SPN/Thor fic: The Tomato in the Mirror 3/4

[rokhal]

Title: The Tomato in the Mirror
Chapter: 3/4
Characters: Sam Winchester, Thor Odinsson, Phil Coulson, Nick Fury, several Avengers and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and guest-starring Dr. Stephen Strange, Sorcerer Supreme of Earth
Pairing: Gen
Rating: T
Length: 6k (of 18k total)
Warnings: Two uses of the F word, several uses of the S word, mild hand-to-hand violence, moderate comic-book violence, massive property destruction, a scene of body horror that may be objectionable to those with anxiety about diet
Spoilers: Thor, Supernatural through 7.11. No actual spoilers for Avengers, as this was written before I saw the film.
Disclaimer: Not for profit. Free advertising for both franchises!
Summary: Loki body-swaps with Sam. Later, things get weird.



They grabbed Sam out of Analysis, slapped a Kevlar vest and some cuffs on him, jerked a black flannel bag over his head, and bundled him into the back seat of a large sedan with cushy shocks and a newer automatic transmission. The sedan spent about fifteen minutes in stop-and-go city traffic, zoomed up a freeway on-ramp and off again four minutes later down a two-hundred-and-seventy degree loop, climbed a long, gently curving highway, and stopped in a parking lot with two speed bumps at the entrance. Sam guessed they'd traveled about thirty-five miles from headquarters. As he was tugged from the car, he heard doors opening and slamming all around; apparently he'd come along with a caravan.

Someone whipped the bag off his head, and Sam blinked in the snow glare. There were six black cars filling the freshly plowed parking lot of a private airstrip, and around twenty heavily armed S.H.I.E.L.D. operatives swarming an anonymous jet that waited on the runway. Two of the men grabbed Sam by the elbows and escorted him up the ladder and into the warm cabin of the plane. Thor, a red-haired woman, and a couple of guys in less bulky gear occupied the plush forward compartment. Sam was escorted to a seat in the back, surrounded by the rank and file.

Judging by the thinly veiled hostility in the eyes of the operatives around him, none of them were in the mood for friendly conversation. Neither was he. He shut his eyes and did some breathing exercises, ignoring the man occupying the arm rest and blocking him from the aisle, until the plane taxied down the runway and leapt into the air.

It turned out that without Dean in the seat next to him furiously humming heavy metal to soothe his own in-flight panic attack, Sam was a bit of a nervous flier himself. He shut the window on the gleaming white plains flecked with dark pines that dropped steadily away below, and rolled the scar on his palm discretely against a corner of his handcuffs. A tiny nozzle in the lighting panel overhead was blowing air on his face to make him feel like the fuselage was wider and less claustrophobic than it really was, a tiny white lie for his caveman brain. He screwed it shut.

Sam jumped when the man beside him folded down to dig something out from under the seats, a steel-and-rubber laptop that looked sturdy enough to bludgeon a ghoul with. The man started it up and opened some kind of browser with a hideous user interface, probably something proprietary, then called up Google. He brought up a map of Reno, Nevada.

They were on a plane, and they had Internet. Sam raised an eyebrow.

"We have Loki to within ten miles of the city center," the operative announced. "We'd like a smaller grid than that, so now you're going to help us find your brother."

"Assuming Loki's still with him," Sam said, the insanity of the situation smacking him behind the eyes like a hangover. "What happened in Reno?"

The communications operative held up a hand at Sam and spoke into the air. "Sir, what am I cleared to tell the prisoner?" He was silent, watching the middle distance intently, and nodded after a while. "Yessir. Geophysicists detected an earthquake two hours ago; apparently it shouldn't have happened. All cell signals from within the city were blocked at the same time. We're still trying to get a hold of someone on the ground."

"But not having much luck," Sam concluded with a sigh. "We need some news from the city over the past two months, look for unexplained or unusual deaths. If Dean's in charge of where they're staying, he would've come for a hunt."

"A hunt. Right," said the operative speculatively. "Because you're vampire slayers. Analysis is already checking for vampires; we need to find Dean Winchester. That's your contribution."

Sam thought about the incident in Lakeville, the kindergarteners-turned-gremlins that he'd barely had the chance to investigate. He recalled past encounters with gods and trickster gods. No biggie, Sam, said a callous, illusory voice. It hummed. You know freedom's just some people talking. Dean's prison is walking through this world all alone-it's like he's already there.

Sam shook the voice out of his ear. "If you want to find Dean, your best chance is wherever he's holed up. Could be a motel, a cheap one. Bottom of the barrel cheap; he hates chains. Or he could be squatting; we like to squat in houses. Someplace safe to leave our gear out for a while, rooms, light. Check the model homes in housing developments, or places that are up for sale. On the ground, look for the car. If he's out on a case, it could be at the cop-shop, the morgue, or a library where public records are kept. Or it could be anywhere. It's probably a '72 Challenger, yellow, or he could've switched already; if he's switched, he'll pick something American, made between 1960 and 1980, any color but pink or baby blue, usually a sedan. If he's feeling nervous, he might go to a later model, maybe even an import, white."

"Got it," replied the communications operative. Sam slid the window blind back up and watched the screen out of the corner of his eye as the operative efficiently parsed through a selection of motels on Google Maps and began flicking through traffic camera stills in a scary-looking S.H.I.E.L.D. surveillance program. He lost interest when the plane began to cross the Rockies, and the landscape creased up in harsh white tree-flecked wilderness.

"I got a possible," the agent announced to the air, after an hour or two. Sam's knee bounced.

When they touched down an airstrip just north of the city, in the midst of a desert winter of greening sagebrush and patches of thin snow, a small fleet of County PD vehicles were waiting for them. A sheriff in a khaki uniform greeted Agent Coulson when they filed out of the little jet, his eyes wide and his lips tight.

"Once you enter city limits, keep the engines running, whatever you do," Sam heard. "The quake's just the tip of the iceberg. We can't get Reno PD out of the building, most people are still trapped in their homes… I don't even want to think about what that place'd do to a firearm. Radios are touch-and-go. I hope it's true your department is the one to call in on the weird shit, 'cause this is the definition right here."

"We're a highly adaptable team," Coulson replied, and that was the last Sam heard before he was herded into the middle seat of a blue and white SUV. Field operatives, two new and one the man with the computer who had sat beside him on the plane, surrounded him with their bulky Kevlar and holstered weapons. Sam hunched his shoulders forward and rested his elbows on his knees to make room. They sized each-other up before the driver climbed in: Sam was the biggest guy in the car, by at least three inches, and Sam's hands were cuffed in front where he might be able to try a punch or a grab, but the agents beside him were solid, armed, and doubtless highly trained, even the communications officer. Agent Coulson got into the front passenger seat. Sam didn't see any weak links.

The S.H.E.I.L.D. team started their engines with some concern, and caravanned toward the city through rolling scrub, passing a few glittering neon-decked casinos at the city border and detouring briefly into an emerald warren of suburbs. Even on the arterials, still on the tail of what should have been the morning rush hour, they were the only cars in motion. They passed a few wrecks-a sedan with its back crumpled against a brick house, across the street from a garage with the door torn off from the inside; a long row of cars parked parallel, crunched up bumper-to-bumper, alarms shrieking; black rubber marks on a driveway across the street from a house with a ten-foot hole in the living room. There were a few people on the street, not as many as Sam would expect in a supernatural crisis. Coulson motioned for the driver to stop, and they idled while Coulson rolled down his window to talk to the civilians. A tall man in a charcoal suit with a stern face drew near, while tight knots of what Sam assumed were families clustered around to listen in.

"We're from the D.O.D., S.H.I.E.L.D. division. I'm Agent Coulson," Coulson said before the civilians could get a word out. "We understand the city has suffered some unusual incidents and we're here to resolve the problem. Your first-hand accounts of such incidents would be helpful at this time."

The man in the suit rocked back a step, cowed. Another man, clutching a little round-faced girl in his arms, stepped forward. "Water's out, you know about that, right? Power's dead, too. Who-the-whoever it was, terrorists, I dunno, that's what you guys are here for, right? Somebody wired the front door to blow. Took me like fifty tries to get it open, and then it exploded. Guess we're all lucky whoever did it had the explosives pointed wrong so the door blew outward."

"Has anyone been injured?" Coulson asked.

"EMS is MIA," the man in the suit cut in. "Cell phones are down. Land lines are down."

"There's Jim Taylor, down that way," said the other man. The girl was hiding her face in his jacket now. "His truck doesn't have airbags, and he went right through… he's walking and talking. Didn't hit anybody, thank God."

"I'll have a field medic take a look at him," Coulson replied.

The operative with the laptop woke his machine up and tried to make contact with another car. He grimaced. "Coms are down, sir."

"Have group Delta leave a man anyway," Coulson replied, and the operative rolled down his window and flashed hand signals to the car behind them.

"Number 1049 has hot coffee pouring out the front door," said the guy with the daughter. "I kinda doubt they're doing that on purpose."

"Good to know," replied Coulson. "We're not certain yet to what extent utilities have been compromised, so we advise you not to attempt to use water or electricity until communications have been restored and we notify you that the problem has been resolved. Advise others to remain in their homes. Do not attempt to drive anywhere. We have reason to believe all vehicles within the city limits have been tampered with."

The dad paled and the man in the suit nodded grimly.

"Sit tight," Coulson said, rolling up his window. "We hope to have the situation resolved within the day." He waved two fingers at the driver, and they drove off. Well-the driver managed to get the car in gear on the fifth try, and they rabbited forward ten feet when he did, and then they drove off. The car behind them, after it let out the field medic, seemed to be having similar difficulties.

"Avoid shifting gear from now on," Coulson told the driver. "Anything mechanized is suspect. You're familiar with the term Belgian Mule?"

"Bites in the front, kicks in the back, burns in the middle," replied the operative on Sam's right, reciting an old saying about primitive muskets.

"Avoid discharging firearms and stun guns," Coulson told his team. "We're here to do what we can to neutralize Loki with the goal of minimizing civilian casualties. Nobody needs to lose limbs. We may not be able to do as much as we expected. Take any opportunity for reconnaissance. Any additional observations or suggestions before the rendezvous briefing?"

"Lee, Roberts, and Scander failed advanced hand signaling repeatedly," said the communications operative. The man on Sam's right glared at him across Sam's hunched back. "It's true," the communications operative protested.

"Winchester, you have anything to add?" Coulson asked.

Sam raised his eyebrows. "Uh. So, he can do a lot of damage. This is a very broad scale of attack, which might mean he's stretching his limits, but you can't bank on that. He could have performed a powerful spell with a wide range of effects, or interfering with thousands of objects at the same time might just be easy for him. If it's a spell, you can't sneak past it, but you can use loopholes if you figure out the pattern. If he's just doing it all brute force, he could change the game as soon as he knows we're on to him."

Coulson nodded. Sam wasn't sure how much credence he was going to get.

As they drove deeper into the city they saw more cars, more people wandering around outside looking lost. Sam spotted a middle-aged man fruitlessly banging on a glass storefront with a brick. The glass wasn't even cracked-which explained the lack of looting. A parking meter was bleeding change. An elaborate neon venue sign threw blue sparks, bright as an arc welder, over a sidewalk glittering with broken glass. The place was generally haywire. Sam wondered if it was a good thing that most people seemed to be trapped in their homes, or if that just meant there was carnage out of sight.

A fistfight broke out. Three men traded hard blows, and none of them seemed fazed.

They pulled in to a parking lot behind an old warehouse-turned-office building to join the vehicles that had arrived ahead of them. All the engines were still running. Thor was pacing back and forth in the lot, an operative in short sleeves bearing a compound bow and quiver of arrows across his back and a red-haired woman in a sleek black jumpsuit flanking him and herding him back toward the caravan whenever he strayed too near the streets. There was a mechanical whine that made Sam cringe in familiarity, and Iron Man-Iron Man-swooped out of the sky and hovered over the lot, balancing five feet off the ground on his levitation beams.

Tony freaking Stark was working with S.H.E.I.L.D. That was some kind of endorsement for the division-Sam wasn't sure if it meant they knew what they were doing or they were just really exciting to work with.

Someone had apparently told Stark about the problem with starting engines in the area, because he wasn't touching down. He flipped up his signature gold visor with an unseen command, and when Thor and the humans formed into a rough half-circle that Coulson got out of the SUV to address, everyone had to yell to be heard over the tiny, powerful engines.

There was a swift conference that Sam couldn't see much of. Sam's foot bounced uncontrollably. The operatives glared at him. Sam ducked his head and smiled his harmless smile, but they didn't seem to buy it.

The men in Kevlar scattered one way around the office building, the woman another, and the archer scaled the fire escape. Stark flicked down his visor like a knight riding to the joust, and Thor hefted a broad rectangular hammer, swung it into the air, and let it carry him skyward as he clung to its handle as though propelled solely by the momentum of his throw.

For all the vaunted sophistication of the smart weapons once produced by Stark Industries, Iron Man tended to leave a swath of destruction behind whenever he encountered a comparable opponent. There would be property damage. Rubble. Dust. Chaos. Thor didn't seem like the most subtle guy in the world either. Sam figured the motel Loki and Dean occupied sat somewhere within a bow-shot, but out of direct view.

Sam trusted Stark's commitment to minimizing human casualties and Thor's desperation to reconcile with his brother to keep Dean alive, and waited. The whine of Stark's engines rose and fell in the distance. Far away, a chorus of car alarms went off. The operative on Sam's right pulled a packet of peanuts out of his cargo pants and ripped it open.

"Again with the peanuts, Mark?" groaned the communications operative. He was clicking frustratedly on the laptop's touch-pad, trying to start up what Sam guessed was an audio feed, by the grainy microphone icon.

Mark shook a couple peanuts into his palm, rolled the plastic packet closed, and lipped the peanuts out of his hand with his head bowed. It made him look like a rodent. "I'm hungry," he said, chewing. He frowned when he swallowed and poked around his gums with his tongue.

"So," Sam said, watching as the men tensed. "What's the plan here? Your boss is out there somewhere, communications are down for the count, the car's burning gas-I mean, I'm a diversion at best, so-"

"No," interrupted the driver.

Sam frowned. "But you don't-"

"No. No, no, no-no, no. Operational secrets, prisoner. Just-"

A gleaming streak of red plummeted from the sky and gouged a massive crater into the asphalt nearby, flinging chunks of pavement high into the air like lava bombs. The Iron Man armor skidded away over the street, engines still firing, and eventually wobbled upright, like a drunk rising from a bathtub, and rose to disappear again over the crest of the office building. The operatives in the car simultaneously released their grips on their weapons, only to clutch them again when, with a boom and rumble of falling bricks, Thor's back punched a hole in the building. A section of masonry dented the SUV's hood, just a foot from the windscreen. Thor landed on the edge of Iron Man's crater and plowed his own hole in the street before rolling to his feet, spinning his hammer around on its cord and leaning forward suddenly. Instead of towing him into the sky, the hammer swung down like any ordinary weight on a string and hit him in the knee. He tried again, and stared mystified at the engraved steel head. After a third attempt, he roared at the sky and took off around the building on foot.

"Hang on," said the driver, and pulled a donut out of the parking lot to skid to a halt across the street, out of the demolition zone. The rest of the waiting fleet of blue-and-whites followed his example. "Looks like the big boys are having trouble. We could be here a while."

They watched the sky for falling man-gods. Mark unrolled his peanuts, shook a few into his palm, and munched on them. Unroll, reroll, munch. Unroll, reroll, munch. The repetitive crinkling was the kind of thing Dean might do if he wanted to provoke Sam into a wrestling match; it made Sam's teeth itch, and with his nerves already stretched to breaking with Dean at the mercy of an insane pagan god two blocks away, Sam was very close to smacking Mark and getting himself shot for the trouble.

"Could you make an exception and not do that for this one stakeout?" the communications operative demanded, glaring at Mark across Sam's back.

Mark stifled a glare and crunched on the peanuts he still had in his hand. "I did a ten-miler the other day, I'm hungry."

The communications operative poked at the audio icon with ever-increasing ferocity and muttered "whiner" under his breath. Sam wasn't sure if Mark had heard him or not, but Mark didn't react.

The driver tried the radio, but all the stations were static.

Mark unrolled his peanut packet after ten minutes of no further action, shook out more peanuts, and crinkled the plastic back up. The communications operative rolled his eyes. "Okay, that's weird," Mark said, staring down at the nuts in his palm instead of eating them.

"What?" asked the driver.

"I'm half a pack down and I'm still starving."

"Must be the ten-miler," dismissed the communications operative. He clicked on the audio icon again, and swore in Russian and Farsi as the desktop flooded with window after window of a black-and-green user interface displaying a wavy frequency line and a text box. Sound abruptly burst from the machine.

The feed was alive with EMF, sparking and hissing with pulsed noise that Sam itched to analyze, and clearly audible in the gaps between the bursts of static were screams. Not Dean's screams. These were strange-harsh, warbling, unstifled, as though for the joy of it, a mix of despair and aggression-rageful screams. He heard Dean's voice, a soft indecipherable murmur, and then his own name.

"That's Loki screaming," Sam said, nerves buzzing with tension as the communications operative fruitlessly Ctrl+F-4'd the windows of audio program as they multiplied. "Loki's disguised as me. Dean's with him, trying to calm him down."

"The bad guy gets you arrested, infiltrates your double act, sticks around for four days, and all he wants to do is play mind games?" the driver demanded.

Sam took a deep, slow breath. "Apparently." If Thor reminded Sam of Dean, maybe Dean reminded Loki of Thor, and while Freud had placed Mommy and Daddy issues at the root of all emotional wounds, in Sam's experience sibling conflict had a good shot for the title. Loki was role-playing with Dean-well, to Loki it was role-play; to Dean it was a brother who'd gone screaming and flailing off the deep end into psychosis.

Duplicate windows of the audio feed interface continued to mushroom onto the screen. The communications operative mashed Ctrl+Alt+Delete. Task Manager didn't appear, and the cooling fan began to whirr angrily.

The EMF spiked, obliterating the voices. When it died back again, Sam heard a clatter and an animal growl, and Dean yelling "Shit! Shit! Sammy, tone it down! Just whatever you're thinking-let me go, I can't help if you don't let me move! Aw, dammit, are you even seeing me?" Static poured back, died away. Dean spoke again, low and panicked, over breathy snarls from elsewhere in the room. "Sam. Sam, undo it. Just think about something else, stop it, come on, Sammy, please!"

The display screen blinked blue and then black as the laptop let out a defeated whine. The communications operative stabbed at the power button, but it refused to reboot.

The idling engine was the only sound in the car, and the space was close and humid. Sam shifted, tense almost to shaking, and found that his wrists were deeply bruised from straining against the handcuffs. Loki was playing with Dean; he was still having fun with him, and Dean could take it. Dean had taken the worst Sam could dish out, and the worst Hell could dish out, and he could take this. He'd be fine. Sam just had to get to him, or wait for Thor and Iron Man to draw Loki out, fighting through the catastrophe magnet that had once been Reno, the constant equipment failures, the . . . the cursed luck. Like the audio program on the laptop. Like opening doors in the suburbs.

Nothing, and then too much, Sam realized. That was the pattern, that was the rule that had been applied to the city. It was irony-Alanis Morisette irony, not the real kind. It was poetic.

"It's a slot machine," Sam announced, the epiphany bursting from his lips. "That's the curse; he turned the whole city into a slot machine, it all makes sense!"

The operatives stared at him, wary and bemused. Sam sighed and wished Dean were here. Preferably not in cuffs.

Mark unrolled and rerolled his peanuts a couple more times while they waited for something to happen. Maybe Coulson would stroll around the corner and wave them into the combat zone. Maybe Loki would peel Sam out of the SUV like a kid unwrapping a Butterfinger. Maybe the building would fall on them. Sam got a bad feeling, an overlooking feeling, as Mark dumped the last of the peanuts out into his hand, wadded the empty wrapper into a ball, and crunched on them. Mark coughed. His mouth twisted. "Uh," he said, tugging at the collar of his shirt.

Sam glanced over his shoulder at him, then stared. Mark was panting shallowly and his face looked puffy. He flailed stiffly with his arms and feet, and as Mark's breaths rasped and stopped altogether, his tactical jacket swelled drum-tight, and rolls of chin spilled out from under the high neck of his jacket collar, Sam realized that they'd just been sucked into a Roald Dahl novel.

"He's not breathing," Sam realized. The bewildered stares of the other operative tightened into combat-focus. The driver spun in his seat to pay at Mark's Kevlar vest, whose heavy nylon straps were strangling Mark like a python. Mark's face was red and his mouth worked silently. His eyes were wide and bloodshot.

"Let me," Sam snapped, undoing his seat belt. Even with his hands cuffed, he had better access than the driver. He forced himself to focus as he pawed at the unfamiliar equipment, releasing plastic snap buckles strained so tight they were practically locked. The front panel of Kevlar sprung free, bouncing on Mark's supernaturally induced beer gut. The jacket's zipper ran down the topline of a rigid dome; Sam reached under Mark's chin and tugged it down. Mark gasped as the jacket opened. His belly heaved with the breath, and his arms and legs stuck out rigidly, still encased in the unyielding fabric like sausages.

"Fuck," Mark gasped.

The communications operative hopped out of the car, leaving the door wide open. "Hang on, man, I'll cut you out of those."

"Fuck, how'm I supposed to pas the challenge course like this?" Mark groaned. His stun gun hung from the left side of his taut belt and his hand-gun from his right.

As the communications operative swung open Mark's door, tense with concern, Sam grabbed him by his vest and jerked him over Mark and into the foot-well in a powerful heave. He snatched at Sam's cuffs, but Sam simply overpowered him, twisted his wrists down, and buckled him to the middle seat by one of his vest's straps. He flailed in the cramped space, half-in and half-out of the car.

"Oh, you fucker," the driver hissed. Mark pawed at Sam, trying to get a grip on him with his arms squeezed straight, and the driver drew his stun gun, but Sam was out of the car and out of reach, sprinting for the scene of the battle with his hands clasped in front of him. Sam heard shots-he was surprised they'd managed to fire anything. He kept running.

Loki was a god, and by the sense of twisted justice underpinning the spell he'd put on the city, a trickster God. He's have no plans beyond playing mind games with Dean. Stop the mind games and he'd have no reason not to let Dean go-he might be pissed or come up with some symbolic punishment for Dean's supposed pathology, but a trickster's sense of fair play should be enough to give them both a faint chance of escape.

Shots chipped brick off the office building at the level of Sam's knees as he turned the corner and put his babysitters behind him. He might as well have run straight into Fallujah. The pagan god and the human wrecking ball that made up S.H.I.E.L.D.'s shock force had torn the street apart, casting chunks of brick and cinderblock far and wide, blowing out windows and downing telephone poles. As for the demolition team themselves, Sam didn't see them. He saw operatives in Kevlar scurrying around the rubble. Coulson, conspicuous by his calm demeanor and dust-coated black suit, was directing the shepherding of a gaggle of civilians through a Thor-sized hole in the wall of an apartment building.

Everyone looked a bit busy to bother with Sam. He ducked between two parked SUVs and scanned for the motel that had to be nearby. There was a parking garage towering into the skyline the next street over, a mirror-shining nameless block building, a row of charming facades with novelty shops at the street entrances, a convenience store with a slot machine squatting out front under the awning, and an L-shaped seventies cinder-block structure with four rows of balconies overlooking a small full parking lot. A sparking and dented neon sign crawling up one corner of the complex proclaimed it the Queen's Inn, and sported a little fan of playing card pips at the top. Bingo. The 1973 Barracuda in the lot, the oilslick mirage wrapping the top floor, and the Stark-Tech listening device suction-cupped to the window of room 403 were just gravy.

Sam was half-way across the street when he heard the roar of a large object exceeding terminal velocity on its way Earthward. He looked up and saw where the battle had moved.

Thor was plummeting uncontrolled toward the city, just a glittering dot of polished steel trailing scarlet cloth. As Sam watched, Iron Man swooped down from higher in the sky and ducked under him, engines whining at the strain of carrying the god. Thor rolled upright and knelt on Stark's armor's back, and as they picked up speed and elevation, Sam thought he saw Thor brandishing his hammer like a cowboy waving his hat. Before them waited a smoky cloud that snaked unnatural, still contrails out in rays toward the borders of the city. Green chain-lightening flashed as they disappeared into it, and Sam heard wild laughter in the distance.

Thor was keeping Loki busy. Good.

Sam bolted into the shadow of the Queen's Inn and hurled himself up the stairs, flight after flight. Two operatives blocked his path on the fourth floor, and Sam barely stopped himself from bouncing their heads off the wall. Probably wouldn't work, anyway, with everything from starting cars to eating peanuts being turned to a disastrous game of all-or-nothing. One of them made a lightening grab for the chain of his cuffs, but Sam yanked his hands aside. The men split to each side of the balcony, flanking him.

"Coulson sent me," Sam spat, jerking his head at the apartment the agent was busy evacuating. "I'm supposed to go in the room."

"Pull the other one," said an operative, tense for a fight.

Sam rocked onto the balls of his feet and rolled his shoulders, ready to give him one.

"Let him through," said a woman from behind him. Sam startled and turned sideways, trying to watch three people at once. It was the red-haired woman who'd accompanied Thor in the SUV. She looked rumpled, with a bruise on her chin, smoke blackening one side of her face, and chunks and shreds missing from the top layer of her black bodysuit.

The operative shifted, daring silent glances at each-other. Neither of them stopped Sam when he stormed past.

He stopped at 403, backed up to the rail, and kicked the door just at the sweet spot next to the latch. The door held strong, and Sam almost overbalanced when his foot bounced back. The oily distortion of Loki's magic was almost tangible, a sickly enticing taste on the air, a maddening scent. Loki's mimicry of Sam was screaming and raving inside the room, and Dean was muttering urgently in consolation or pleading-Sam couldn't tell. He kicked the door again and staggered back against the rail, then slammed it with his shoulder. He panted and pawed at the locked doorknob. The operatives and the woman were staring at him. He wasn't getting in. He had to think.

Kicking in the door would either fail or blast fragments of plywood into the room at supersonic speeds, by the rules of Reno, and he could tire himself out or injure himself before he got the jackpot.

The rule was that the outcome would massively exceed the effort applied, and the odds of success at each attempt were very low.

Sam laid his palms flat against the door and pushed firmly. Half a second later, he tried again. He built up an urgent rhythm, with a little chant in his head, push and maybe, push and this time, push and please. The red-haired woman has disappeared as silently as she had come, leaving the two operatives watching him dubiously. Below in the street, Agent Coulson had noticed him and was pointing a handful of operatives toward his position.

A soft hysterical laugh escaped him as he kept pushing again and again on the door, as fast as he could move. He couldn't stop. He was a rat in a skinner box, deep in the quagmire of sunk costs; any single attempt could be the one that forced the door open, and Dean was right there on the other side, pleading-oh, god-pleading for Sam to let him go, to stop.

"Sammy, no!" Dean bellowed suddenly, in a gap in the screaming. "Sam, please-we can work with this, please!"

Sam heard bootsteps on the stairs, and a quick conference between the operatives guarding the fourth floor. Sam got the impression that the woman's command authority was ad hoc rather than official. Whatever break she'd seen fit to grant him wouldn't last long.

He pushed frantically at the door, ignoring the snide whisper at his shoulder (that wasn't there, wasn't there) that he was just making shit up-that he was trying to play slots with laundromat tokens.

The door gave way, bouncing off the interior wall and rebounding in his face. Sam stumbled inside.

The air was choked with black smoke and golden light. The ceiling was smoldering, charred from wall to wall, with ragged heat-warped chunks curling down into the room. The bedside table was embedded into the opposite wall as though it had merged with it. As Sam crossed the threshold, a film of glowing gold gas parted around his face like cobwebs, briefly blinding him and leaving his hair standing on end. He could feel power clogging in his nostrils. If he opened his mouth he could drink it from the air.

He clamped his lips and swallowed spit.

He heard Dean gag from deeper in the maelstrom, and pushed further. A chunk of charcoal dropped from the ceiling and bounced against his hair. His shoes stuck to the carpet; he smelled blood and smoke and the tang of power.

He plowed through knot after knot of gold-lacy energy, his eyes stinging, until he spotted Dean, pinned to the hotel wall by twining gold-fire ropes, desperation as obvious as the arterial spray that dotted his face, as his infinite horror. His eyes fixed on another Sam, livid-pale, tense, hulking, with arcane symbols cut into his bare sides and his wrists slit down to the bone. A monster, a willing monster in pain.

"Dean!" Sam bellowed. The other Sam snapped his head around to face him. His eyes flashed black on gold-no demon Sam had ever seen, but a composite of the worst. He looked annoyed and feral. "That's a trickster!"

Dean met his eyes through the smoke and flare. Sam could see relief ripple through him. He raised an arm Sam hadn't known was free, drew a gun Sam hadn't known he held, and shot the monstrous Sam in the back of the head.

Wood chips cut into Sam's face. The other Sam stood, head half-shattered and illusory flesh fading to pine and paint-but still moving. It snapped its fingers and the taste of power went out of the air; the room un-burned, the smoke and flood vanished. Dean flopped to the floor, gasping. "You get arrested without me?" Dean panted, struggling to his feet.

Sam searched the room for an appropriate weapon-a stake for a trickster, but this was some kind of golem, not Loki in disguise. Machete. The weapons duffel was under the window. Sam dove for it.

Fiery ropes snagged him out of the air, green this time, digging and sawing at his skin as they pulled him to the ground. The wood automaton strode over and looked down at him, a strange wild sneer pulling at the carved features. "You are hardly such an obstacle as you suspect, mortal," it snarled, still in Sam's voice, but now with the god's diction.

A roar like a freight train shook the motel and Sam thought of tornado sirens in the Midwest, the chaos and ruin afterward. The ceiling punched open from the inside, plaster to rafters. The wooden Sam golem stared up at the hole. Sam decided that this was probably a real hole, not more of Loki's illusions, when the god himself descended through it, arms crossed and the cape of his black leather and bronze battle-armor fluttering around him. He wore a gleaming helmet with a crest of goat's horns, and a manic snarl. "Odin's blood, will no one stay where they are put," he spat. He gestured at the wooden Sam, which stilled and toppled over, its enchantment lost. "Dean, hello again. I fear I must be somewhat crude, now that your brother has interrupted what would have been a showy but humane little game."

Sam kicked against the phantom ropes. "Don't you touch him!" he roared, hearing Dean across the room yelling something similar. "Dean's got nothing to do with you!" Sam continued, fighting for air as the ropes shifted and began to twine around his throat. Looking up through the hole in the ceiling, Sam saw a red-fringed mote of gleaming steel-Thor, descending, maybe with Iron Man along with. "If you don't have the stones to face your own brother, you think screwing with mine is gonna change anything? Let him go and take a look at yourself!"

Loki smiled faintly-a shallow smile, the grin of a wild wolf with its guts spilling from its belly, all menace and desolation. "Did you just double-dog-dare me?" he asked indulgently, bending down to stroke Sam's hair with his fine pale fingers. "Simple mortals. I like my plan better."

He laid his palm on Sam's forehead, and for an earthly eternity, Sam's world went to Hell.

To Chapter 4