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At 18:00:01 Clint Barton’s eyes open, and without preamble or warning he climbs gingerly down from his sick bed, waves away the medical team officer who insists he needs to be subject to a test or two to determine the cause of his previous loss of consciousness, and walks out into the corridor.
He moves with his usual tight, springy determination, without stopping to check his route or exchange conversation beyond replies to direct questions, all of which are answered in yes, no, and I don’t with the rapid-fire precision of a man with a lot on his mind.
Several people are forced to move out of his way as he approaches the portal room, as it appears that he is in no mood to stop for something as trivial as the possibility of running down S.H.I.E.L.D staff and injuring them.
The portal room is kept under strict guard, and locked. The guard are under instructions to allow Nick Fury’s Avengers Initiative members and Nick Fury immediate access without question, and the locks are ones with which Barton is intimately familiar: he is inside within moments.
The initiation of the portal set-up sequence and the calibration of the portal’s end point takes rather longer.
“Had a sudden flash of inspiration?” Tony Stark asks, stepping out of the shadows rather like the flickerings of someone’s conscience. He is suited, and his voice has a slight echo in the vast room.
“Something like that,” Barton says, still fiddling with the calibration settings.
“Oh yes?” Tony says, stepping up beside him very quickly for a man encased in metal. “Your om-ing and circular breathing just happened to pop the exact coordinates for one of the remaining Citadels right into your head, did it?”
“Actually I was having a fight with a vacuum cleaner,” Barton says in a far-off voice.
“Right,” Tony says, and as Barton reaches out to tap the initiation code in, he slaps his arm away with a force which could break bone.
Barton merely dips out of his way and taps in the second digit. “That’s not helpful, Tony.”
“You know, ordinarily I’d trust you with my life,” Tony says, trying to yank Barton away from the panel and coming up empty-handed. “In fact, I seem to remember I have on at least two occasions which, by the way, I am still grateful for. But I can’t help thinking that this sudden revelation of yours has just turned up very conveniently right at a time when some pretty weird - I would say unworldly weird, maybe even, I don’t know, demi-godly weird - some weird-ass shit is going down inside this base. Now, call me paranoid if you like -“
Tony makes a snatch for Barton’s wrist, but comes up with air. Barton isn’t fighting him, only squirming away from him like a greased eel.
“-but I’m not convinced you’re acting under your own initiative here.”
Barton taps in the last digit of the initiation code and flashes Tony a bland, unreadable smile. “Believe what you like, Tony, you usually do.”
The vapour trail ignites: the wall of blue fire erupts.
“I also think-“ Tony says, interposing himself between Barton and the portal, “-that you are making a very big mistake here. Yoga and lentils and all the rest is great and all but maybe you should put a little thought into what you’re going to do when you get to the other side of that portal-“ the words come out faster and faster as Barton dodges, ducks, and skips under each of Tony’s blocking ploys, “-because so far he’s causally smashed in Steve’s head and as far as we known done just the same to Natasha and who knows what he’s done to Bruce and Clint - really - no offence - but you’re not up to the standard Natasha was and it didn’t exactly help her to go in cold and calm either -“
By now they are against the wall of blue fire. Two steps closer and Tony Stark will be engulfed, pulled into another world.
“Move out of the way, Tony,” Barton says quietly. “If you go through there the Citadel defences will crush you into atoms.”
“You’re not going,” Tony says shoving Barton backwards.
“I am going,” Barton says, “you aren’t, because the minute you step through there you’ll die. Move aside, Tony.”
“You’re not - thinking - clearly -“ Tony snaps, diving to block Barton’s path again. “I can keep this up all night.”
“You haven’t slept in days,” Barton says. “Let me past.”
“Let him go, Tony,” says Fury, walking out onto the gangways above.
“Do you want him to die?” Tony shouts, making another dive to block Barton’s path. “Or has Loki got to you too?”
“I know he’s got the coordinates for the Citadel, I know he’s not going to die the second he puts a toe through that portal,” Fury says, “and I know Clint Barton can do things in unarmed combat that you can’t even imagine.” He raises his voice. “I also know that if you keep trying to stop him, I’m going to definitely lose two operatives instead of potentially losing one.”
“So you’re just going to sacrifice Barton?” Tony shouts, hurling himself in Barton’s way again.
“He’s asking you to get out of my way,” Barton says. “Now. Tony. Get out of my way.”
“I’m working with what we’ve got here,” Fury calls. “Get out of the line of that portal, Tony Stark.”
“He’s not under his own control -“ Tony shouts, his foot inches from the blue flames.
“But you are. Tony, let him go. I need you here,” Fury says. “Get the hell out of the way of that portal. Jarvis, if he doesn’t get the hell out of the way of that portal you move his damn suit for him. Or he dies.”
Tony stands still. Barton walks past him with another bland, unreadable smile, and disappears into the blue flames.
Clint Barton walks into what feels like the world’s hottest sauna as if he’s walking out of a dream. The fact that the last thing he can remember clearly is vacuuming angry blood particles out of the air does little to diminish the feeling that he’s just woken up.
He is not especially surprised to see Loki Laufeysson sitting on the floor beside what looks like an enormous golden sledgehammer with a deformed bull on the mallet. He is momentarily thrown by the absence of the god’s helm and the look of exhausted sorrow on his face, but he reminds himself that Loki is a liar, and says, “Oh, it was you.”
“Hello, Barton,” Loki says, standing slowly. He looks as if he is in pain. “Have you come to die quietly?”
“When did you ever meet an Avenger who died quietly?” Barton asks. He may not have his bow, but he knows he has several knives on his person and he knows every weak spot and pressure point on the human body.
“Your woman didn’t have a lot to say for herself,” Loki shrugs. He leans away from his gaudy sledgehammer as if trying to distance himself from it. Barton wonders where his other weapons are, and what they are, and if that cheap-looking piece of crap was really what brought the brutal end to Steve that they all saw; and the one to Natasha that they could only imagine.
“She wasn’t my woman,” Barton says. He feels as empty as outer space. No anger, no fear. “And she never did have much to say to people like you.”
“Her betters?” Loki says. Barton wonders if he’s trying to goad him on purpose, to set off the Citadel defences, or if he honestly cannot help prodding at anything that might resemble a wound.
He doesn’t deign to answer, only drops into a crouch, grips the handle of the knife at his belt, and slashes at Loki’s legs. The knife is slippery in his hand: the Citadel is so hot that he sweats what feels like all of the water out of his body in seconds.
“This isn’t as much fun as I thought it was going to be,” Loki says with a kind of wooden sullenness.
Someone else - Tony, probably - might have a sarcastic rejoinder to hand here, but Barton is concentrating on not dying. He rolls on the floor to avoid being knocked to it by Loki’s extended leg, meaning to come up beneath him for a groin shot with the knife. It would be a nasty death for them both: instead Barton’s bare shoulder touches superheated substance and singes, and in the bolt of pain that shoots across his vision, temporarily blinding him, he loses sight of Loki.
The crippling blow to his shoulder tells him that Loki has not lost sight of him.
Barton tries to roll away from whatever has struck him; he tries to use the echoes of the room and the prickling sense of someone else’s presence to locate Loki as his vision greys out again. But the echoes are unnatural, and Loki appears to be everywhere. From what he’s seen, that is a real possibility; Barton rolls into a ball, his shoulder screaming, and fumbles for another knife.
“Has he finished his grand subversion of the Citadel defences yet?” Loki asks, and when Barton lunges, twists, and thrusts towards the sound, something with the approximate weight and force of an aircraft-carrier smashes into his other shoulder and knocks it out of its socket.
“Why here?” Barton asks, unscrewing his eyes to get a better look at Loki in relation to himself. He cannot move his left arm, but his right - while agonising - is still useable. He takes the knife out of his left hand as if disarming a corpse. “Why not kill us off anywhere? Why Citadels?”
Loki gives him the kind of look Barton imagines he might give a talking monkey. “You really are very stupid.”
“And you’re an asshole, we all have -“ Barton spits out a mouthful of his own sweat, grips tighter on the knife handle as he steadies himself against the too-hot floor. “-we all have our down sides.”
Loki does not acknowledge the question. He only says, “Yes, you are a transformed man. You’ll do.” He continues, apparently talking to himself: “They should have worded this with more precision and less poetry.”
Barton ignores the cryptic bullshit and springs for the liar in green as best he can.
He is not even close to half-way there when Loki swings the ugly golden sledgehammer up and round and shatters Barton’s ribs in mid-air.
As he falls onto the scorching floor Barton can feel his lungs tear. He has until now been unaware that this is possible, this sensation of puncturing lungs, of broken bones ripping into the delicate forests within him like knives. He would not have imagined the pain this clearly, nor the sudden feeling that he is drowning in this dry room.
Loki kicks him along the floor. Barton makes a grab for his foot, but it is easily evaded.
“Transformed man,” Loki says, lifting his - Barton guesses it’s a sceptre, the kind of thing they show kings holding in paintings, which figures - with an audible crack. “From rage to peace. The perfect offering.”
“You played us,” Barton says, his chest bubbling. Something like pain crosses Loki’s face, but what with the punctured lung and the dislocated shoulder and the imminent death Barton finds it a little hard to sympathise.
Loki casts a pitying look upon him, “Are you new?”
He swings the sceptre, and Barton doesn’t think or feel a lot after that.
"Stark," Fury says for perhaps the millionth time this afternoon: neither of them is keeping count any more. "There are only two remaining Citadels that we know of. Settle on one of them and concentrate on it." He is temporarily grateful that he lost his sense of smell along with his eye; from the way Tony looks right now he can only imagine how bad he smells. There has been no time for pleasantries.
Tony looks frayed at the edges. His hair is greasy. His skin, deprived of whatever sunbed or orange dye or wood-stain he usually uses to make himself look like an Oompa-Loompa, looks sallow and fragile, like it might tear if jostled too hard. His eyes have sunk so deep into his face that he resembles a pygmy gorilla, and he won't stop fidgetting.
"I can get both," Tony insists. "They use the same mechanisms. And then we're a step ahead of him because he won't know which one we're coming for --"
"Tony," Fury says irritably, "focus."
There are snack food wrappers all over the lab. Fury wants to fly in Potts, have her reason with the man: she is the only person alive now who knows how to effectively guide this particular difficult genius to the conclusions they need, and stop the wheels from coming off. But Tony has threatened dire if vague consequences if Potts is brought within a half-mile of him right now.
He might well want to protect her, but as Fury sees it, Tony really needs her to protect him from going crazy.
"I am perfectly focused," says Tony Stark, almost vibrating as he rifles through schematics in three dimensions that obey different physical laws o the ones holding this base together.
"Remember you need to either lure him out or keep their defences jammed for long enough to incapacitate him" Fury says. He can hear himself nagging unnecessarily, and it makes his gorge rise. "We can't afford to lose you."
"Nope," Tony says in a high, distracted voice.
"Stark. Earth needs you." It would sound cheesy from anyone else.
"And if that nut in the stupid hat succeeds at what he's trying to do - at what I think he's trying to do, based on this, and when have I ever been wrong? Don't bring up Cuba, that was a technical error, not an actual mistake - then there won't be an Earth to need me. There won't be an anywhere." Tony waves a hand through the hovering wall of green lines and arcane shapes, and stares, briefly, at or through Fury. "So I pull the place down on us both."
Fury sighs. "You're not Samson." This is exactly the kind of stupid idea that Tony comes up with after not sleeping for a week, and just because the rest of S.H.I.E.L.D, the rest of the world is too swayed by his infinite personal charm to point this out doesn't mean Fury's going to be shy about it.
"He had the right idea."
Fury casts an appraising eye over Tony Stark. He looks smaller than usual, and it's not just the absence of his vain little Cuban heels. "There's always some way out, right, Tony?"
"That's not important."
Fury snorts. "Miss Potts might disagree."
Tony holds up a finger for quiet, still flicking through the flickering schematics with his other hand. "Oh no. No. She will disagree. That's why I'm not telling her." He lowers his finger. "You know who wouldn't disagree, though? Steve wouldn't. He'd call it putting yourself on the line for your men. I may not be him, but you know what, Fury? I don't want him to have died so that I can chicken out of doing what needs to be done, okay?"
Nick Fury says, "We can't rely on Thor to help us in your absence. If the last few weeks have proved nothing else--" he opens the lab door to leave, and the snack food wrappers do an abrupt dance in the influx of new air. "Tony. You will find a way back out of here alive. Death is not an option."
Tony breaks into a smile at last. "It's always an option. But trust me, it's not my A plan."
Calibrating the settings of the portal generation system to point outside of the Citadel of Peace is not only difficult, but on one of the worlds at which the remaining Citadels are located, it is also suicidal.
“That leaves us one option,” says Fury, when Tony tells him. “You’re not equipped for dealing with zero gravity.”
“I can be,” Tony says stubbornly.
“No.”
The Technical team have been banned from the portal room. They seem to have gotten over their brief plague of exsanguinations and exploding faces, attempts to remove their own eyes, and other symptoms of something seriously rotten in the state of the base, but Fury is taking no chances. Half of his technical team have been recommended for counselling. There are two very good operatives invalided on permanent disability leave, and two dead. For one of Loki’s incursions it’s an impressively low fatality count, but that’s not a great deal of consolation.
Tony busies himself with the computers. He is, Fury thinks, becoming increasingly secretive and paranoid and he’s not sure he likes it. There is only room for one secretive and paranoid S.H.I.E.L.D operative and that’s the one with the eye-patch.
The vapour trail ignites slowly.
Tony Stark’s gloves close over his hands, and his mask over his face. He strides towards the wall of blue fire as it spreads and shimmers, and the endlessly-shifting mirage of destinations appears in its depths, far beyond where the walls of the room lie. The suit masks his tiredness, rendering Tony an impenetrable machine moving unstoppably for another world.
“Come back alive,” Fury says, as Tony stands at the gate to the next world. “Or I will personally design the machine that transports me into the afterlife to kick your ass.”
“Get in line behind Pepper,” Tony says, “she already has the blueprints.”
“Don’t do anything dumb,” Fury cautions.
“I never do anything dumb. I’m a genius, it’s impossible.”
“Don’t fucking die out there, Stark.” Fury watches him perform a brief weapons check. Tony is carrying sufficient firepower to take out China. If he can’t take down the Citadel he’ll throw the entire world out of orbit.
“Not planning on it,” Tony says, and with spring he’s gone.
Tony Stark drops into the desert like a ball-bearing into pudding.
Preliminary information on this world did provide the necessary information about the increased gravity, and this is the main reason that Tony’s lungs do not immediately collapse.
He is a mile from the Citadel. He can see it, a low flat blemish among the low flat landscape. It must have taken marvels of engineering to build something even this high. Perhaps the people who lived here before were giants.
Nothing in Tony's arsenal will go a full mile in this gravity. He must be closer to the building before he can even begin to attempt to destroy it, and it looks discouragingly impregnable.
He raises himself up on his elbows, bends at the waist, and tries to stand.
The gravity of the place has other ideas, and Tony smacks face-first into the indentation of his own body upon the ground.
“Fine, I get it, I get it,” Tony says irritably, even though Jarvis has been utterly silent since passing through the portal. “It’s a very clever choice of location because it requires penitent crawling. Brilliant.”
Tony’s never been particularly inclined to accept punishments meted out by external sources of authority. He’s quite capable of punishing himself; likewise, he’ll decide for himself how penitent he is and whether or not it merits crawling. Right now he doesn’t feel particularly penitent at all, and he has rockets in his goddamn feet.
After some wrestling with the controls and a hairy moment in which Tony’s almost sure he’s going to blow himself up over something really dumb, he blasts off from the ground, stabilises a full six inches above the surface, and at a speed which would embarrass a sloth, he approaches the Citadel with his head held up.
He is getting one hell of a tension headache.
Within the low-ceilinged, acre-wide Citadel of Peace, Loki, lies flat on his back with his arms extended and his eyes closed, one fingertip pressed to the sceptre’s head as it lies beside him. His chest labours in the in the heavy gravity of the land of penitence.
Tony Stark breeched the walls of this world half an hour ago; he must crawl every step of the way, but Loki would rather rest than watch. His bones hurt, his blood hurts, his tongue hurts, and his head hurts; creeping in deference to the laws of the physical universe as every mortal must is not kowtowing in fear to the power of an immortal king. He will see Tony either perform the latter or die without; he has no interest in the Cheater’s labours until he falls.
The blow that shakes the walls of the Citadel knocks only dust free from the ceiling. The place is a bunker in construction, and it has withstood sunstorms.
All the same, Loki rolls slowly onto his knees and, wobbling, onto his feet. He takes the sceptre handle in his hands. Here, and only here, it is as light as a feather in the pocket of inversion the Citadel represents. His arms strain and his muscles squirm all the same, and his nerves cry out in protest.
The Citadel walls shake and shiver; the sceptre grows lighter in Loki’s hands, and the horned beast bellows silently in its prison.
There is, Loki supposes, an outside possibility that something Stark has invented will puncture the walls of the Citadel, but he has a suspicion that whatever Tony thinks of himself, he wants to see Loki die up close and personal. It is a suspicion upon which he has hung his entire plan for this sacrifice, and this would be risky were he not invariably rewarded in his low opinion of the morality of mortals.
Before he takes a single step from the centre of the Citadel, the bombardment ceases. Loki waits, bent double under the weight of the world, his hand on the sceptre which feels no more solid than a dream, but there are no further blasts. Either Stark has used up everything he has to give, or he has seen the impossibility of his task.
There is a chance that he’ll turn and run, perhaps. Stark more than the others knows the value of his own life; he is also the kind of fool who will not retreat when retreat is needed. Loki doubts that he will run, or crawl, or fall back on his precious Nick Fury. He will come.
Even now the floor looks inviting and friendly, and Loki’s shoulders ache, and his head feels as if it is being crushed by huge hands. He wants to lie down, just for a moment, but Stark is coming.
Loki keeps his balance. He leans a little more heavily on the shaft of the sceptre, but he does not waver. He has no inkling of how Stark will deceive the metabolic scanners at the door - he can hardly emulate Loki, balanced on the edge of hibernation stupor and wakefulness as only a half Jotun can as he crosses the threshold - but he will use some clever trick or other. He will not turn back. They never turn back.
The gates of the Citadel open with a dramatic clang, and by the time the sound reaches Loki he knows Stark must be a third of the way across the hall. Sound travels strangely here, and Stark’s suit still allows him to fly.
“You’ve been a long time,” Loki says, straightening up as Stark’s armour comes within earshot.
“Other priorities,” Stark says shortly, and it’s a good thing he has his metabolic masking technique - whatever it is - because his voice is flooded with a boiling ocean of rage.
“I rather doubt that,” says Loki.
Stark raises his hand, palm towards Loki, and moves as rapidly as he can in the treacle-thick air. His hand glows, but there is no following burst of energy to shove Loki aside.
“You should really know better than to let your enemy choose the field of battle,” Loki says, letting the sceptre take what feels like twice his normal weight with a crooked, exhausted smile. “Oh, that … doesn’t work in here.”
“Figures,” says Stark, and without pause for reconsideration he punches Loki in the head.
The force of it, the blow of this clockwork man’s metal fist, is sufficient to lift Loki off his feet and knock him to the floor, staggering under his own weight. His hand closes about the shaft of the sceptre in an instinctive spasm, not a calculated gesture.
Stark stamps on his wrist.
Loki howls in shock as much as pain, but his wrist has broken and set every time he raises the sceptre: his body is accustomed to the sensation, and he keeps his grip on the horned beast’s lock, key, and prison even as Stark’s foot smashes into his temples.
He grins, and grins, and curls around the sceptre like a wounded beast around the soft parts of its belly; Stark seizes him by the throat.
With a burst of strength that comes from his chest and tears at the chambers of his heart, Loki raises the sceptre and pokes Stark’s reactor with it. It is not a hearty poke, or a hard one, but a spark reaches between the two, and in a blinding burst of blue-white light, Tony Stark’s arc reactor shuts down.
“Well” says Loki, as Stark stumbles backwards.
They roll together for a moment, neither one of them strong enough to gain the upper hand against gravity as well as his opponent. Loki hooks his foot around Stark’s chestplate, fired by dim memories of wrestling with Thor as a child, and straddles the fallen hero as he would a horse.
“No,” Stark says, but without a power source he is immobile.
“Yes,” Loki corrects, levering the plates of his helmet up with the horns upon the sceptre. He peels them away with arms that feel no more strong and powerful than wet rope.
“What the hell is that thing?”
Loki climbs to his feet, standing on Stark’s chest with the sceptre braced against the side of his helpless head. “I was going to roll you onto your face,” he says, breathless and aching. “Banner died on his back. Rogers died on his knees, like a slave.”
Stark’s face is almost purple. Whether it is anger or the shrapnel working its way into his heart is impossible to tell.
“But it doesn’t matter,” Loki says, swinging his hips in order to distribute his unnaturally enhanced weight for the swing. “It doesn’t matter how you die or which symbol you are. It matters that you die. That’s all. They were wrong about that. It’s all poetry and no lore.”
Stark has nothing to offer. Loki is not sure he can speak, now.
“Let me make it very clear,” Loki says, lifting the sceptre to his shoulder. “You are going to die.”
He swings the sceptre into the side of Tony Stark’s head, and the most valuable brain on earth disintegrates into mush.
The walls of the Citadel ripple and pinch: the head of the sceptre bends and bulges. Hints of an animal too large to be contained within such a tiny space batter and buck at the metal, and the great slabs of the Citadel mirror them, bending as if they are made of cloth.
Loki loses his footing on the breastplate of Stark’s armour and falls. He lands hard half on and half off the man he has just killed, hard enough feel his bones crunch and crack, but not hard enough to score the surface of his skin.
He lies for a while, broken and victorious, as the Citadel swallows Stark’s blood. Loki laughs quietly to himself, but it is a sound shot through with misery as gold veins through rock: he feels the weight of ages in the weight of gravity upon his body, and the sceptre blisters his hand.
Thor hangs as motionless as Loki left him, suspended in the light that emits from the cracked and criss-crossed floor of the Citadel. When Loki left, the floor was whole, but Thor has not moved. He does not turn, bob, or waver in the airless air, only hangs as if poised in mid-leap forever, his hair suspended about his face, rendered alien and strange by the light from below. The roof of the Citadel is cracked like a hatching egg, and beyond Thor’s head lie stars.
The Seventh Citadel of Peace hurtles through the void between worlds, where the All-Seeing are blind and the powerful are powerless. Loki floats within the bounds of the airless chamber, the sceptre his anchor, hanging against his chest. This Citadel is half-quenched already, drunk on the intoxication of its brothers.
“Your turn,” he says, pointing at Thor as much for the effect as to direct his magic. There may be no one here to see, but Loki imagines the horrified, pleading gazes of the worlds he is to destroy as they realise their destiny is only to die, all the same.
Thor lifts his head. He is still bluff and bright, unfaded by his imprisonment: Loki finds this unfair, but he has had lifetimes to learn that Asgard’s citizens unblemished hides do not preclude the rot in their insides. So it is with Thor, who casts the longest shadow of them all; he shines too bright for anyone to find their way in the dark that follows him.
“Brother,” Thor says, as Loki directs his hanging body above the old stone table. The concentric carved rings upon its surface expand and contract like the pupils of a cat as Thor comes above them.
“I am not your brother,” Loki says, although this final lock depends almost wholly on that not being true. The sceptre drags at him from its sling; he speaks with feeling.
“You were always my brother,” Thor says.
“There is the matter of blood,” Loki points out, holding up his left hand: it is blue and frozen for this very demonstration. “I don’t believe this is you blood, is it, Son of Odin?”
“You are also the Son of Odin,” Thor says stubbornly, “and you will always be my brother.” He glares at Loki with more mixed emotions that Loki has ever credited him with the capacity to experience, some of which Loki chooses to ignore all together. “You will always be my brother, and I will always be yours, whether or not either of us wishes it.”
“Good enough for the lore,” Loki says with a sharp, tired smile. He lets Thor drop to the altar, but keeps him, arms and legs, locked and paralysed against any struggle. He lifts the sceptre and pulls himself off his own precarious footing for a moment. Trying to gain friction, a fulcrum on which to stand in this tiny, weightless void-world is akin to wrestling with an oiled snake.
“It will not grant you Asgard,” Thor says, watching him with wide and worried eyes. “Loki, you hear me. That creature you want to let from its cage, it won’t make you king.”
Loki wipes his eyes with the back of his hand. They are streaming into the weightlessness, and he has no notion of how long they have been weeping without his noticing. He says with a clipped, clicking precision biting down on the end of each word, “Fuck. Asgard.”
“Brother, you will be king of nowhere,” Thor cranes his neck to keep Loki in his line of sight. Loki spits at him, but due to the nature of the place he misses, and the phlegm hangs in the air between them. “There will be nowhere for you to reign, no one for you to rule. It means to destroy all. It was caged to keep what was left of the worlds intact, you must know-“
Loki cradles the head of the sceptre in his palm. It is close to drawing blood from him. “We have a common goal,” he says, “I will see everything ended. And I will see you all destroyed.” He swings the sceptre.
Thor is unable to give account of what occurs. His memory grows cloudy in battle, and magic fogs everyone’s minds. He knows he is locked to the altar by some infernal new spell of his brother’s, and then that Loki swings the Sceptre of the Horned Beast towards him at the wrong angle to make contact with his head, and then that he is no longer locked to the altar.
Battle is instinct of the god of thunder: he has the sceptre out of Loki’s hands and into his own without pause. He is deprived of his hammer, but for now this evil thing has the same heft and weight; it sits easily in his hands.
In the weightless air of the void-world, Loki comes at him with knife raised and a look in his eye that is not the spark of madness and yet the fire of unreason at once.
Thor does what is in his nature to do, and he swings the sceptre towards Loki’s head as he would swing Mjolnir. In deference to that in his nature which recognises Loki as his blood brother even now that Loki will not reciprocate, he does not swing the sceptre very hard.
To his immediate horror, it is hard enough.
The sceptre touches the skin of Loki’s temple, and his skin pulls back as if tugged. Blood floats free in the air like lost raindrops: Thor releases the handle of the sceptre, and the horned beast’s silhouette behind the metal guzzles blood from Loki’s skin. Thor can see it soak in and vanish.
For one long moment the Citadel shakes and shivers as if it is in the grip of a giant hand determined to claw it open - Thor grabs for the altar, and for Loki’s foot to prevent him from drifting.
A shadow of something vaster than galaxies and older than worlds falls across the face of the night, twists, shrinks, and pours like smoke into the wound on Loki’s head.
The column of shadow, struggling and fighting, is pulled down through the split in his brother’s skull by some terrible invisible hand. Thor sees hooves and horns flashing in the darkness - so many that there must be a herd, a stable of these impossible beasts - and somehow far away, their distance belying their impossible size.
He holds Loki more tightly by the ankle.
The last of the shadow seeps into Loki’s head. The wound through which it has entered closes behind it, leaving not a trace of blood or a dent behind.
“You,” Thor says, shaking his brother by the ankle. “You planned this.”
“Of course I planned it, you moron,” Loki says, opening his eyes very slowly. He is shaking with suppressed laughter, and Thor wishes to every authority he has ever recognised that he might be allowed a moment to shake his brother like a rag doll just for a moment until he stops being so smug.
“But we read-“
“You read nothing,” Loki says impishily. “I’ve never been very sure if you could read at all. But there is always lore behind the lore. If you ever bothered to read you would know that. Sacrifice my brother,” he says, gesturing with impossible delicacy and no small sarcasm to Thor, “and free the horned beast from its prison of eternities to lay waste to the galaxies, gain nothing, see everything ended - or - have you sacrifice me,” and here he begins to laugh, a series of barking giggles that set the hairs on the back of Thor’s neck on end. “And gain infinite powers.”
Thor releases his brother’s ankle in disgust.
“Infinite. Power,” Loki repeats, laughing again. “INFINITE.” He struggles for a moment in the weightless air, his eyes bugling and damp. There is blood at the corners of his mouth, and the shadows beneath his eyes are deep and dark as the void itself. “I could. Do. I could do anything. ANYTHING.”
“Can you undo what you have done?” Thor asks, but Loki ignores him.
“Anything. I -“
He drops like a stone from his poised position in the empty air, and Thor does not have time to fight the unusual forces of the place to reach him; he, too, is busy falling to his unsteady feet as the world grows heavier.
“I can’t,” Loki says, folding in on himself as if compressed from without. “I can’t, I can’t. It won’t.”
He sounds very young. Thor remembers when they both spoke as children; now Loki’s mouth is clogged with his own blood, and his eyes, when he lifts his head, are dark and wild.
“Infinite power,” Thor says, watching him warily. “You are not using it, I think.”
“IT ISN’T WORKING,” Loki screams in frustration. “It. Isn’t. Working.”
“Perhaps,” suggests Thor, “you have read your lore wrong.”
“WHY WON’T IT WORK?”
“It seems,” Thor continues, kicking aside the dull sceptre - it rolls easily across the cracked shafts of light, as if it is nothing more than an ugly bauble - and stooping to see his brother’s blood-flecked face more clearly, “that your horned beast has exchanged one prison for another, and let free none of its … infinite power.”
Loki stares at him with depthless eyes and shapes sounds with his mouth that do not leave his throat. He lies in a heap, a vanquished body amid the strange lights that are even now dimming as this world loses its magic.
“What can you do, brother, with your infinite power?” Thor asks, scooping up the surprisingly heavy body and depositing Loki over his shoulder like a bundle or a cape. “But contemplate your eternity in prison, as a prison?”
Loki says nothing. He does not struggle. Thor believes him to be exhausted, although Thor knows he has been fooled many times before into thinking his brother is at his wits end when he is only shamming lame, the way a bird might.
“You will be freed when you undo what you have done,” says Thor. He can hear his own rage in his voice, but he does not move to break Loki. There is no profit in it; Loki has very ably broken himself.
“I can do nothing but speak,” Loki says at last, his voice hoarse and small. They will be gone from this place soon enough, but it is not for Thor to dictate the moment of their leaving.
“Words shape worlds,” Thor says, patting Loki on his leg. “You are a magician. You will undo what you have done.” Thor holds back his rage. For Loki to have come this far he must have ended lives, many lives. Thor is not so very naïve that he cannot guess whose.
“I tell you I can do NOTHING,” Loki insists, in a temper. His voice is that of a furious child; Thor feels him, tense as a bundle of wires, thump in frustration against Thor’s back. It is the blow of an infant.
“You will consider and find way,” Thor says, half-assurance, half-order. “You will be contained for an eternity. You will have the time.”
“And what makes you think I will make any attempt to undo this?” Loki sneers. His breathing is laboured, and he coughs something down the back of Thor’s armour. Thor can feel the twitching in his muscles, the effort to remain whole and awake. “I’ll not return your ‘friends’ to you.”
“I will not leave you alone with the things you have done,” Thor says from between gritted teeth, as the wall of blue flame opens at last before him, “because you are my brother, and I love you, I will wait with you in the darkness for the rest of eternity, until you undo what you have done.”
“I am not your brother,” Loki croaks, choking on something wet.
Thor steps into the portal with the flesh prison of the horned beast draped over his shoulder.
YES THE ENTIRE THING IS SOME SORT OF HUGE METAPHOR WONDERFUL SHUT UP.
At 18:00:01 Clint Barton’s eyes open, and without preamble or warning he climbs gingerly down from his sick bed, waves away the medical team officer who insists he needs to be subject to a test or two to determine the cause of his previous loss of consciousness, and walks out into the corridor.
He moves with his usual tight, springy determination, without stopping to check his route or exchange conversation beyond replies to direct questions, all of which are answered in yes, no, and I don’t with the rapid-fire precision of a man with a lot on his mind.
Several people are forced to move out of his way as he approaches the portal room, as it appears that he is in no mood to stop for something as trivial as the possibility of running down S.H.I.E.L.D staff and injuring them.
The portal room is kept under strict guard, and locked. The guard are under instructions to allow Nick Fury’s Avengers Initiative members and Nick Fury immediate access without question, and the locks are ones with which Barton is intimately familiar: he is inside within moments.
The initiation of the portal set-up sequence and the calibration of the portal’s end point takes rather longer.
“Had a sudden flash of inspiration?” Tony Stark asks, stepping out of the shadows rather like the flickerings of someone’s conscience. He is suited, and his voice has a slight echo in the vast room.
“Something like that,” Barton says, still fiddling with the calibration settings.
“Oh yes?” Tony says, stepping up beside him very quickly for a man encased in metal. “Your om-ing and circular breathing just happened to pop the exact coordinates for one of the remaining Citadels right into your head, did it?”
“Actually I was having a fight with a vacuum cleaner,” Barton says in a far-off voice.
“Right,” Tony says, and as Barton reaches out to tap the initiation code in, he slaps his arm away with a force which could break bone.
Barton merely dips out of his way and taps in the second digit. “That’s not helpful, Tony.”
“You know, ordinarily I’d trust you with my life,” Tony says, trying to yank Barton away from the panel and coming up empty-handed. “In fact, I seem to remember I have on at least two occasions which, by the way, I am still grateful for. But I can’t help thinking that this sudden revelation of yours has just turned up very conveniently right at a time when some pretty weird - I would say unworldly weird, maybe even, I don’t know, demi-godly weird - some weird-ass shit is going down inside this base. Now, call me paranoid if you like -“
Tony makes a snatch for Barton’s wrist, but comes up with air. Barton isn’t fighting him, only squirming away from him like a greased eel.
“-but I’m not convinced you’re acting under your own initiative here.”
Barton taps in the last digit of the initiation code and flashes Tony a bland, unreadable smile. “Believe what you like, Tony, you usually do.”
The vapour trail ignites: the wall of blue fire erupts.
“I also think-“ Tony says, interposing himself between Barton and the portal, “-that you are making a very big mistake here. Yoga and lentils and all the rest is great and all but maybe you should put a little thought into what you’re going to do when you get to the other side of that portal-“ the words come out faster and faster as Barton dodges, ducks, and skips under each of Tony’s blocking ploys, “-because so far he’s causally smashed in Steve’s head and as far as we known done just the same to Natasha and who knows what he’s done to Bruce and Clint - really - no offence - but you’re not up to the standard Natasha was and it didn’t exactly help her to go in cold and calm either -“
By now they are against the wall of blue fire. Two steps closer and Tony Stark will be engulfed, pulled into another world.
“Move out of the way, Tony,” Barton says quietly. “If you go through there the Citadel defences will crush you into atoms.”
“You’re not going,” Tony says shoving Barton backwards.
“I am going,” Barton says, “you aren’t, because the minute you step through there you’ll die. Move aside, Tony.”
“You’re not - thinking - clearly -“ Tony snaps, diving to block Barton’s path again. “I can keep this up all night.”
“You haven’t slept in days,” Barton says. “Let me past.”
“Let him go, Tony,” says Fury, walking out onto the gangways above.
“Do you want him to die?” Tony shouts, making another dive to block Barton’s path. “Or has Loki got to you too?”
“I know he’s got the coordinates for the Citadel, I know he’s not going to die the second he puts a toe through that portal,” Fury says, “and I know Clint Barton can do things in unarmed combat that you can’t even imagine.” He raises his voice. “I also know that if you keep trying to stop him, I’m going to definitely lose two operatives instead of potentially losing one.”
“So you’re just going to sacrifice Barton?” Tony shouts, hurling himself in Barton’s way again.
“He’s asking you to get out of my way,” Barton says. “Now. Tony. Get out of my way.”
“I’m working with what we’ve got here,” Fury calls. “Get out of the line of that portal, Tony Stark.”
“He’s not under his own control -“ Tony shouts, his foot inches from the blue flames.
“But you are. Tony, let him go. I need you here,” Fury says. “Get the hell out of the way of that portal. Jarvis, if he doesn’t get the hell out of the way of that portal you move his damn suit for him. Or he dies.”
Tony stands still. Barton walks past him with another bland, unreadable smile, and disappears into the blue flames.
Clint Barton walks into what feels like the world’s hottest sauna as if he’s walking out of a dream. The fact that the last thing he can remember clearly is vacuuming angry blood particles out of the air does little to diminish the feeling that he’s just woken up.
He is not especially surprised to see Loki Laufeysson sitting on the floor beside what looks like an enormous golden sledgehammer with a deformed bull on the mallet. He is momentarily thrown by the absence of the god’s helm and the look of exhausted sorrow on his face, but he reminds himself that Loki is a liar, and says, “Oh, it was you.”
“Hello, Barton,” Loki says, standing slowly. He looks as if he is in pain. “Have you come to die quietly?”
“When did you ever meet an Avenger who died quietly?” Barton asks. He may not have his bow, but he knows he has several knives on his person and he knows every weak spot and pressure point on the human body.
“Your woman didn’t have a lot to say for herself,” Loki shrugs. He leans away from his gaudy sledgehammer as if trying to distance himself from it. Barton wonders where his other weapons are, and what they are, and if that cheap-looking piece of crap was really what brought the brutal end to Steve that they all saw; and the one to Natasha that they could only imagine.
“She wasn’t my woman,” Barton says. He feels as empty as outer space. No anger, no fear. “And she never did have much to say to people like you.”
“Her betters?” Loki says. Barton wonders if he’s trying to goad him on purpose, to set off the Citadel defences, or if he honestly cannot help prodding at anything that might resemble a wound.
He doesn’t deign to answer, only drops into a crouch, grips the handle of the knife at his belt, and slashes at Loki’s legs. The knife is slippery in his hand: the Citadel is so hot that he sweats what feels like all of the water out of his body in seconds.
“This isn’t as much fun as I thought it was going to be,” Loki says with a kind of wooden sullenness.
Someone else - Tony, probably - might have a sarcastic rejoinder to hand here, but Barton is concentrating on not dying. He rolls on the floor to avoid being knocked to it by Loki’s extended leg, meaning to come up beneath him for a groin shot with the knife. It would be a nasty death for them both: instead Barton’s bare shoulder touches superheated substance and singes, and in the bolt of pain that shoots across his vision, temporarily blinding him, he loses sight of Loki.
The crippling blow to his shoulder tells him that Loki has not lost sight of him.
Barton tries to roll away from whatever has struck him; he tries to use the echoes of the room and the prickling sense of someone else’s presence to locate Loki as his vision greys out again. But the echoes are unnatural, and Loki appears to be everywhere. From what he’s seen, that is a real possibility; Barton rolls into a ball, his shoulder screaming, and fumbles for another knife.
“Has he finished his grand subversion of the Citadel defences yet?” Loki asks, and when Barton lunges, twists, and thrusts towards the sound, something with the approximate weight and force of an aircraft-carrier smashes into his other shoulder and knocks it out of its socket.
“Why here?” Barton asks, unscrewing his eyes to get a better look at Loki in relation to himself. He cannot move his left arm, but his right - while agonising - is still useable. He takes the knife out of his left hand as if disarming a corpse. “Why not kill us off anywhere? Why Citadels?”
Loki gives him the kind of look Barton imagines he might give a talking monkey. “You really are very stupid.”
“And you’re an asshole, we all have -“ Barton spits out a mouthful of his own sweat, grips tighter on the knife handle as he steadies himself against the too-hot floor. “-we all have our down sides.”
Loki does not acknowledge the question. He only says, “Yes, you are a transformed man. You’ll do.” He continues, apparently talking to himself: “They should have worded this with more precision and less poetry.”
Barton ignores the cryptic bullshit and springs for the liar in green as best he can.
He is not even close to half-way there when Loki swings the ugly golden sledgehammer up and round and shatters Barton’s ribs in mid-air.
As he falls onto the scorching floor Barton can feel his lungs tear. He has until now been unaware that this is possible, this sensation of puncturing lungs, of broken bones ripping into the delicate forests within him like knives. He would not have imagined the pain this clearly, nor the sudden feeling that he is drowning in this dry room.
Loki kicks him along the floor. Barton makes a grab for his foot, but it is easily evaded.
“Transformed man,” Loki says, lifting his - Barton guesses it’s a sceptre, the kind of thing they show kings holding in paintings, which figures - with an audible crack. “From rage to peace. The perfect offering.”
“You played us,” Barton says, his chest bubbling. Something like pain crosses Loki’s face, but what with the punctured lung and the dislocated shoulder and the imminent death Barton finds it a little hard to sympathise.
Loki casts a pitying look upon him, “Are you new?”
He swings the sceptre, and Barton doesn’t think or feel a lot after that.
"Stark," Fury says for perhaps the millionth time this afternoon: neither of them is keeping count any more. "There are only two remaining Citadels that we know of. Settle on one of them and concentrate on it." He is temporarily grateful that he lost his sense of smell along with his eye; from the way Tony looks right now he can only imagine how bad he smells. There has been no time for pleasantries.
Tony looks frayed at the edges. His hair is greasy. His skin, deprived of whatever sunbed or orange dye or wood-stain he usually uses to make himself look like an Oompa-Loompa, looks sallow and fragile, like it might tear if jostled too hard. His eyes have sunk so deep into his face that he resembles a pygmy gorilla, and he won't stop fidgetting.
"I can get both," Tony insists. "They use the same mechanisms. And then we're a step ahead of him because he won't know which one we're coming for --"
"Tony," Fury says irritably, "focus."
There are snack food wrappers all over the lab. Fury wants to fly in Potts, have her reason with the man: she is the only person alive now who knows how to effectively guide this particular difficult genius to the conclusions they need, and stop the wheels from coming off. But Tony has threatened dire if vague consequences if Potts is brought within a half-mile of him right now.
He might well want to protect her, but as Fury sees it, Tony really needs her to protect him from going crazy.
"I am perfectly focused," says Tony Stark, almost vibrating as he rifles through schematics in three dimensions that obey different physical laws o the ones holding this base together.
"Remember you need to either lure him out or keep their defences jammed for long enough to incapacitate him" Fury says. He can hear himself nagging unnecessarily, and it makes his gorge rise. "We can't afford to lose you."
"Nope," Tony says in a high, distracted voice.
"Stark. Earth needs you." It would sound cheesy from anyone else.
"And if that nut in the stupid hat succeeds at what he's trying to do - at what I think he's trying to do, based on this, and when have I ever been wrong? Don't bring up Cuba, that was a technical error, not an actual mistake - then there won't be an Earth to need me. There won't be an anywhere." Tony waves a hand through the hovering wall of green lines and arcane shapes, and stares, briefly, at or through Fury. "So I pull the place down on us both."
Fury sighs. "You're not Samson." This is exactly the kind of stupid idea that Tony comes up with after not sleeping for a week, and just because the rest of S.H.I.E.L.D, the rest of the world is too swayed by his infinite personal charm to point this out doesn't mean Fury's going to be shy about it.
"He had the right idea."
Fury casts an appraising eye over Tony Stark. He looks smaller than usual, and it's not just the absence of his vain little Cuban heels. "There's always some way out, right, Tony?"
"That's not important."
Fury snorts. "Miss Potts might disagree."
Tony holds up a finger for quiet, still flicking through the flickering schematics with his other hand. "Oh no. No. She will disagree. That's why I'm not telling her." He lowers his finger. "You know who wouldn't disagree, though? Steve wouldn't. He'd call it putting yourself on the line for your men. I may not be him, but you know what, Fury? I don't want him to have died so that I can chicken out of doing what needs to be done, okay?"
Nick Fury says, "We can't rely on Thor to help us in your absence. If the last few weeks have proved nothing else--" he opens the lab door to leave, and the snack food wrappers do an abrupt dance in the influx of new air. "Tony. You will find a way back out of here alive. Death is not an option."
Tony breaks into a smile at last. "It's always an option. But trust me, it's not my A plan."
Calibrating the settings of the portal generation system to point outside of the Citadel of Peace is not only difficult, but on one of the worlds at which the remaining Citadels are located, it is also suicidal.
“That leaves us one option,” says Fury, when Tony tells him. “You’re not equipped for dealing with zero gravity.”
“I can be,” Tony says stubbornly.
“No.”
The Technical team have been banned from the portal room. They seem to have gotten over their brief plague of exsanguinations and exploding faces, attempts to remove their own eyes, and other symptoms of something seriously rotten in the state of the base, but Fury is taking no chances. Half of his technical team have been recommended for counselling. There are two very good operatives invalided on permanent disability leave, and two dead. For one of Loki’s incursions it’s an impressively low fatality count, but that’s not a great deal of consolation.
Tony busies himself with the computers. He is, Fury thinks, becoming increasingly secretive and paranoid and he’s not sure he likes it. There is only room for one secretive and paranoid S.H.I.E.L.D operative and that’s the one with the eye-patch.
The vapour trail ignites slowly.
Tony Stark’s gloves close over his hands, and his mask over his face. He strides towards the wall of blue fire as it spreads and shimmers, and the endlessly-shifting mirage of destinations appears in its depths, far beyond where the walls of the room lie. The suit masks his tiredness, rendering Tony an impenetrable machine moving unstoppably for another world.
“Come back alive,” Fury says, as Tony stands at the gate to the next world. “Or I will personally design the machine that transports me into the afterlife to kick your ass.”
“Get in line behind Pepper,” Tony says, “she already has the blueprints.”
“Don’t do anything dumb,” Fury cautions.
“I never do anything dumb. I’m a genius, it’s impossible.”
“Don’t fucking die out there, Stark.” Fury watches him perform a brief weapons check. Tony is carrying sufficient firepower to take out China. If he can’t take down the Citadel he’ll throw the entire world out of orbit.
“Not planning on it,” Tony says, and with spring he’s gone.
Tony Stark drops into the desert like a ball-bearing into pudding.
Preliminary information on this world did provide the necessary information about the increased gravity, and this is the main reason that Tony’s lungs do not immediately collapse.
He is a mile from the Citadel. He can see it, a low flat blemish among the low flat landscape. It must have taken marvels of engineering to build something even this high. Perhaps the people who lived here before were giants.
Nothing in Tony's arsenal will go a full mile in this gravity. He must be closer to the building before he can even begin to attempt to destroy it, and it looks discouragingly impregnable.
He raises himself up on his elbows, bends at the waist, and tries to stand.
The gravity of the place has other ideas, and Tony smacks face-first into the indentation of his own body upon the ground.
“Fine, I get it, I get it,” Tony says irritably, even though Jarvis has been utterly silent since passing through the portal. “It’s a very clever choice of location because it requires penitent crawling. Brilliant.”
Tony’s never been particularly inclined to accept punishments meted out by external sources of authority. He’s quite capable of punishing himself; likewise, he’ll decide for himself how penitent he is and whether or not it merits crawling. Right now he doesn’t feel particularly penitent at all, and he has rockets in his goddamn feet.
After some wrestling with the controls and a hairy moment in which Tony’s almost sure he’s going to blow himself up over something really dumb, he blasts off from the ground, stabilises a full six inches above the surface, and at a speed which would embarrass a sloth, he approaches the Citadel with his head held up.
He is getting one hell of a tension headache.
Within the low-ceilinged, acre-wide Citadel of Peace, Loki, lies flat on his back with his arms extended and his eyes closed, one fingertip pressed to the sceptre’s head as it lies beside him. His chest labours in the in the heavy gravity of the land of penitence.
Tony Stark breeched the walls of this world half an hour ago; he must crawl every step of the way, but Loki would rather rest than watch. His bones hurt, his blood hurts, his tongue hurts, and his head hurts; creeping in deference to the laws of the physical universe as every mortal must is not kowtowing in fear to the power of an immortal king. He will see Tony either perform the latter or die without; he has no interest in the Cheater’s labours until he falls.
The blow that shakes the walls of the Citadel knocks only dust free from the ceiling. The place is a bunker in construction, and it has withstood sunstorms.
All the same, Loki rolls slowly onto his knees and, wobbling, onto his feet. He takes the sceptre handle in his hands. Here, and only here, it is as light as a feather in the pocket of inversion the Citadel represents. His arms strain and his muscles squirm all the same, and his nerves cry out in protest.
The Citadel walls shake and shiver; the sceptre grows lighter in Loki’s hands, and the horned beast bellows silently in its prison.
There is, Loki supposes, an outside possibility that something Stark has invented will puncture the walls of the Citadel, but he has a suspicion that whatever Tony thinks of himself, he wants to see Loki die up close and personal. It is a suspicion upon which he has hung his entire plan for this sacrifice, and this would be risky were he not invariably rewarded in his low opinion of the morality of mortals.
Before he takes a single step from the centre of the Citadel, the bombardment ceases. Loki waits, bent double under the weight of the world, his hand on the sceptre which feels no more solid than a dream, but there are no further blasts. Either Stark has used up everything he has to give, or he has seen the impossibility of his task.
There is a chance that he’ll turn and run, perhaps. Stark more than the others knows the value of his own life; he is also the kind of fool who will not retreat when retreat is needed. Loki doubts that he will run, or crawl, or fall back on his precious Nick Fury. He will come.
Even now the floor looks inviting and friendly, and Loki’s shoulders ache, and his head feels as if it is being crushed by huge hands. He wants to lie down, just for a moment, but Stark is coming.
Loki keeps his balance. He leans a little more heavily on the shaft of the sceptre, but he does not waver. He has no inkling of how Stark will deceive the metabolic scanners at the door - he can hardly emulate Loki, balanced on the edge of hibernation stupor and wakefulness as only a half Jotun can as he crosses the threshold - but he will use some clever trick or other. He will not turn back. They never turn back.
The gates of the Citadel open with a dramatic clang, and by the time the sound reaches Loki he knows Stark must be a third of the way across the hall. Sound travels strangely here, and Stark’s suit still allows him to fly.
“You’ve been a long time,” Loki says, straightening up as Stark’s armour comes within earshot.
“Other priorities,” Stark says shortly, and it’s a good thing he has his metabolic masking technique - whatever it is - because his voice is flooded with a boiling ocean of rage.
“I rather doubt that,” says Loki.
Stark raises his hand, palm towards Loki, and moves as rapidly as he can in the treacle-thick air. His hand glows, but there is no following burst of energy to shove Loki aside.
“You should really know better than to let your enemy choose the field of battle,” Loki says, letting the sceptre take what feels like twice his normal weight with a crooked, exhausted smile. “Oh, that … doesn’t work in here.”
“Figures,” says Stark, and without pause for reconsideration he punches Loki in the head.
The force of it, the blow of this clockwork man’s metal fist, is sufficient to lift Loki off his feet and knock him to the floor, staggering under his own weight. His hand closes about the shaft of the sceptre in an instinctive spasm, not a calculated gesture.
Stark stamps on his wrist.
Loki howls in shock as much as pain, but his wrist has broken and set every time he raises the sceptre: his body is accustomed to the sensation, and he keeps his grip on the horned beast’s lock, key, and prison even as Stark’s foot smashes into his temples.
He grins, and grins, and curls around the sceptre like a wounded beast around the soft parts of its belly; Stark seizes him by the throat.
With a burst of strength that comes from his chest and tears at the chambers of his heart, Loki raises the sceptre and pokes Stark’s reactor with it. It is not a hearty poke, or a hard one, but a spark reaches between the two, and in a blinding burst of blue-white light, Tony Stark’s arc reactor shuts down.
“Well” says Loki, as Stark stumbles backwards.
They roll together for a moment, neither one of them strong enough to gain the upper hand against gravity as well as his opponent. Loki hooks his foot around Stark’s chestplate, fired by dim memories of wrestling with Thor as a child, and straddles the fallen hero as he would a horse.
“No,” Stark says, but without a power source he is immobile.
“Yes,” Loki corrects, levering the plates of his helmet up with the horns upon the sceptre. He peels them away with arms that feel no more strong and powerful than wet rope.
“What the hell is that thing?”
Loki climbs to his feet, standing on Stark’s chest with the sceptre braced against the side of his helpless head. “I was going to roll you onto your face,” he says, breathless and aching. “Banner died on his back. Rogers died on his knees, like a slave.”
Stark’s face is almost purple. Whether it is anger or the shrapnel working its way into his heart is impossible to tell.
“But it doesn’t matter,” Loki says, swinging his hips in order to distribute his unnaturally enhanced weight for the swing. “It doesn’t matter how you die or which symbol you are. It matters that you die. That’s all. They were wrong about that. It’s all poetry and no lore.”
Stark has nothing to offer. Loki is not sure he can speak, now.
“Let me make it very clear,” Loki says, lifting the sceptre to his shoulder. “You are going to die.”
He swings the sceptre into the side of Tony Stark’s head, and the most valuable brain on earth disintegrates into mush.
The walls of the Citadel ripple and pinch: the head of the sceptre bends and bulges. Hints of an animal too large to be contained within such a tiny space batter and buck at the metal, and the great slabs of the Citadel mirror them, bending as if they are made of cloth.
Loki loses his footing on the breastplate of Stark’s armour and falls. He lands hard half on and half off the man he has just killed, hard enough feel his bones crunch and crack, but not hard enough to score the surface of his skin.
He lies for a while, broken and victorious, as the Citadel swallows Stark’s blood. Loki laughs quietly to himself, but it is a sound shot through with misery as gold veins through rock: he feels the weight of ages in the weight of gravity upon his body, and the sceptre blisters his hand.
Thor hangs as motionless as Loki left him, suspended in the light that emits from the cracked and criss-crossed floor of the Citadel. When Loki left, the floor was whole, but Thor has not moved. He does not turn, bob, or waver in the airless air, only hangs as if poised in mid-leap forever, his hair suspended about his face, rendered alien and strange by the light from below. The roof of the Citadel is cracked like a hatching egg, and beyond Thor’s head lie stars.
The Seventh Citadel of Peace hurtles through the void between worlds, where the All-Seeing are blind and the powerful are powerless. Loki floats within the bounds of the airless chamber, the sceptre his anchor, hanging against his chest. This Citadel is half-quenched already, drunk on the intoxication of its brothers.
“Your turn,” he says, pointing at Thor as much for the effect as to direct his magic. There may be no one here to see, but Loki imagines the horrified, pleading gazes of the worlds he is to destroy as they realise their destiny is only to die, all the same.
Thor lifts his head. He is still bluff and bright, unfaded by his imprisonment: Loki finds this unfair, but he has had lifetimes to learn that Asgard’s citizens unblemished hides do not preclude the rot in their insides. So it is with Thor, who casts the longest shadow of them all; he shines too bright for anyone to find their way in the dark that follows him.
“Brother,” Thor says, as Loki directs his hanging body above the old stone table. The concentric carved rings upon its surface expand and contract like the pupils of a cat as Thor comes above them.
“I am not your brother,” Loki says, although this final lock depends almost wholly on that not being true. The sceptre drags at him from its sling; he speaks with feeling.
“You were always my brother,” Thor says.
“There is the matter of blood,” Loki points out, holding up his left hand: it is blue and frozen for this very demonstration. “I don’t believe this is you blood, is it, Son of Odin?”
“You are also the Son of Odin,” Thor says stubbornly, “and you will always be my brother.” He glares at Loki with more mixed emotions that Loki has ever credited him with the capacity to experience, some of which Loki chooses to ignore all together. “You will always be my brother, and I will always be yours, whether or not either of us wishes it.”
“Good enough for the lore,” Loki says with a sharp, tired smile. He lets Thor drop to the altar, but keeps him, arms and legs, locked and paralysed against any struggle. He lifts the sceptre and pulls himself off his own precarious footing for a moment. Trying to gain friction, a fulcrum on which to stand in this tiny, weightless void-world is akin to wrestling with an oiled snake.
“It will not grant you Asgard,” Thor says, watching him with wide and worried eyes. “Loki, you hear me. That creature you want to let from its cage, it won’t make you king.”
Loki wipes his eyes with the back of his hand. They are streaming into the weightlessness, and he has no notion of how long they have been weeping without his noticing. He says with a clipped, clicking precision biting down on the end of each word, “Fuck. Asgard.”
“Brother, you will be king of nowhere,” Thor cranes his neck to keep Loki in his line of sight. Loki spits at him, but due to the nature of the place he misses, and the phlegm hangs in the air between them. “There will be nowhere for you to reign, no one for you to rule. It means to destroy all. It was caged to keep what was left of the worlds intact, you must know-“
Loki cradles the head of the sceptre in his palm. It is close to drawing blood from him. “We have a common goal,” he says, “I will see everything ended. And I will see you all destroyed.” He swings the sceptre.
Thor is unable to give account of what occurs. His memory grows cloudy in battle, and magic fogs everyone’s minds. He knows he is locked to the altar by some infernal new spell of his brother’s, and then that Loki swings the Sceptre of the Horned Beast towards him at the wrong angle to make contact with his head, and then that he is no longer locked to the altar.
Battle is instinct of the god of thunder: he has the sceptre out of Loki’s hands and into his own without pause. He is deprived of his hammer, but for now this evil thing has the same heft and weight; it sits easily in his hands.
In the weightless air of the void-world, Loki comes at him with knife raised and a look in his eye that is not the spark of madness and yet the fire of unreason at once.
Thor does what is in his nature to do, and he swings the sceptre towards Loki’s head as he would swing Mjolnir. In deference to that in his nature which recognises Loki as his blood brother even now that Loki will not reciprocate, he does not swing the sceptre very hard.
To his immediate horror, it is hard enough.
The sceptre touches the skin of Loki’s temple, and his skin pulls back as if tugged. Blood floats free in the air like lost raindrops: Thor releases the handle of the sceptre, and the horned beast’s silhouette behind the metal guzzles blood from Loki’s skin. Thor can see it soak in and vanish.
For one long moment the Citadel shakes and shivers as if it is in the grip of a giant hand determined to claw it open - Thor grabs for the altar, and for Loki’s foot to prevent him from drifting.
A shadow of something vaster than galaxies and older than worlds falls across the face of the night, twists, shrinks, and pours like smoke into the wound on Loki’s head.
The column of shadow, struggling and fighting, is pulled down through the split in his brother’s skull by some terrible invisible hand. Thor sees hooves and horns flashing in the darkness - so many that there must be a herd, a stable of these impossible beasts - and somehow far away, their distance belying their impossible size.
He holds Loki more tightly by the ankle.
The last of the shadow seeps into Loki’s head. The wound through which it has entered closes behind it, leaving not a trace of blood or a dent behind.
“You,” Thor says, shaking his brother by the ankle. “You planned this.”
“Of course I planned it, you moron,” Loki says, opening his eyes very slowly. He is shaking with suppressed laughter, and Thor wishes to every authority he has ever recognised that he might be allowed a moment to shake his brother like a rag doll just for a moment until he stops being so smug.
“But we read-“
“You read nothing,” Loki says impishily. “I’ve never been very sure if you could read at all. But there is always lore behind the lore. If you ever bothered to read you would know that. Sacrifice my brother,” he says, gesturing with impossible delicacy and no small sarcasm to Thor, “and free the horned beast from its prison of eternities to lay waste to the galaxies, gain nothing, see everything ended - or - have you sacrifice me,” and here he begins to laugh, a series of barking giggles that set the hairs on the back of Thor’s neck on end. “And gain infinite powers.”
Thor releases his brother’s ankle in disgust.
“Infinite. Power,” Loki repeats, laughing again. “INFINITE.” He struggles for a moment in the weightless air, his eyes bugling and damp. There is blood at the corners of his mouth, and the shadows beneath his eyes are deep and dark as the void itself. “I could. Do. I could do anything. ANYTHING.”
“Can you undo what you have done?” Thor asks, but Loki ignores him.
“Anything. I -“
He drops like a stone from his poised position in the empty air, and Thor does not have time to fight the unusual forces of the place to reach him; he, too, is busy falling to his unsteady feet as the world grows heavier.
“I can’t,” Loki says, folding in on himself as if compressed from without. “I can’t, I can’t. It won’t.”
He sounds very young. Thor remembers when they both spoke as children; now Loki’s mouth is clogged with his own blood, and his eyes, when he lifts his head, are dark and wild.
“Infinite power,” Thor says, watching him warily. “You are not using it, I think.”
“IT ISN’T WORKING,” Loki screams in frustration. “It. Isn’t. Working.”
“Perhaps,” suggests Thor, “you have read your lore wrong.”
“WHY WON’T IT WORK?”
“It seems,” Thor continues, kicking aside the dull sceptre - it rolls easily across the cracked shafts of light, as if it is nothing more than an ugly bauble - and stooping to see his brother’s blood-flecked face more clearly, “that your horned beast has exchanged one prison for another, and let free none of its … infinite power.”
Loki stares at him with depthless eyes and shapes sounds with his mouth that do not leave his throat. He lies in a heap, a vanquished body amid the strange lights that are even now dimming as this world loses its magic.
“What can you do, brother, with your infinite power?” Thor asks, scooping up the surprisingly heavy body and depositing Loki over his shoulder like a bundle or a cape. “But contemplate your eternity in prison, as a prison?”
Loki says nothing. He does not struggle. Thor believes him to be exhausted, although Thor knows he has been fooled many times before into thinking his brother is at his wits end when he is only shamming lame, the way a bird might.
“You will be freed when you undo what you have done,” says Thor. He can hear his own rage in his voice, but he does not move to break Loki. There is no profit in it; Loki has very ably broken himself.
“I can do nothing but speak,” Loki says at last, his voice hoarse and small. They will be gone from this place soon enough, but it is not for Thor to dictate the moment of their leaving.
“Words shape worlds,” Thor says, patting Loki on his leg. “You are a magician. You will undo what you have done.” Thor holds back his rage. For Loki to have come this far he must have ended lives, many lives. Thor is not so very naïve that he cannot guess whose.
“I tell you I can do NOTHING,” Loki insists, in a temper. His voice is that of a furious child; Thor feels him, tense as a bundle of wires, thump in frustration against Thor’s back. It is the blow of an infant.
“You will consider and find way,” Thor says, half-assurance, half-order. “You will be contained for an eternity. You will have the time.”
“And what makes you think I will make any attempt to undo this?” Loki sneers. His breathing is laboured, and he coughs something down the back of Thor’s armour. Thor can feel the twitching in his muscles, the effort to remain whole and awake. “I’ll not return your ‘friends’ to you.”
“I will not leave you alone with the things you have done,” Thor says from between gritted teeth, as the wall of blue flame opens at last before him, “because you are my brother, and I love you, I will wait with you in the darkness for the rest of eternity, until you undo what you have done.”
“I am not your brother,” Loki croaks, choking on something wet.
Thor steps into the portal with the flesh prison of the horned beast draped over his shoulder.
YES THE ENTIRE THING IS SOME SORT OF HUGE METAPHOR WONDERFUL SHUT UP.