[Fateverse Side Story: NC Bundle] Piping in the Valley
Fifteen suffers some indigestion. With the aid of two Theorists, she intends to cast an echo into a distant valley.
Warnings: AU - Fateverse. Rule 63. Fifteen!Loki (…well, almost all Lokis…) is bad at interpersonal relationships. Oblique Infinity War spoilers with canon divergence (a universe where Everybody Lives and all the Aesir and Sakaarians are kicking it on their spaceship like when Asgard was floating over Kansas in the comics, but Loki is still dead for Reasons™). language: pg-13 (primetime plus f*** and g**damn).
Pairing: none/gen.
Timeline: later in the same week as The Coin.
Disclaimer: Marvel owns the characters, I just made this crazy dollhouse called the Fateverse.
Notes: See postscript; linked footnotes may open in a new tab.
Visit The Fateverse Glossary for terms and concepts, and The Fateverse Appendix for Nodes, branches, and important people.
Piping in the Valley[ 1]
“I need an extrapolation,” Loki says, staring at the math on the wall beside her.
“I’ve got work of my own to do[ 2].”
She tips her head, and the fall of her hair reminds Wade of his mother.
“Piss off,” he says, in case she misunderstood.
“Just as well. Two-oh-seven[ 3] said you wouldn’t be able to do it.”
“Blake is an obsessive moron. Like most Thors.”
“He’s obsessive!” she laughs. “And Six said you had no sense of humor.”
“Piss entirely off,” he growls.
“I’m going to discharge a resonant imprint-a ‘soul fragment,’ one might say. Your extrapolation would determine what sort of body it gets, if it gets one at all.”
That…
Actually sounds kinda cool.
“You have a new home in mind for the imprint?” he asks.
“I do.”
“I have to go there to get an accurate read.”
“Will this afternoon be convenient?”
He glares. “Nothing about you is convenient to me,” he says. “But I have good aim and don’t need as much sleep as most people, so it’s not like I’ll lose any time. Let’s get this over with.”
“Skuld, confirm solidification of locus at previous assignment.”
The bracelet flashes green. ~Confirm.~
“Open a conduit to one year after the locus, majority branch.”
~Warning: destination branch is marked red and uninitiated.~
“Acknowledged.”
“Not the central branch?” Wade asks, curious.
She looks at him like he’s an idiot. “It’s almost impossible to make direct changes to the central trunk of the MM bundle; its reactions to tuning are ridiculously disproportionate and often unpredictable. Better to work in a neighboring branch and let the resonance propagate naturally, if we’re going to do something like adding an entire person.”
They are invisible when they step through (spectral to Wade’s eyes, but he knows Fifteen is too old and experienced to slip on something like that).
A few Avengers are shaking hands with civilians-weepy, ragged, just-got-rescued types.
They have a Thor, short-haired and scarred, and his mismatched eyes skip from one grateful face to the next with impatience and disappointment.
A dark-skinned hottie in white armor punches him in the bicep. “What’s wrong?” she asks sternly, like she’s seen it before and noticed a pattern.
Thor grimaces. “I…lost someone. I’m told he’s gone for good, but my heart will not listen-I still reach for him without thinking, still listen for the sound of his voice, still look for his face in crowds.”
She leers. “Pfft, knew there was something off with the way you looked at guys… I mean, not that there’s anything wrong with a bit of argr[ 4] between friends.”
He scowls at her. “It’s not like that,” he retorts. “Have you never keenly felt the absence of someone you didn’t care to bed?”
“You know I have,” she replies gloomily. “Look…I didn’t mean to mock your pain, all right? I actually thought it might cheer you.”
“Then I thank you for your kind intentions. Someday, the pain will leave me.”
She raises her eyebrows. “Yeah. Someday, you’ll die.”
Fifteen rubs her temples like she has a headache.
Probability eclipses possibility in Wade’s mind.
A child. A boy. Frost-giant. Blank slate. Spoiled and clever and sarcastic as hell. Thor cries and laughs and makes promises to himself. He’ll do better. Loki will not become what he was. Kindness changes everything. Bruce and Tony like him. Carol and Hope make it their business to turn the hesitant ones to non-hostility, at least. The Valkyrie takes to him quickly. The Avengers bring him on as a member of their junior team. He becomes a hero in his own right, and then a king with a crown of ice.
“Holy-fucking-moose knuckles!” Wade manages.
“Is that good or bad?”
“Yes?” he hazards. “Do we have clearance for this kind of resonance boost?”
“Give me a percentage, and I’ll ask.”
He thinks.
Carry the four…sub in the current mean stability for the bundle…
“Anywhere from two to frigging eighteen percent, but with increasing chance of schism.”
“Skuld, request sysadmin clearance for local resonance boost, two to eighteen with escalating schism.”
The bracelet beeps.
Seven seconds later, it beeps again. ~Clearance granted for fifteen percent boost with moderate propagation. Warning: main trunk may resist alteration and schism.~
“We good with that?” asks Wade.
“If it wipes that damn sad look off one Thor’s face, it’s worth it.”
“Well…let’s figure out how to do this, since the genfab facility can’t quite manage frost giants.”
“I can deal with that part. I’ll just call Thor; I promised he could observe for his application project.”
After another ten minutes, a hipster viking shows up at Wade’s office with a shiny metal suitcase and an annoyingly placid smile.
“Doctor Wilson,” the big guy says politely.
“Doctor Blake,” he replies, trying not to sneer.
“For the sake of scientific completeness, could you describe how you extrapolated the imprint’s potential future or futures?”
“Not really. I go to a place, I focus on an individual or a specific chain of events, and I can see a kind of…choose-your-own-adventure. The closer to the present, the more probability branches I can see, the more definite I can be about what’s going to happen.”
“Fascinating,” Blake says, like some demented, man-bun-wearing Thor-Spock hybrid.
“I’m not part of your senior application,” Wade grumbles.
“No, that’s Doctor Rogers[ 5],” the dumb blond agrees easily. “But it is interesting that Wades can be so individual, so distinctive in their talents and experience, yet be identical in resonance signature. It’s my understanding that the only reason we have a Smart Node with intuition is that its base materials were exposed to your presence for a prolonged period during moments of high emotion. No other Wade would do.”
“The very idea of that thing makes me sick.”
“It’s a better conversationalist than you are,” Fifteen says.
“Piss all the fucking way off into the goddamn sunset, dickhead.”
Blake just happily twiddles with his instruments. “Even Six doesn’t know how that Node works, and he’s the one who commissioned and programmed it. It’s classified as an artificial consciousness now-whole new term. It says it’s gradually remembering your life.”
Wade glares at the guy. “Wow, thanks for giving me nightmares for the next forty years. You totally weren’t already creepy enough with the way you voluntarily babysit random Loki iterations.”
“It’s hardly random,” says Fifteen.
“Loki,” Blake warns.
“He picks the cutest, sweetest-looking ones,” she faux-whispers. “Whether or not they’re actually sweet.”
Wade makes a face.
Fifteen gestures. “Thor, if all your scanning equipment is in place, let’s begin.”
“Everything except what will be attached to the body before transfer.”
Wade shudders. “Make it quick. And don’t go poking around while you’re in there.”
“I assure you, your private life is of absolutely no interest to me,” she grunts, laying her hands against his temples almost exactly as Strange had done to the Traveler. “Focus on the futures you saw.”
Her magic feels like snowmelt down his neck, chilly and invigorating. She coats the fragments of his visions with it, seeks whatever information she needs to build a body for the hero-Loki he saw.
One of her hands moves away, and he can hear a sound like glitter. Seriously, if glitter were a sound, it’d be the sound going on right now. Like…sand blowing gently over glass, plus something like a dozen tiny icicles shattering, with an impression of chimes (but no actual chimes what the actual fuck).
“Thor,” she says, and her voice is tense with strain.
Blake shuffles around quickly.
Fifteen takes her other hand off Wade, so he risks opening his eyes and having a look.
A blue-skinned little boy of eightish is standing between her outstretched palms, dressed in simple grey linens. His hair is black and curly like some kid’s doll, and Blake’s electrodes peek out from under it (there’s another set on Fifteen). His heavy-lidded eyes are ruby-red and unfocused.
In three voices, she speaks. “And now have you come to us, child of frost. Through lies, through pain, through hate, through love. Through sacrifice. You who have given yourself freely-what one boon would you ask?”
And the little boy says, “Make me new.”
She cups his cheeks and kisses his brow. “Then forget, brave boy.”
He slumps, unconscious, and Fifteen staggers while Blake catches the kid (Wade intentionally steps back from Fifteen, half-hoping she’ll faint).
“How do you feel, Loki?” Blake asks.
“Better,” she says with a tone of mild surprise. “He really was making me ill. And your research?”
“Glorious. I’ll be sifting through data for weeks.”
Fifteen turns to Wade and actually bows to him. “Your assistance in this endeavor was greatly appreciated, Savant. If you wish, you may consider that I owe you a favor.”
“What’re you gonna do with the kid?”
“Drop him in the ocean and wait for Thor to find him. I’m quite adept at giving the big lug little hints by now.”
Wade blinks at her. “Drop him. In the ocean.”
She blinks right back. “He can swim, and he certainly won’t freeze to death.”
“Oh, no, yeah, as long as you’re good with dropping an amnesiac little kid in the ocean, I’m sure it’s perfectly all right.”
“He’ll be fine,” Blake and Fifteen both say, looking at him like he’s grown an extra head.
.End
1 When Daphnis told Chloe the story of Echo, he said that Pan was jealous of Echo's musical talent. In a fit of rage, he did what he usually did: drove people nuts until they ripped somebody to shreds (his counterpart Bacchus did the same thing). The pieces of Echo were scattered, still singing, and Gaia the earth-mother hid them away to protect them. Safe in the bosom of the earth, Echo would faithfully sing back any sound she heard. Ever after, Pan would occasionally chase after Echo's renditions of his own music, unable to find the mysterious piper.
2 The Savant is busy trying to figure out how the Traveler's brainslides work.
3 Theorist 207: Don Blake HX377. He's the Thor from the previous chapter who makes a living researching Lokis.
4 Argr, which has come to hold the meaning 'unmanly' in a negative sense, is an old Norse term related to sex between men; from what we can tell from old Norse literature, it was once a common social bonding practice among close-knit warrior groups such as Odin's Einherjar. Fun fact: Loki, a master of several 'unmanly' things like shape-shifting, seidr (spellcasting), and distracting Odin's enemies with his sexy bod, is broadly considered a patron deity of argr.
5 Five's buddy, Theorist!Steve, is a fidelis effect specialist. The relationship between Wades and the fidelis effect is the subject of his Senior Theorist application study.
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