expecting something like this-and really, compared to the scale upon which Loki was usually able to wreak destruction, a few broken ornaments were of little concern. “Loki, what troubles you?”
Loki looked away from him, breathing in sharply through his nose. “Oh, you know,” he said, his voice deceptively light. “The usual petty grievances and imagined slights, as you would say.”
Thor sighed. “I regret saying that your grievances were petty and imagined. As I have told you many times now. Did something happen to-lead you to feel our apartment needed redecoration?”
“No.”
Stepping around piles of debris into the kitchen area, Thor opened the freezer and took out the bottle of Midgardian liquor that was traditionally stored there. “Perhaps this will cool your anger,” he suggested, pouring two measures. After a moment’s thought, he transferred Loki’s share from the heavy-bottomed glass into a flimsy plastic tumbler. The glass would not do serious injury, if Loki chose to fling it at his head, but it would not be particularly pleasant, either.
For a moment, after Thor handed him his drink, Loki looked as if he would fling it at Thor’s head, but in the end he sighed, sat down on the low table between the two couches, and drank. Perhaps taking this as a sign that the mayhem was over, one of Stark’s cleaning robots emerged from a hatch in the wall and began ingesting shards of glass and pottery.
Thor sat on the sofa facing Loki, close enough that their knees were nearly brushing. “What troubles you so, brother?”
“I do not need your pity,” he answered, cutting his eyes away sharply. “Or desire your kindness.”
Thor suspected his clever brother was mistaken on that point, but chose not to pursue it. “What do you need?”
Loki gave him the look of amused disdain he wore whenever Thor fell for one of his stalest tricks. “The restoration--”
“Of your magic,” Thor finished. “Yes, I know. As you know that it is not within my power to grant. Although if it were, I could not do so until you have regained your reason and are no longer a danger to yourself and others.” Loki rolled his eyes at that; Thor ignored it. “What else do you need? Or want?”
“A realm. An army. And I’ve always fancied a temple of vestal virgins. Well. Not virgins, exactly.”
“That is also not within my power,” Thor noted. Clearly, Loki was not ready to give him a serious answer to that question. “You must find more appropriate ways to release your anger.” That was something Thor had been reading about in the materials Bruce had provided. Unfortunately, all of the article’s suggestions-punching a pillow, writing in a journal, or drawing a picture of how one felt, for instance-Thor would have been embarrassed to suggest. “If you wish to throw things, you could do so in the sparring-room.”
Loki’s look of contempt showed what he thought of that idea.
“What if I summon a sudden thunderstorm? You can go out on the balcony and laugh at all the people scurrying about trying not to get wet.” Loki had always enjoyed that, though it had been quite some time since he’d asked Thor to do it. “Would that cheer you?”
“It might,” Loki admitted.
“Then let us try,” Thor said.
#
“Can I take the suit off yet?” Tony asked Steve plaintively, as yet another rumble of thunder shook the building. They were all gathered in Steve’s apartment-it happened to be closest to Thor’s-waiting to see if it would be necessary to subdue Loki by force. A holographic display showed Jarvis’s camera feed of Loki and Thor, sitting on the edge of Thor’s balcony with their legs dangling over the edge, passing a bottle of Stoli back and forth. Loki looked pretty calm, and while Tony loved the suit, it was not at all comfortable for lounging.
“It looks like the emergency’s over,” Steve agreed. Gesturing at the display, he said, “I’ll keep this up for a while, just in case something changes, but you guys can go.”
“That’s it?” Clint asked. “We’re just going to…pretend this never happened? We should throw him in a cell, for at least a week. Teach him a lesson.”
“Clint,” Bruce pointed out, “he got pissed off and threw some stuff around in his own apartment. Is there anybody in this room who has not done that?”
“Me,” Steve volunteered. “I haven’t.”
Natasha added, “I don’t remember anyone rewarding me with a drink and a light show when I did it.”
Tony had to admit, Thor changing the weather to entertain Loki was a little bizarre to contemplate. And he was supposedly more responsible and level-headed now than he’d been even a little while ago. Maybe Thor had been in the habit of whipping up tornadoes or hurricanes when he had a temper tantrum. “Yeah, well, gods. What are you going to do? As long as he’s done throwing paperweights at my AI, I’m happy.”
“As am I, sir,” Jarvis said through the suit interface. “It was most disconcerting, having my camera suddenly taken out.”
“I’ll fix it as soon as it’s safe to go in there,” Tony promised him. The others looked at him a little oddly; Tony realized they hadn’t heard what Jarvis said. “Jarvis,” he explained. “He’s unhappy about his camera.”
“Thank you, sir,” Jarvis said, this time using the room’s speakers for everyone’s benefit.
#
Loki stayed out on the balcony for a while after Thor went inside, watching the storm die down. The method Thor had chosen for calming him was condescending-it had been decades since he’d asked Thor to entertain him in that way; the last time had been well before he came of age-but the gentle cushion of inebriation kept him from minding too much. On the streets below him, mortals folded their umbrellas and turned off the windshield wipers of their cars.
Now that he was calmer, Loki was embarrassed at his loss of temper. It seemed like something Thor would have done. Getting angry and throwing things had never been his style; he considered it much more effective to keep an outward air of calm, and quietly plot revenge.
He would have to teach the mortals a lesson about feeling pity for gods, but there were much cleverer-and more effective-ways to do it. Admittedly, all of the ways that sprang to mind were impossible in his current state: he couldn’t turn their hair-care products into snakes, or teleport them naked into different parts of the Tower, or even spread embarrassing rumors about them. But surely he could think of something.
Picking up the empty vodka bottle, Loki lurched to his feet and went inside. There was a brand-new camera in the corner, replacing the one Loki had broken earlier.
That, Loki really did almost feel bad about. Mother-Frigga-had never had any tolerance for throwing things at even the lowliest of servants, and Jarvis was, as near as he could tell, equivalent to majordomo of the house. In an ordinary house, he’d have expected at least a week of smoky fires and cold food in return for such an insult. He met the camera’s glittering single eye and nodded, doing his best not to look sheepish.
“May I help you?” Jarvis asked.
“No,” Loki said, and made the gesture dismissal, with thanks at the camera. It was ordinarily used for banishing a summoned spirit, but it was one of the ones he had taught Jarvis, and it was the thing he had to an apology.
#
A week or so later, what Bruce said Tony absolutely could not call Operation Tame The Savage Jotun (“That’s racist, Tony!”) seemed to have gotten back on track. Loki was back to skulking around, alternately being silent and as annoying as the geas would let him, but there were no more tantrums-at least, not any alarming enough that Jarvis felt the need to tell Tony about them.
Thor invited everyone to a movie night in their apartment, and apparently, this time Loki knew they were coming-Tony smelled his hand in the playlist, a double feature of the film version of Beowulf and the 1931 Frankenstein. Bruce suggested, tentatively, that it might be a good sign that Loki was interested in sharing his exploration into monstrosity with the rest of them.
They didn’t plan to all show up at once, but when Tony got off the elevator on the Asgardian brothers’ floor, the rest of the team were all loitering in the bland, lobby-like space outside the apartment. There was a small couch there-Tony had no idea why; the decorator he’d hired for the corporate levels had ordered dozens of them-and Natasha was sitting on it, Clint hovering at her shoulder. “Here I thought I was going to be fashionably late,” Tony joked.
Natasha unfolded to her feet. “Might as well get this over with.”
“Team movie night isn’t mandatory,” Steve pointed out, shooting her a sharp look.
“I like Thor just fine,” Natasha answered. “I’ve got no call to throw his invitations back in his face.”
They went in. Thor lollopped over like a great big Labrador puppy, grinning. “Friends!” he said, as if he hadn’t already seen most of them at various points earlier in the day. Scooping up a sixer of Bud from the coffee table, he offered them around. “Loki has made popcorn,” he added. “With-what did you say it was, brother?”
Loki emerged from the kitchen area, holding a large blue plastic bowl. “Fleur de sel,” he answered, setting the bowl down in the center of the coffee table.
“It, uh, looks great,” Bruce said.
“You have some kind of gizmo you can use to scan it for poison?” Natasha asked Tony in an undertone that, nonetheless, carried. Loki stiffened up a little at that, looking hurt, but honestly, Tony thought it was a sensible precaution, and reached for his phone.
Before he could get it out, Steve reached down and plucked a kernel out of the bowl. Popping it into his mouth, he chewed slowly. “It’s fine,” he said, after he had swallowed. “Super-senses, remember? I’d be able to smell or taste poison.”
Natasha nodded, and Loki relaxed. They all sat down with beers and handfuls of popcorn, and Thor started the movie.
Tony wasn’t very familiar with Beowulf-he’d skipped it when it was assigned in high school-but the movie was okay. It seemed right up Thor’s alley, lots of burly Viking types drinking heavily and fighting some kind of hideous troll-thing. The part where the main Viking guy fought the monster buck-ass naked was a little weird, but whoever shot and edited the thing had managed to avoid any dick shots, so it wasn’t as weird as it could have been.
Then, on the screen, Beowulf ripped off the monster’s arm. And, more or less simultaneously, the popcorn bowl exploded with a flash of green fire.
#
“Fire suppression system activating,” Jarvis said, and flame-retardant foam sprayed down from the ceiling onto the smoldering coffee table. “No further explosives have been detected.”
Sticking his head up from behind the sofa, Steve got his bearings. All of them had reacted instantly when the explosion went off. Steve had grabbed Tony-who happened to be nearest, and who his combat reflexes read as “civilian” out of the suit-and dove over the back of the couch with him. Clint had done likewise on the other sofa, though he hadn’t grabbed the closest thing nearby to a civilian-that would be Bruce-to take with him. Thor was on his feet, Mjolnir in hand. Natasha was pinning Loki down in a manner that Tony would probably make a lewd remark about as soon as he could manage, holding a knife to his throat.
Bruce, though, was still sitting where he had been on the opposite sofa, lightly coated in fire-retardant foam. Steve couldn’t tell if he was looking a little green around the gills or not.
It took Steve only a fraction of a second to make his own assessment of his team-no one down-but he asked anyway, “Is everyone all right?”
Tony popped up next to him. “I think you wrenched something throwing me on the floor,” he answered, rubbing the small of his back theatrically. “Jarvis, cut the movie. What the hell just happened?”
The movie stopped. “Analyzing,” Jarvis said.
“Cap, you got any orders for me?” Natasha asked.
“Stand by,” Steve told her. “Loki, did you do this?” It seemed pretty darned likely, but Steve didn’t want to jump to any unfair conclusions.
“Yes,” Loki answered.
That answered that. “We’ll take him down to the cell. Romanoff, Barton, you’re with me.”
Steve thought that Thor might object, but he just shook his head, lowering the hammer as he did so, and said, “Brother,” in a sorrowful way as Natatsha hauled Loki to his feet.
Loki raised his chin and glared at him, then turned for the door, not even waiting for any of the Avengers to hustle him along. He didn’t give them the least bit of trouble on the way down to the cell, walking along like they were his bodyguards or something, an irritating half-smile on his face.
“Put him in here,” Steve ordered, opening the cell opposite the one where they’d previously stashed Loki. If he wanted to be down here for some reason of his own, that might make a difference.
“Jarvis, I want constant monitoring on this cell,” he continued as Natasha shoved Loki inside. She wasn’t particularly gentle about it, but Steve wasn’t in the mood to call her on it. “If he does anything even remotely suspicious, notify me and Tony immediately.”
“Yes, Captain,” Jarvis said.
They went back upstairs to Thor’s place. Bruce and Tony were standing at a holographic display; Thor was cleaning up the scattered popcorn and casting sheepish looks at the blackened crater in the middle of what used to be a coffee table.
“Report?” Steve asked.
“Chemical explosion involving a previously unknown compound,” Tony answered. A gesture at the display brought up a molecular diagram; Steve figured it probably meant something to Bruce and Tony. “Planted on the underside of the bowl in two packets, separated by a dissolving membrane. When the membrane dissolved, the two agents combined, and-boom!” Tony spread his hands, miming an explosion. “It’s pretty good stuff. I’ll have to do some experiments, but I think we can use it in the next batch of exploding arrows,” he added to Clint.
“Where did he get it?” Steve asked.
“Synthesized it, I’ll bet,” Tony said. “Jarvis is still going through his video footage to see when and how, but it’s made out of all common elements. Our old friend carbon-or should I say, bones-of-giants-oxygen, nitrogen, sodium.” He shrugged.
“One of the kinds of magic he does-used to do-is basically chemistry,” Bruce added.
Tony nodded. “Except he uses magic to pull the elements he needs out of-wherever-and to hook them up into molecules. He must have figured out how to do it the puny mortal way. He didn’t get into any of the labs, did he, Jarvis?”
“No, sir,” Jarvis responded. “My review of the surveillance recordings indicates that he performed most, if not all, of his experiments in the kitchen.”
“How’d you miss that?” Tony asked.
“He’s also been teaching himself to cook,” Jarvis explained. “I’m afraid I did not monitor his activities in that area in sufficient detail.” It might have been Steve’s imagination, but he thought the AI sounded almost embarrassed. “I also failed to recognize the import of his researches into basic chemistry.”
“Aw, don’t be too hard on yourself, J,” Tony said. “Let me see some of that footage.”
The molecular diagram was replaced by video of the apartment’s kitchen. Most of what Loki was doing-mixing things, measuring things, heating things-looked like normal kitchen activities, except for a small bowl full of what looked like water, that Loki periodically fussed with for no apparent reason.
“In retrospect,” Jarvis said, “it is obvious that he is using direct oxidation to extract chlorine from table salt.”
“And making scrambled eggs,” Bruce noted.
“That’s pretty damn sneaky,” Tony said, sounding admiring.
“My brother has always been clever,” Thor said, joining them. “I did not realize he was planning this, either. It is fortunate that no one was hurt.”
“It could’ve been a lot worse,” Tony said, nodding. “If he’d given us each individual bowls, or used about twice as much explosive, we’d be having a really different conversation. Consisting mostly of screaming.”
“Now can we keep him locked up?” Clint asked.
“I think we have to,” Steve said, with an apologetic look at Thor. “He--”
Before Steve could complete the thought, Tony interrupted. “Did anyone hear a single word that I just said?”
“Yes,” Natasha answered. “Loki could have killed us.”
“Exactly,” Tony said, snapping his fingers and pointing at her.
Natasha batted his hand away. “Don’t do that.”
“Green fire is, like, Loki’s signature move, right?” Tony asked Thor.
“It is one of the first magics he learned,” Thor agreed. “Mother despaired that he’d ever stop setting the curtains on fire when one of our friends annoyed him.”
“So I’m betting he has a pretty clear read on the difference between ‘enough to blow a hole in the coffee table’ and ‘enough to kill us all.’”
Bruce said slowly, “You’re suggesting he didn’t actually want to do any real harm.”
“Welcome to the end of the thought process!” Tony spread his hands. “Exploding popcorn bowl. Classic prank. Had a buddy in college who pulled shit like that all the time. No, wait, that was me.” He grinned like they all ought to congratulate him on his cleverness.
“It’s a little bit more than a prank,” Bruce pointed out. “Even if he planned on it not doing any real damage, it could have gone wrong-and if he knows this stuff as well as you think he does, he knew that, too.”
“Mother chided him often of the danger of such pranks,” Thor confirmed. “I will speak to him in the morning, after he has had time to think about what he has done. If he is unrepentant, I will not object to keeping him confined for some time. I like it not, but I know it is your way of punishing wrongdoers,” he added.
Steve was glad Thor was being reasonable. With Tony seeming more amused than anything, if Thor had objected to taking any actions against Loki, the team would have been seriously divided. “How would he be punished on Asgard for something like this?”
“Now?” Thor said. “Likely he would not be; he is already under a heavy sentence. Though the All-Father would remind him that he has not yet been declared outlaw, and still could be. When we were children, Mother would have insisted that he make good the damages himself and tender an apology to the victim of his prank.”
“Good,” Steve said. “We’ll do that.” If Loki was going to act like a child, they’d treat him like one. “He can come out of the cell when he’s ready to clean up this mess and apologize. Tony, you and Jarvis figure something out so this doesn’t happen again.”
“Will do,” Tony said cheerfully.
#
“No,” Loki said, enjoying Thor’s look of confused disbelief. That the Avengers asked only that clean up his mess and apologize showed how laughably they misunderstood him. If an explosion in the middle of their gathering was not enough to convince them that he wasn’t an errant child to be corrected and cosseted, he didn’t know what would.
Destroying their city, perhaps, but he’d done that already, and they seemed determined to overlook it.
Somewhat to his surprise, Thor had left him to stew in the cell all night. It was incredibly tedious-he didn’t even have his tablet-but, knowing he was being monitored, he was careful to project an air of complete unconcern.
Thor had come calling in the morning, bringing with him a tray of coffee, toast, and porridge. Loki was careful not to show too much interest in that, either-the cell he occupied as not stocked with food and drink, as the other one had been, and he was hungry, but he wouldn’t give Thor the satisfaction of seeming grateful.
After urging him to eat, Thor presented the terms for Loki’s release from the cell. “Why will you not do these things, brother?” Thor asked after he refused.
“I do not wish to,” Loki answered coolly.
“You will remain in this cell until you do,” Thor warned him, as though Loki might have missed that.
He shrugged his good shoulder.
Sighing heavily, like a tired hound, Thor pushed aside the tray that Loki was ignoring and sat beside him on the cell’s cot. “Such a jest could have seriously injured our friends. What say you to that?”
“They aren’t our friends. And it was not a jest. If you are truly thick enough to believe it was, I’m glad you are no kinsman of mine.”
“I didn’t, really,” Thor admitted. “Although Tony believes that the size of the explosion was calculated to avoid serious harm.” Looking at Loki sidelong, he asked, “Was it?”
“Yes,” Loki said, trying not to show that he minded being asked.
“Why?”
“I have no particular desire to die,” Loki answered. “As I expect would be the result if I killed or maimed one of your friends while I’m still captive.”
“I am glad that you do not desire death,” Thor said, missing the point as usual. “Dr. Banner feared that you might.”
Dr. Banner, Loki thought, was entirely too invested in the idea that he and Loki had anything in common.
“Why did you carry out this-attack, if not to cause injury?”
“Because that’s what enemies do,” Loki snapped. How obvious did he need to make it?
Thor just looked at him sorrowfully, and eventually got to his feet and left.
Which was fine. Precisely what Loki wanted, in fact.
#
Two days on, Loki was still refusing to cooperate. Clint wasn’t the most emotionally perceptive guy around, but he could tell that Thor was pretty bummed about it. The way he kept bringing up the video feed from the cell on any nearby screen and sighing lugubriously was a big clue.
“The way I see it,” Clint said as Thor divided his attention between a pizza lunch and the Loki-cam, “if I can stomach apologizing to that fucking psychopath, he can damn well stay in there until he rots if he doesn’t feel like apologizing to us.”
“He’s choosing to be in there,” Bruce added to Thor. “Although ‘fucking psychopath’ might not be the most, uh, most useful description.”
“Clint has the most cause of any of us to be wary of my brother,” Thor said, like it was real fucking big of him.
It reminded Clint of the way Thor was always making excuses for Loki-he’s troubled, he was bullied, our dad was a racist shitbag.
Not that Thor said “racist shitbag,” of course, but that seemed to be the gist of it. He had to admit, teaching a kid that his entire race were monsters was all kinds of fucked up, but Loki wasn’t a kid anymore. “Personal responsibility,” Clint said. “It’s not just for puny mortals.”
“The geas makes it harder for him to apologize,” Bruce pointed out. “I mean, he can’t just totally fake it.” He didn’t come out and say, Like you did, but Clint figured it was strongly implied.
“Trickster god,” Tony reminded them. “If he can’t come up with something that’ll get past the geas, he’s not trying hard enough.”
“I’m afraid he is not trying at all,” Thor added, with a shake of his head. “He says that he does not wish to make good his wrongdoing. If he could but begin with this one small thing, perhaps….” He trailed off, shaking his head again.
“That’s the thing,” Bruce said. “You can’t want it for him.”
Link to Part 6