[Fateverse Side Story: NC Bundle] The Coin
Warnings: AU - Fateverse. Rule 63. Background femslash. Fifteen!Loki (…well, almost all Lokis…) is bad at interpersonal relationships. not actually Infinity War spoilers, just vague inklings of possibilities that could happen in any universe where Thanos gets his creepy mitts on the stones. language: pg.
Pairing: fem!Loki/Natasha.
Timeline: From Natasha and Thor’s (Thors’?) perspective, three months after Conducting the Blizzard; from Loki’s side, more like a year.
Disclaimer: Marvel owns the characters, I just made this crazy dollhouse called the Fateverse.
Notes: See postscript; linked footnotes may open in a new tab.
Visit The Fateverse Glossary for terms and concepts, and The Fateverse Appendix for Nodes, branches, and important people.
The Coin
Fifteen strides through the corridors of the housing complex like a stiletto-clad tiger, proud and vindicated and unrepentantly sporting her gaudiest set of horns.
A mother gasps and clutches her children close; a Steve spits at her feet; a woman makes a tasteless crack about ‘horny girls.’
But she is Loki, Realm-Slayer, Queen of a race and world she destroyed, and the multiverse would spin away into screaming chaos without her.
She holds her wrist out to the lock panel of Natasha’s apartment, and Skuld obligingly overrides the lock.
“I’m home, my loves!” she declares.
Natasha barrels into her and shoves her bodily back into the corridor.
“Manhandling me already, dear? I expected dinner first.”
“You’ve been gone for three months, asshole!” Natasha hisses.
Fifteen sighs. “You wouldn’t believe how much persuasion Strange needed, and then it took bloody forever to get Loki killed, that selfish little bastard… Why are we standing out here?”
“Because first of all, I’m still not speaking to you,” grumbles the redhead. “Second, your super-codependent sister is asleep on the couch after a screaming tantrum about you having never been gone for so long and it meaning that maybe you didn’t love her anymore, or maybe you needed help and obviously she should go save you, or maybe you were already dead and nobody thought to tell her.”
Fifteen flinches. “It was an extremely precise pre-tune,” she says stiffly. “At one point, it was necessary to manipulate a single molecule. Their overall success depended on them first failing in a very specific way. It was exhausting, thankless work that took the better part of a year from my perspective, and if I ever do anything in my life that does not have my sister's best interests in mind, you will know that I have been replaced by a talentless imposter.”
Natasha exhales slowly through her nose, but still looks notably displeased. “Welcome back. Thanks for all your hard work. You’re still an asshole, and you still need to understand what you did wrong before you can come to my place, ever. But Thor can stay whenever she needs to.”
“How is she doing with the new Proctor?[ 1]”
“From what I can tell, marginally better than she’s done with anybody besides Foster. She still refuses to go as often as you wanted her to.”
Fifteen purses her lips. “I…dislike the fact that she is generally unhappy when I'm away. I won’t say that I wish she were ‘whole,’ or some other such crassly diminishing drivel, but…as my profession so frequently demands my absence, I would certainly prefer that it not cause her such distress.”
They stand in silence for a while, and Fifteen tries to read the tale of the previous months from the general state of her sometimes-ex-girlfriend. It’s worn on her, clearly; but she’s managed to focus her anger and frustration on Fifteen, rather than on poor Thor.
Someone angry at Loki? Situation normal, as Pietro would say (Tom maintains-and Fifteen agrees-that in her line of work, if no one is angry, then she isn’t doing her job properly).
Natasha raises her eyebrows and breaks the silence. “So you went to MM, huh? Natalie said you were on the Thanos problem. You don't find that just a little bit hypocritical?”
What.
In this moment, Fifteen knows only that she is on the verge of extreme violence and she cannot allow herself to tip past it.[ 2]
“No,” she replies icily. “When she wakes, tell her I'm home. Good day, Agent Romanoff.”
And, too blindingly furious to linger, Fifteen turns and stalks away.
How absurd! They aren’t even in the same league. It’s like comparing a battering ram to a bullet. Thanos dabbled a little in economics and thought it gave him the right to kill half a universe to alleviate scarcity for the other half. The oaf didn’t even stop to conjecture which members of a given society would be the most peaceful and productive-so he managed only a modest delay of what he insisted was inevitable, and only did so through the use of a power that tended to cause cascading faults, just like higher-order magic. To ‘save’ half a universe, he endangered dozens more. How bitterly she wishes she could explain his idiocy to him, to wipe that smug look off his stupid purple face!
The very idea that Fifteen’s elegant machinations have anything in common with the way every Thanos bludgeons his way through the universes is so…galling…so breathtakingly insulting…
“Mmm, I thought I heard those heels.”
“I will gladly end you and face sentencing for unauthorized re-tuning,” Fifteen tells the sleazy old man following in her wake.
“Peace, sister-self,” he demurrs. “I only intrude upon your magnificent display to offer, as ever, a listening ear. Who but Loki can know the pain of being Loki, after all?”
She spins and clutches his scrawny throat with her painted nails. “You are repulsive, old worm. You know nothing of me or my pains, except perhaps for the pain of being surrounded by ignorant, short-sighted simpletons so convinced of their own superiority that they wouldn’t know true genius if it stripped naked and sat in their laps.”
“I know the look in our eyes when we hurt Thor for his own good,” he drawls. “A little bird told me that you’d gone to save that garbage fire of a bundle from Thanos… Did our beloved golden buffoon require…motivating?”
“You think you know me,” she scoffs, squeezing. “Do not confuse your coveting with care; you hate your brother. You and I could not be more different.”
“It must be easy to love something so thoroughly in your thrall,” he chokes out. “Which, of course, is why you keep the silly creature in the role of beloved pet rather than equal partner.”
She drops him. “Pitiful old dotard… She looks to me as you once looked to your brother; I have not made his mistake of dismissing that as my due. I shape worlds with a flick of my finger, while you have only ever used your strength for petty little vengeances.”
“I have become the acknowledged expert on petty little vengeances, my dear,” he coos. “Someday, you too will seek my talents, same as all the others. Someday, you will see Loki as I do-a bastion alone in a storm of pretty lies, unique in the excruciating honesty of merciless redress. Like a poisonous caterpillar, our words are eyespots, diversion and warning in one; but our toxic nature is hardly our fault, and it’s terribly forthright, for those with the wit to pause and observe.”
“You’re talking in circles,” Fifteen lies. “Self-important nonsense.”
“Is it?” he asks sweetly. “Have you never wondered why Loki nearly always grows old and Thor so seldom does?”
“No,” she tells him bluntly. “And I won’t start now.”
“Liar,” he pronounces with deep affection. “You know where to find me…should the need arise, of course.”
She starts walking again, more measured this time.
He’s wrong.
She doesn’t need to wonder.
Thor is an incarnation of youth, fertility, beginnings… Loki is the coin’s other face, a creature of change and destructive renewal, wildfire to Thor’s thriving forest.
Growing old is, quite simply, not in Thor’s nature.
By contrast, Loki can be young…but can never stay that way. No Loki can exist for long in stasis. Like Time herself, they cannot be allowed to stagnate; it is their bane, in simplest terms. If it goes on too long, it kills them. The more they stay the same, the older they get.
Fifteen has used that knowledge more than once to destroy her other selves. She uses it to keep herself alive. When she travels, she lets some piece of her become each of her counterparts. She might almost call it symbiosis, except that the ones she ‘feeds on’ gain nothing in return and occasionally lose everything.
Only two others know the secret of her continued vitality, her appearance of agelessness that lets her seem to Thor’s eyes to be exactly the same as ever: the Worlds-Ender and a very different version of her sister.
Then again, she knows their secrets, too.
She politely presses the door chime of Don Blake[ 3] HX377’s door.
~I'm busy!~
Fifteen smiles fondly. “Pause your game and let me in, you barbarian.”
After a moment, the door opens.
He regards her in silence for several seconds-gauging her, no doubt, as she gauged Natasha. There’s more grey in his hair than she remembers, and it makes him resemble their father. He’s been giving away too much of his strength, it seems.[ 4] “You look as though your latest meal disagreed with you, little vampire,” he comments without malice.
“A bit less sane than most,” she admits. “And there was some strange fidelis activity going on.”
“Well, come in. You know my home is always open to Loki. Have you tried spitting him back out? Metaphorically…”
“How uncharacteristically clever of you, Thor. No, I haven't tried; perhaps I ought to.”
“Let me know when you make the attempt, so that I may document the process thoroughly. I’m still working on my Senior Theorist application, and your resonance siphoning will put me on equal footing with the old grump himself.”
“Your brother’s been offering me a ‘friendly ear’ again. Still insists I’ll one day resort to his line of work.”
“Hm. No, I don’t see the great Realm-Slayer bothering with revenge. You take too many pains to remain detached; you are famed for it.”
Fifteen stares at her brother-sister. “If you'd ever met the Founder at the peak of rage, you would understand. He loved the children my father slaughtered, without ever having met them. His anger at their deaths almost ruined him. It almost tore this universe asunder. I have learned my lesson: I trust and love no-one but Thor.”
He smiles at her, tugs her close, kisses her hair. “That is a simple truth of Loki, and I would have it no other way. Come, sister-brother-there is a second controller with your name on it, and a two-player puzzle that has long thwarted my poor burlap lad.”
.End.
1 Fifteen’s sister’s therapy has stalled since the death of her favorite Proctor, Jane Foster. Dr. Temple, the same woman who serves as mental health Proctor to the likes of the Savant and the Cartographer, has taken over because of her experience with long-lived subjects, and has managed to make a bit more progress.
2 The only way to actually piss Fifteen off is to insult her competence. Well, that and implying she resembles the ‘lesser’ versions of Loki that she so frequently manipulates (same difference).
3 Don Blake is one of Thor’s aliases.
4 This particular Thor is a Network Theorist whose chosen area of expertise is…Loki. He makes a habit of ‘raising’ or ‘sheltering’ young versions in order to study their resonant differences and what effect (if any) their actions and personalities have on their aging. He’s discovered that he (and possibly others with similar powers tied to youth and fertility) can prolong their youth at the cost of his own. Also, he’s addicted to the LBP video game series (his favorite Sackboy outfit is Thor, of course).
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