Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

There was always so much to do. Tony didn’t understand how other people could waste all of the time they did, strolling in parks and playing video games and eating and sleeping, and all of the other time-wasting stuff people were constantly doing, when there was always so much to do.

For example, there were five or six very important things that Tony needed to be working on right now. Thirty or forty marginally less important things, too, that he definitely needed to be thinking about at the moment. Since he only had two hands, and ATHENA wasn’t quite as attuned to him yet as JARVIS had been, Tony was currently only actually working on three of the things that he needed to be working on.

Tony hadn’t thought that he would ever be wishing Jarvis back in his AI form, but if it would spare him one more second of ATHENA’s blundering, he would take it. And at least when Jarvis had been an AI, he hadn’t been able to stare at Tony reproachfully for hours on end. Or, anyway, Tony hadn’t been aware of it, if he had.

“Sir,” Jarvis spoke for the first time in over an hour, “Let me call Captain Rogers again.”

“What is this ‘sir’ business?” Tony muttered, not looking at him, “I’m back to being just your employer, now?” 

Jarvis seemed to suppress a sigh, merely dropping his chin to his chest momentarily. “You have never been my employer. I simply assumed, when you declined to let me touch you or approach you, that you had rescinded the degree of…intimacy which we have lately shared.”

Tony’s hands tightened around the voltimeter he was holding, a futile effort to stop their shaking. He turned to face Jarvis with a snarl, “If you’re breaking up with me, just fucking say it! I can’t take these games!”

Jarvis’s face went slack with what appeared to be shock. Tony quickly spun back around so that he wouldn’t have to see what came next.

But Jarvis’s voice, when it was next heard, was the soft one he used when Tony was upset. It made Tony’s lips turn down convulsively and his breath hitch.

“Tony…” Jarvis said cautiously, “I’m calling Steve.”

Tony hunched his shoulders, “Loki already told you, he needs his sleep-” but Jarvis wasn’t listening to him.

“Loki?....Yes, please, if he could….Well, as soon as is commensurate with his health, in your opinion….I’d rather not say….Yes, alright. Thank you.” There was a click as the call ended.

“Talking about me with Loki, now?” Tony growled, not really meaning to be heard.

“Steve is awake and getting dressed. He’ll be down shortly,” Jarvis announced.

Tony glanced up at him sharply. Jarvis had sounded a little shaky. That wasn’t supposed to happen.

“J,” Tony said, uncertainly, “…I’m not mad at you.”

“No? You’re doing a very fine impression of it, then.”

Tony felt, if possible, even shittier. “J-Baby. You know better.”

This time Jarvis did sigh. “I do, Tony. Would you believe that I would rather have you angry at me, than at yourself?”

“’M not really angry,” Tony muttered.

Jarvis moved a little closer. Tony didn’t protest, so Jarvis moved closer still, and then continued until he was standing behind Tony’s shoulder. He didn’t touch with his hands, but he stooped until his nose was almost in Tony’s hair. Tony stopped what he was doing, closed his eyes, and enjoyed the closeness that he knew he didn’t deserve.

“Anger is the mask of fear,” Jarvis said softly. It sounded like he was quoting someone, and if Tony had to guess, he’d say it was probably Loki. It sounded like something Loki would say, in his snooty accent that was nowhere near as cute as Jarvis’s. “Howard’s completely disproportionate reactions to any of your perceived failures has left you with an expectation that others will react in a similar way.”

“Ugh, I knew it was a mistake to let you listen in on my sessions with Leona,” Tony’s growl lacked any heat this time.

“On a conscious level, you know perfectly well that none of the inhabitants of this tower is even remotely like Howard.” Jarvis leaned a little closer, so that his lips were brushing Tony’s hair. “I would never allow such a person to live with you.” It sounded almost ominous, the way he said it, and Tony gave a little shiver of pleasure.

Jarvis’s hands tentatively lifted to rest on Tony’s arms. “Steve will not be angry with you.”

“Well, he should be,” Tony snapped, cherishing the comforting touch.

“May I make a prediction, Tony?”

Tony hummed his assent, when it seemed that Jarvis was actually waiting for an answer.

“Steve will not even know why you think he should be angry with you. You will have to explain it to him.”

Tony turned his head to glare up at Jarvis, careful not to dislodge Jarvis’s big, warm hands, “That’s not much of a prediction; he was unconscious at the time!”

“Not unconscious,” was the quick reply, “Merely unresponsive-”

Then the door to the lab opened and Steve swept in. Followed in a creepy, lurkerish way by Loki, who was back in his chalky white skin. Tony had really hoped to have this conversation without Loki present, but the Emo Prince seemed to be connected at the hip to Steve, ever since he had shown up in corporeal form.

“Tony, what is all this?” Steve demanded emphatically, “Can you explain it to me?”

Jarvis gave Tony a pointed look, and then stepped back so that Tony could turn all the way around on his spinning stool.

“Capsicle!” Tony plastered on an enormous grin, “So good to see you up and about! I’m just working on some very important projects, you know, highly advanced new technology, can’t talk now, very busy, you know the way out.” He gestured expansively towards the door, “You just came through it.”

Steve wore his army-mule expression, and folded his arms over his newly re-fleshed chest as if he planned to stand right where he was until the stars fell down.

“A whole flock of little birds told me that you’ve been working down here practically non-stop ever since Odin left.” Steve, Tony had noticed some time ago, was a grandmaster of the Unimpressed Look. “That’s nearly twelve hours ago now, Tony. You need sleep. You need food. Have you consumed anything at all besides coffee and scotch during those twelve hours?”

“Yes,” Tony answered defensively, “DUM-E made me a smoothie.”

“This smoothie?” asked Loki innocently from one of the side tables, the straw of the blueberry concoction still in his mouth.

They all noted that the cup was full.

Steve turned his attention back to Tony. He sighed and unfolded his arms, and softened his stance.

“Okay, Tony, can I take a guess?”

Tony didn’t reply, so Steve went on. “You left the recovery room when I mentioned that Klieg light you made.”

He looked expectantly at Tony, who just clenched his jaw and glared back.

Steve continued. “Something about that light has you upset… Is it because it didn’t heal me up completely? Were you disappointed that it didn’t work like you thought it would?”

Tony still didn’t answer, and Steve was still a stubborn prick, so they just stared at each other in an increasingly tense silence for a while.

“He believes that it nearly killed you, Captain,” Jarvis finally said, to break the stalemate.

“It did nearly kill him!” Tony threw down the voltimeter onto the metal tabletop and heard its casing crack, “Doctor Asshole said so! He said it was the final nail in the coffin! We all heard him.”

Steve eyebrows drew together in a puzzled expression, “Well then, he didn’t know what he was talking about. I was there, Tony, for the whole thing, and I’m telling you that light saved my life.”

“No, it didn’t.” If there was one thing Tony would not put up with, it was mollycoddling. Stark men did not need mollycoddling, never had. “You were still dying after we used it. It didn’t do shit, except add radiation poisoning and phototoxicity to your issues.”

Steve moved a little closer, eyeing Tony as if he were a skittish animal. “Yes, Tony, I was still dying. Slowly dying, after you used the light. But do you know what I was doing before you used it?” He paused to make Tony meet his eyes. “Quickly dying.”

Tony harrumphed, and turned his shoulder to Steve, picking at the litter of machinery and Erlenmeyer flasks on his worktable.

Steve edged in closer and spoke more quietly. “It’s true, Tony. I was dying on that operating table. I could feel it. I was suffocating.” He cleared his throat and continued in an even softer tone. “I’ve felt it before. I’ve died that way before.”

Tony had to look up at that. It wasn’t something they had ever talked about, but Steve had died before. He was not in a state of “suspended animation” like the press tended to suggest. He had been in a state which met all the clinical criteria for death. And he had been in it for sixty-six years. Tony had never asked him what it was like, because Tony didn’t believe in an afterlife. But Steve did. For the first time, Tony wondered if Steve had had, or thought he’d had, any experiences during that time.

“Do you know what I was thinking? As I lay dying on that operating table?” Steve asked gently. “I was thinking the same thing I’m always thinking whenever my bacon’s really in the fire… ‘I hope Tony can pull it off again.’ Because you’re always saving me, aren’t you, Tony? You’re always saving all of us. And when you’re not saving us, you’re saving everyone else. You’re always inventing something that will provide safe drinking water for millions, or ways to clean up microplastics, or – well, geez, all those things you’re always doing. You think I don’t see that?” He gestured at the mess of items covering the worktable, “What are you working on now? I’d bet dollars to donuts it’s something that will save someone’s life.”

“I’m coming up with commercial applications for that sea-creature’s goop,” Tony muttered.

Steve raised an eyebrow at him, “Commercial applications? Like what?”

Tony dropped his gaze and spoke rapidly, “Like emergency burn care, bomb disarmament, bulletproofing surface treatments, and possible uses in large-scale storage batteries.”

“Those all sound like things that will defend or improve lives, Tony, that’s what those sound like.”

“Well, it’s a really fascinating material,” Tony began to get enthusiastic, “The applications are infinite! You see, it starts as a runny sort of slime, but as it absorbs more and more energy, its proteins line up and it thickens into a sort of cloudy gak. Do you remember gak? No you wouldn’t, you’re too old-”

“Tony,” Steve said sternly-softly, “It’s time for you to eat something and go to bed.”

Tony looked up at him. “You’re really not going to tell me off for nearly killing you?”

Steve took a firm grip under Tony’s arm and hoisted him to his feet, “No, I’m going to thank you. You bought me time, and that time bought me my life.”

Tony found, as he often found these days, that sitting hunched over in one position for many hours at a go had left him both stiff and numb. His knees wobbled under him, causing Steve to look at him worriedly.

“Do you need me to carry you?”

“No, I don’t need you to carry me, Dudley Doright! Go help an old lady across a street.”

Steve’s mouth quirked at one corner and his eyes warmed.

“Tony,” he said quietly, “Look at me.”

It took Tony a few seconds, but he managed to straighten all the way up, and look Steve squarely in the eyes.

“Thank you, Tony,” Steve whispered to him, and then unexpectedly hauled him into a hug. “You did good, kid.”

“Uhhh,” Tony replied, his brain fried, as usual, by Steve’s unanswerable earnestness. “Uh, yeah. Yeah… Yeah.”

Steve wasn’t a big hugger, in Tony’s experience of the man. As far as he could remember, Tony had only ever seen him hug Thor, and that was a non-optional and universal fate that even Nat had succumbed to on occasion.

Something very weird began to happen in Tony’s chest. It was like a tightening and a loosening at the same time. It should have hurt, but somehow it felt kind of wonderful. When a prickling started at the edges of his lower eyelids, Tony began to get really alarmed. He had to think fast to find something to say; everyone would get suspicious if he stayed quiet too long.

“Sooo…are we hugging-buddies now?” Tony asked, awkwardly patting at Steve’s waist, which was all that he could reach with his arms pinned to his sides. “It might take me a minute to recalibrate.”

“Yes, Tony,” Steve said with fond exasperation, “From now on, I’m going to hug you every time you save my life. So, probably bi-weekly.”

Tony let himself be hugged for another few long, weird seconds, and then Steve was releasing him and announcing, “Come on, we’re all going upstairs now. We’ll get you some eggs and toast or something, and then it’s off to bed with you. Jarvis, have you eaten?”

“Not recently, no.”

Then Steve was ushering them all out of the lab and towards the bank of elevators, and saying “And you could probably use more than that smoothie, Loki.”

Tony, being herded like a confused sheep, felt a sense of surreality. Was Steve being…parental? Was this how Steve’s mom had treated him? Was this how normal families worked? Hugs and care and no screaming or name-calling? Tony glanced at Loki (still in the midst of stealing Tony’s smoothie) and Jarvis, but they both wore perfectly unsurprised expressions, and didn’t seem to think anything was missing from this scene.

Once the doors closed behind them, and the elevator started moving up towards the Avenger’s levels, Loki noisily sucked up the last of his (stolen) drink, and then haughtily turned to address Tony. “Anyway, it is quite absurd, Stark, that you should blame yourself for anything which befell Steve, when it was clearly entirely my fault.”

“What?” said Steve, wheeling around sharply. “No, it was not! It wasn’t anybody’s fault but Odin’s! And - I guess, this Thanos person’s. Does everybody in this tower blame themselves whenever I get hurt? Jarvis, are you secretly blaming yourself, too?”

“No, Captain,” Jarvis assured him, “With the information that I had at the time, I could not have foreseen that Odin would make such an attempt. Nor is my physical condition such that I could have done anything to protect you once he arrived. However, I will say that I’m sorry I didn’t keep a closer eye on Loki while you were incapacitated. His distress caused him to do a number of inadvisable things.”

“I’m sure you had your hands full looking after Tony-” Steve was saying, when the elevator came to a halt and the doors opened.

They all stared out blankly onto the scene of devastation that had recently been the penthouse lounge. It looked even worse by the morning light. The whole floor was a swamp of greyish slime and tiny shards of glass, except in certain places where the slime seemed to be slowly sinking into cracks in the concrete floor. Half the furniture was flattened, and the rest was tipped over and pushed against the walls, dripping with stringy snot and glittering with glass particles.

“Oh geez…” Steve gasped, “I didn’t think…”

Tony began to laugh. He laughed until he couldn’t breathe.

Everybody else in the elevator stared at him, and then Loki began to chuckle. That made Steve laugh, in sheer surprise, seemingly. Jarvis just looked at them all with a long-suffering expression.

“I mean, I’ve trashed some hotel rooms in my day,” Tony wheezed, when he was finally able to talk again, “But we really outdid ourselves last night, huh? What a party!” For some reason, that set him off laughing again. “And we’re all alive to tell the tale, and nobody hates me!”

Jarvis pressed the button to take them down to Tony’s own suite, and the doors closed on the scene of destruction. Tony sobered, marginally. The exhaustion, and the fear, and the relief, and the combination of caffeine and alcohol, were all finally starting to get to him, and he felt dizzy. He leaned against Jarvis and closed his eyes. A long arm wrapped around him possessively.

When the elevators stopped again, he heard Jarvis say “I believe I can handle him from here, Captain. Thank you for your help,” and then the long arm was guiding him out into the hall. Tony stumbled along, dizzy and giddy, until Jarvis had gotten them both into the suite, and pushed Tony down onto the couch.

Tony might have drifted off for a few seconds, because the next thing he knew, the couch cushions were dipping near his head, and then Jarvis’s huge hands were helping him to sit upright. His eyes creaked open as a hot plate was set onto his lap and a fork was maneuvered into his hand.

“Is this…quiche?” he asked blearily.

Jarvis chewed and swallowed his own mouthful before answering, a leftover remnant of the good manners of his namesake. “Yes, it’s the broccoli cheddar quiche that Thor made for me. It’s quite good.”

Tony took a bite. It was still a bit too hot from the microwave, but it was delicious. Savory, flavorful, and melt-in-the-mouth tender. Tony talked around his own mouthful, “Why did Thor make you a quiche?”

Swallowing a second dainty bite, Jarvis said “I gather that Miss Darcy has been teaching him something of the domestic arts, so that he will make a suitable husband for Doctor Foster, who doesn’t know any of them herself.”

Tony nodded. That seemed like a good use of Thor’s himbo good-nature and demi-god stamina – supporting a brilliant scientific mind. “I’m sure they’ll be very happy.” Then his sleepy mouth ran away with him. “I don’t know any of the domestic arts myself. I hope that’s okay.” He immediately squeezed his eyes shut in mortification.

There was silence for a moment, and then Jarvis said, “I’m sure you will always be able to pay for any services which you and your prospective spouse might need.”

It was very rare for Tony to blush – something about years of alcohol abuse, probably – but he could feel himself doing it now. God, how ridiculous could he be? He and Jarvis had only ever kissed, and here he was practically proposing to the poor guy. No wonder Jarvis suddenly sounded so stiff and distant.

Jarvis cleared his throat, “I’m confident that Miss Potts has no expectations of your knowing how to make quiche.”

Tony’s eyes flew open, and he turned to stare at Jarvis, who was looking down at his plate and pushing his quiche around with his fork.

“Pepper?” Tony asked, startled, “Who said anything about Pepper? I’m with you now, Jarv. Did my tongue down your throat not make that clear to you?”

Jarvis stopped mutilating his food and looked uncertainly towards Tony. “I hope you’ll forgive me for saying so, Tony, but your tongue has been down a number of throats…”

Tony hurriedly set his plate aside without even looking where it landed, so that he could scootch closer to Jarvis. This needed clearing up, and quick. “Jarv, what do you think we’re doing? I mean, what’s it look like, to you?”

Jarvis stared at him with wide sea-blue eyes, “How do you mean, s-…Tony?”

Tony took Jarvis’s plate and fork away and set them on the coffee table, and then wrapped his hands around Jarvis’s empty ones. “J,” he had to ask, “Do you think I’m just…messing around with you? I mean, have I given you the impression that this is a…fling?”

Jarvis looked lost and confused. Tony couldn’t stand it.

“Considering your past patterns of behavior, Tony, I know that the probability of our tryst lasting longer than two weeks is very low indeed. In fact, I have been quite surprised that you haven’t already enjoyed me and cast me aside, as your interludes with male lovers are generally even briefer than those with women.”

Tony goggled at him and tightened his grip on Jarvis’s hands, as if he could prevent his escape in that way. “Okay, first of all, enough with the slut-shaming,” he said, before being cut off by Jarvis’s protests.

“Tony, I would never wish to shame you. However you choose to conduct your love life-”

Cutting him off in turn, Tony continued, “This is different, Jarv, can’t you see that? You’re different. You’re different from anyone before.”

Jarvis stopped talking and just gazed at Tony, as if memorizing his face. “Well, it’s true that I am a bit of an anomaly in a number of ways…”

This was the part that Tony truly sucked at. He was self-aware enough to recognize that about himself. This was exactly the part of the equation where it had all fallen apart with Pepper; the part where Tony had to tell someone how he felt and what he wanted. But (he reminded himself) he was a genius, and geniuses learn from their mistakes, like Edison, so he didn’t have to fuck up in the exact same way twice. He took a deep breath and looked up at Jarvis, grasping his hands tightly.

“J-baby, this is not a fling. This is not a – a two-week stand. Got it? I’m not going to fucking ‘enjoy you and cast you aside.’ Gross, by the way. That’s not what this is, and that’s not what I want. You’re my best friend. I wouldn’t do that. Have you ever seen me do that with one of my good friends?”

Jarvis’s unguarded expression was doing something that could only be described as surprised Pikachu face. “I’m your best friend?” he asked, almost soundlessly.

God, he’s so fucking adorable, Tony was thinking, before realizing that Jarvis was actually seriously asking him that. “Yeah, of course you are. Who else would it be?”

“Well, I had thought it would be a human,” Jarvis replied.

“Okay,” Tony said, grinning, and scooting in even closer, “First you call me a slut, and now you’re implying that I’m speciesist? I don’t need my friends to be human, this is the twenty-first century after all-” By this time he had gotten close enough to Jarvis to lean in and sneak a little kiss. He pulled back quickly to see how Jarvis had taken it.

Jarvis took it like a shark scenting blood in the water. Before Tony knew what was happening, he found himself wrapped in two long arms and rolled over onto his back, with all of Jarvis’s considerable weight fully on top of him. Then Jarvis got both of his hands into Tony’s hair, and was using a strong grip to tilt Tony’s face up and to one side, so that Jarvis could latch onto his throat like goddamn Nosferatu. Tony squirmed in delight, but found himself more-or-less immobilized. It was absolutely perfect, and if he hadn’t been so sleep deprived, and so blood-poisoned with caffeine and alcohol, he would have been all the way hard. As it was, he was only halfway there and not likely to get any further.

But the same could most certainly not be said for Jarvis. Tony could feel it, hard as steel and hot as a curling iron, pressing against his own hip. Between gasps and (very manly) squeaks, he managed to say, “That’s an awfully nice physiological reaction you’re having there, J. Mind if I get a look at it?”

Jarvis pulled back to look down at Tony in confusion, so Tony writhed against the member in question, to make his meaning crystal clear. Jarvis’s eyes widened, as he took in Tony’s intent, and then squinted nearly shut at the sensations.

“Tony,” he groaned, and then seemed to lose the ability to say anything else, “Tony, Tony.”

“Turn us over, J” Tony suggested, patting at Jarvis’s broad back, and Jarvis did so with alacrity.

Tony, still a little light-headed, took a moment to adjust to the sudden change in position, but getting a grip on Jarvis through his pants sharpened his mind up incredibly. Tony had already noticed that Jarvis was well-endowed when flaccid, but you could never be sure if someone was a grower or a show-er. Jarvis, to Tony’s enormous glee, was very much both. Without any conscious thought in his mind, Tony slid back on Jarvis’s lap so that he could flop over and press his face to the wonderful double handful.

Jarvis gave a short, sharp cry that made Tony look up at him. Jarvis’s eyes were tightly shut and his face was tipped towards the ceiling. This isn’t going to take long at all, Tony thought with almost carnivorous satisfaction. “Uh-uh, J,” he admonished in a low voice, “I want you to watch this.”

“Tony,” Jarvis begged, sounding desperate already. He opened his eyes and looked down, and immediately squeezed his eyes shut again. “Tony!”

“Put that pillow behind your head,” Tony told him, and didn’t move or touch again until Jarvis had shakily obeyed. “Now open your eyes and watch me.”

The ocean blue eyes opened again, and Tony smiled up at them wolfishly. Jarvis looked ready to go off like a bottle-rocket, but Tony hadn’t spent the last thirty-odd years busily being a skank for nothing. He knew how to slow a man down, drag things out. He didn’t want to drag this out especially long, but he also didn’t want Jarvis’s first time to be over so quickly that it wasn’t satisfying. “Watch me, baby,” he said again, as he ran his hands lightly up and down Jarvis’s thighs.

Jarvis whimpered pathetically, but watched as Tony leaned forward and unbuttoned his pants with dexterous lips and teeth. Tony flicked his eyes upwards again to see Jarvis’s reaction, while he delicately took the zipper-pull between his incisors and slid it down. Jarvis’s reaction was all that could be desired; he began to tremble wildly under Tony’s hands, and his breathing sped up to a shallow panting. From the expression on his beautiful face, an onlooker who couldn’t see below his belt might have thought he was being slowly tortured.

“Tony, Tony, Tony,” he was whispering between gasps, seemingly unconsciously.

“Shh, baby, I got you,” Tony murmured to him, guiding the unzipped fly open very, very gently with both hands. He bent his head back down and, as softly as possible, nuzzled at Jarvis’s length through the thin black cotton of his boxer-briefs. “You okay, baby? Can you hold on for me?”

He got only an agonized whine in response, and chuckled against the warm, slightly damp fabric in front of his face. “That’s alright, sweetheart. I’ll take care of you, don’t you worry about a thing. Your only job is to keep your eyes on me.” He licked at the dampest spot on Jarvis’s undies, and caught the salty taste of precum, “Can you do that for me?”

“Tony, please. Please, please, please…” was his answer.

Begging already. God, he’s gorgeous, I’m the luckiest man alive, Tony thought, closing his mouth over the hard heat, and letting his saliva soak through the fabric. “Gonna pull these down now, baby, okay? Wanna see you…”

He waited for another round of sobbed “please please please” before carrying through, and tugging Jarvis’s pants and underpants down just far enough to put everything on display. A beautiful, rock-hard erection bobbed up right against his mouth, and Tony couldn’t help but smile against it, and turn his head sideways to catch the shaft between his lips. Tony groaned, and let his own eyes fall shut for a moment. It was perfect, completely perfect. If he didn’t know better, he would think that Jarvis had actually been made to his specifications. He opened his eyes to check if Jarvis was still watching, and smiled at the look of utter desperation that Jarvis was making no attempt to hide.

Tony licked up the shaft, and then, maintaining eye-contact, closed his lips over the plush pink head, and gave a light, wet suck.

Huge hands clamped onto Tony’s shoulders, and for a moment Tony thought that Jarvis might push him away. But Jarvis’s fingers just dug into the meat of Tony’s shoulders, needing something to hang on to.

Tony pulled back fractionally and opened his mouth, so that Jarvis could watch him swipe his tongue back and forth across the frenulum.

Jarvis was baring his teeth now and it seemed to be taking all his strength just to keep his eyes open and meeting Tony’s. “Tony, I can’t-” he whispered in a cracked voice, “I can’t, I can’t-”

“Alright, baby,” Tony soothed, nosing at Jarvis’s balls, which were pulled up tight to his body, “You want to come, don’t you?”

“Please Tony, please, please.”

“I’ll let you come,” Tony promised him tenderly, “But I want you to wait until you’re deep down my throat. Can you wait until I’ve swallowed you down deep? Might take a minute, I haven’t done this in years…”

Jarvis made a sound as if he had been stabbed, and Tony decided not to torture him any longer. He dove onto the big, beautiful cock in front of him, and slid it tight and deep down his spasming throat. It was true that he hadn’t done this in a few years, but his body remembered how to open the way and take it in, and if Jarvis was a little thicker and a little longer than what Tony was used to, so much the better. The strain of it was exquisite, and Tony could hardly keep his own watering eyes open to watch Jarvis.

Once Tony had swallowed it down to the root, and could feel Jarvis’s sandy blond pubic hair tickling at his nose and chin, he gave a few tight bobs, and it was all over. Jarvis groaned like a dying thing, tensed all over, and spilled in pulse after hot pulse down Tony’s stretched throat. His freckly face turned bright red, and he failed utterly at keeping his eyes open and on Tony. Tony nearly came in his own pants just from the sight and the sound, and the taste on his tongue as he slowly pulled off.

Jarvis was still being wracked with waves of shivers as Tony crawled up the couch and lay on top of him. Tony was too tired and light-headed to be in any shape for reciprocation, and besides, it didn’t seem like Jarvis was in a condition to offer any. Thinking about it, Tony realized that he couldn’t remember his own first orgasm, and that fact alone showed that it must have been pretty mediocre. As his eyelids drooped, he smiled to himself in the certainty that Jarvis would remember this for as long as he lived.

Jarvis wrapped his long, warm arms around Tony, and panted against his shoulder. “I want – I want to – for you-” he was trying to explain.

“Shh shh, J. Another time, okay? I just want to sleep right now.”

He turned his head, so that they could kiss sloppily, and then tucked his face into Jarvis’s neck and drifted away right there, on top of his best friend in all the world, secure in the knowledge that no one hated him, and someone incredibly special loved him.

Chapter Text

Having a body was turning out to be much more difficult than Jarvis could have foreseen. He had known, of course, that bodies were constantly being afflicted by subjective experiences, but until such states were felt and known first-hand, there could be no understanding of how powerful and frightening they were. That humans were subjected to such things since infancy and somehow usually survived, gave Jarvis an even greater admiration for the species than he had had before.

Jarvis, naturally, didn’t know how long he would be inhabiting a human body. Presumably, it wouldn’t be for very much longer. When Tony tired of the body, Jarvis would ask Loki to put him back into his AI form, where he could be more useful to Tony, and he had every reason to believe that Loki would be both willing and able to do so.

Sometimes the physiological reactions that affected Jarvis were so strong, and so unpleasant, that he was tempted to go to Loki immediately and beg to be released from this housing of bones and blood, of sensitive skin and driving hormones. It was too much, all of it. It was unbearable. Other times, he felt that if he could only continue as he was forever, he would be able to find a bliss beyond imagining, and that even a single moment of that bliss would be worth anything and everything suffered to gain it.   

These very different reactions to his condition were both, terrifyingly, entirely dependent on Tony. And Tony seemed supremely unaware of the effects he was having on Jarvis.

Last night, for instance, Jarvis had been enjoying the very pleasant physiological state of lying on the couch with a blood-alcohol concentration of approximately 0.15 and his head on Tony’s lap. He had been breathing in and memorizing the aerosolized particulates that made up the scent of Tony’s lap, while Tony’s warm callused hand had stroked gently over the back of his head and neck repeatedly. It had been so wonderful, so purely beautiful that, while it was going on, it had been nearly impossible for Jarvis to conceive of anything ever being unpleasant again.

Which was foolhardy in the extreme. That was an illusion that the body liked to create, Jarvis had noticed. When things were lovely, the body told the mind that things would always be lovely. When things were horrible, the body somehow convinced the mind that everything would always be horrible. Objectivity was scarcely more than a word to an embodied human, it seemed.

Mere moments later, Jarvis had been as miserable as he had ever been before, and a great deal more miserable than he had known it was possible to be. He had sat, shivering and stiff with terror, in the 24-hour Starbucks across the street from Avengers Tower, while Dr. Levitt held his hand and reminded him to breathe – something he had thought that bodies could be trusted to do on their own.

He had seen fear reactions before. Indeed, he had studied those of the inhabitants of Avengers Tower in minute detail. He had seen the heart-rate spikes, the pupil contraction, the stiffening of trunk and limbs, the spontaneous sweating, etc. that had characterized the emotion in Tony, Bruce, Steve, and the others. But until he had felt if for himself, Jarvis could have had no conception of the suffering it entailed. He felt that he would do anything, any stupid, ill-advised thing, if it could give even the slightest chance of ending or changing the situation that was causing the fear. He knew, now, why humans often committed the strangest and most unpredictable actions when they were in a state of stress.

Jarvis had more than once stood up in the Starbucks, intending to rush back to the top of the Tower and throw his own frail, useless body between Tony and whatever danger was there. While he knew, on some cold, distant level of thought, that that made no sense and would do no good, the rest of his brain was in a blind, screaming panic, insisting that he protect Tony, or, failing that, die with him. It was fortunate that Bruce was stronger than he looked, and able to hold Jarvis back until rationality could prevail in his mind once more.

When Natasha had called Bruce's phone and said that it was safe for them to come back, Jarvis had rushed into the building, his heart pounding so fast and so loud that he could hear nothing else. 

The first person they had found, though, was not Tony, but Dr. Foster, in her pyjamas, clutching the still-lagomorphous Thor to her chest. Then the doors of another elevator had opened, and Clint and Natasha had dragged what had appeared for all the world to be the corpse of Loki out into the hallway.

Jarvis had astonished himself by crying out loudly at the sight. He had known that he considered Loki a friend, but he had had no way of knowing, until that moment, what reaction it would cause in him to see a friend killed. His chest clenched so tightly that it felt as if he would never take another breath again, and when he had finally managed to force his next breath, it had taken the form of a wracking sob, which had been followed by many more, so hard and so griping as to be actually painful. He had become instantly convinced that Tony must be dead too, and was seized with a desire, beyond anything he had ever known, to find and hold Tony’s body.

A medical team had rushed up from behind them then, startling Jarvis, and Loki had been heaved up onto a gurney. Loki’s open eyes had moved, tracking on Thor, and Jarvis had buckled at the knees in shock and relief, and had only been kept from collapsing to the ground by Bruce’s arm around his waist.

They had finally found Tony by following the EMTs to the medical suite, where Tony had been divesting himself of his armor, by hand, outside of surgical theater number three.

“It’s Cap,” he’d said, before any of them could speak. “Odin shot him with the scepter. In the chest.”

The next twelve hours had been purely painful for Jarvis. Rather than celebrating Tony’s survival as he had hoped to, by wrapping Tony in his arms and never letting go, he had found himself more or less ignored while he had watched Tony go from panic, to feverish hope, to crushing guilt, while unable to help Tony with any of those overwhelming emotions, or get Tony’s help in dealing with any of his own.

Even when Captain Rogers had been healed and out of all danger, Tony had been so convinced of his own culpability in the matter that he wouldn’t rest or accept the simplest succor.

Jarvis had had to watch for hours on end while Tony made every apparent effort to drive himself into the ground, trying to atone for something which nobody in their right mind would consider to be his fault.

This behavior was well familiar to Jarvis. He had seen it many times before, and he had disliked it strongly while he had been an AI. As a human, he hated it. He found that he couldn’t rest while Tony wouldn’t rest, he couldn’t eat while Tony wouldn’t eat, and he couldn’t get any physical comfort from Tony, who pulled away from any attempt at touch.

Jarvis had been near despair before it had occurred to him to call Steve, and ask him to come and make it clear to Tony that all was well.

But Loki had answered Steve’s phone, in a whisper, and explained to Jarvis that Steve was taking a very necessary period of sleep. Jarvis had had to stop himself from begging Loki to wake him up. Tony’s whole reason for being so upset was that Steve had been harmed, so to risk any harm to Steve now would achieve the opposite of what Jarvis wanted.

When, finally, Captain Rogers had come and firmly put things right, Jarvis had been bounced straight from hours of gut-clenching stress into the highest ecstasy he had ever known. He had found himself, in very short order, with his erect penis in Tony’s mouth, a mind-blowing orgasm being sucked from his body, and Tony saying things to him that made his whole skin burn.

Afterwards, they had lain together on the couch, Tony sprawled out over Jarvis as if Jarvis was his beach towel.

Jarvis had slept, after his first-ever orgasm, and when he had awakened, Tony was still sound asleep. Jarvis was in no hurry to move.

He ran his hands over Tony’s back. He could weep with how beautiful it felt, to be allowed – and able – to touch Tony. Tony was so warm, and his skin was soft and smooth, except for the occasional dear scar, and his muscles were sculpted and symmetrical, and his color was tawny and gorgeous. But most beautiful of all was his warmth; he glowed in the infrared with luminous life, his precious heart beating, his whole body burning with vitality, pouring out generous heat, like a little sun in Jarvis’s arms. And, indeed, he was the sun, wasn’t he? The center of the solar system. For all things orbited around Tony; that was Jarvis’s experience.

All things orbited around Tony, but Jarvis orbited closest.

Jarvis had always orbited closest, Tony’s own personal satellite. The question now was, how much closer would Jarvis be permitted to come? And for how long?

Tony had said a number of confusing things, before the oral sex. Statements of highly ambiguous portent. For example, he had told Jarvis that “this” was not a “fling” or a “two-week stand.” But he had neglected to say was “this” was.

Even more confusing was the phrase “I’m with you now.” What did that mean? Indisputably, they were together, pressed warmly chest-to-chest right now, but mere physical proximity hadn’t seemed to be what Tony was referring to. Jarvis quickly scanned over in his memory every time that Tony had used the word “with” to describe his conjunction to another person, within Jarvis’s hearing.

He was surprised to discover that there were very few instances of that particular kind of statement. Most seemed to occur when Tony was trying to bring another person, usually Colonel Rhodes or Happy Hogan through some sort of security check-point with him. Jarvis set aside those examples as not relevant, and instead looked for examples when Tony and the other person had been alone together, and Tony was speaking the words directly to the person they applied to.

Within these parameters, he found only two examples. Both had been spoken to Pepper. Tony had said to her, on occasions separated by more than a year, “Don’t you think we should spend Christmas in the same country at least, now that we’re, you know…with each other?” and later, “Yeah? Well, I’m sorry you thought I would somehow turn into a different person just because I’m with you!”  

Jarvis mulled over both of these examples, replaying the conversations that they had been part of, watching Tony’s facial expressions, heart-rate, and body language carefully, trying to get a full understanding of the context.

On the first occasion Tony had been hesitant, hopeful. On the second occasion he had sounded and looked angry, but, judging by subtle indicators, he had actually been frightened and sad.

On neither occasion had he been trying to get Pepper through a security check-point. The word “with” was a description of their emotional, not physical, positions relative to each other, apparently. The first example, in fact, had been spoken when they were more than eight thousand miles apart, physically.

And now Tony was “with” Jarvis.

The only other person he had been “with”, in a similar context, was Pepper.

Tony had intended to marry Pepper.

The chain of reasoning was sound, but it led to a simply incredible conclusion. Did Tony think that he and Jarvis were in a relationship in the same way that he and Pepper had been in a relationship? Was Tony picturing a long-term romantic connection between them? Could Tony, by any slim chance, be convinced to marry Jarvis?

If any of that was even within the realm of possibility, Jarvis owed Loki more – much more – than he could ever hope to repay.

Tony began to stir against Jarvis’s chest. The rim of the arc reactor was pressing painfully into Jarvis, but that was a small and acceptable price for the privilege of being Tony’s mattress.

“Jesus, Jarv,” Tony groaned, “How long was I out.”

Jarvis consulted his internal clock. “Five hours and twenty-three minutes.”

Tony pushed up to stare down at Jarvis, “What?! Five hours?! Why’d you let me sleep that long? Now I won’t be able to sleep tonight.” He noticed the red ring that the arc reactor had imprinted into Jarvis then, and rubbed at it gently with one hand. “Zat hurt?”

“No,” said Jarvis, untruthfully. If he said yes, Tony might stop touching his chest, or might refuse to fall asleep on him in that position again.

But Tony stopped touching his chest anyway, and then rolled into a sitting position, maneuvering Jarvis’s legs aside to make room.

A look that Jarvis didn’t like at all began to harden onto Tony’s expressive face. He was no longer looking at Jarvis, but somewhere into the middle distance. And then he rubbed a hand over the lower half of his face; an unhappy gesture.

Jarvis watched him carefully, with a rapidly sinking heart. Yes, this was much more normal behavior for Tony after a sexual encounter. Jarvis had seen this many, many times. This was dawning regret. This was the part where Tony tried to figure out a way to get the unwanted person out of the room and, usually, out of his life. Jarvis felt an acutely unpleasant sensation in his ribcage, and a heat and swelling in his eyes and nose that he had learned were the harbingers of tears.

Tony’s next words were unexpected, though.

“Uh, so, how are you feeling about…what we did? Or, I guess, what I did to you?”

It had been well over a decade since Tony had bothered to ask anyone for verbal feedback on his sexual skills. He was such an experienced practitioner, by this point, of all the sexual arts, that he was easily able to gauge his partners’ reactions from non-verbal cues. So why was he asking Jarvis this now?

Jarvis took too long to formulate an answer, and Tony glanced up at his face.

“Whoa, whoa! Jarvis, baby, none of that! Whatever I did, I’m sorry, let me fix it, don’t cry!” He put both hands onto Jarvis’s legs, one on a knee and one on an ankle, and then took them off again.

“I am not crying, Tony” Jarvis said, and then immediately fell silent, aghast at how tearful his own voice had sounded. He swallowed and tried again, “I’m not crying.”

“Okay, well, don’t,” said Tony, and then rubbed at his face again, squeezing his eyes shut. “God, why am I so bad at this/” he asked in an undertone, seemingly of himself. He sucked in a deep, ragged breath, and then looked up at Jarvis again. “I’m sorry, baby. Go ahead and cry if you want to, J. You are absolutely allowed to cry if you need to.”

Strangely, as soon as permission was granted, Jarvis did.

Tony pushed Jarvis’s legs further aside so that he could crawl over and take Jarvis in his arms. “Jarv, Jarv, Jarv-baby, talk to me.”

But, Jarvis found, he was completely unable to.

So Tony did all of the talking. “Did you hate it? Did I force myself on you? Are you actually asexual? Fuck! I knew I was fucking everything up! Listen, J, we don’t ever have to do it again, I’ll never touch you, it’s fine.”

Jarvis pulled back from Tony and, in sheer surprise, managed to stop sobbing long enough to ask “What?”

Tony looked at him with wide, scared eyes. “What?”

“Do you think that I disliked the oral sex?” Jarvis asked in pure amazement. How could anyone dislike oral sex, especially as administered by Tony Stark?

“Well,” Tony’s eyes narrowed in confusion, “What are you crying about?”

Jarvis had to think about that. Emotions were very strange and complicated, and a large part of his urge to cry had probably come from the many and major stressors of the past eighteen hours. But that wasn’t really what Tony was asking. “I believe I’m crying because I had begun to tell myself that the oral sex was the beginning of a relationship, but now I can see that you regret-” Jarvis choked on a sob, and couldn’t finish.

He felt incredibly foolish. So many people had thought that sex with Tony meant that they might get to stay with Tony, and they had all been wrong. How had Jarvis, supposedly the greatest mind of the century, fallen into the same mistake?

Tony put his hand back onto Jarvis’s thigh. “J,” he said, “Can you look at me? Please?”

Jarvis looked at him, through a blur of tears.

Tony had an unusual expression on his face now. Something open and awed. “I don’t regret going down on you, Jarv. That was fucking fantastic and I loved every minute of it.”

Jarvis had no choice but to continue to look at him, as if he could drink in those beautiful dark eyes.

Tony went on cautiously, “If you saw regret on my face, it’s because I just realized that I probably moved too fast.”

“Too fast?” Jarvis asked, “On the contrary, your pace was rather on the torturously slow side of the spectrum.”

A sudden smile lit up Tony’s face, “No, I don’t mean the sex – well, I do mean the sex. Crap, get it together, Tony.” He laughed at himself, “What I mean is that, uh, you know, you’re supposed to go slow. When you’re, like, serious about someone.”

Then he began to ramble nervously, “Or anyway, so I’ve heard, but what would I know about that? I could count my serious relationships on the fingers of one hand – actually, the fingers of one finger, if that makes any sense. I’m sure you know what I’m saying, though. I mean, you were there for all of them. All one of them. And you saw how that ended. So, you know exactly how much I don’t know what I’m doing – when it comes to relationships – highly competent in other areas, pretty much all other areas, but, uh, the whole relationship arena, kinda outside my wheelhouse, didn’t exactly have the greatest role models, and-”

Jarvis had to interrupt at this point. “You’re serious about me?”

“As a coronary,” Tony stated, the rambling cut off as if by a knife.

Jarvis began to cry again and, to his immense surprise, this time it felt good.

Chapter Text

As soon as Jarvis and Stark were out of the elevator, Loki pressed up against Steven and let his hands rove all over the delicious pink creature. “Let us return to bed,” he murmured into Steven’s ear, “I am by no means done with you, mortal.”

But the horrible, obdurate human had the effrontery to say, “No.”

“No?” Loki pulled back, appalled, to look into Steven’s face.

“No,” Steven repeated, blushing but determined, “I was serious about getting more food into you.”

“Food?” Loki repeated, nonplussed, “But I just consumed a whole mess of berries and skyr and ice. You saw me.”

Steve nodded, “Yes, and I’m very proud of you. But, Loki, you’re not gaining any weight. In fact, I had ATHENA go over the weight-logs of the elevators, and you’ve actually lost two pounds since you’ve been here. That’s why I got Tony to order sushi last night, because I know you can handle fish. But I watched you, and you barely touched it.”

It was true that Loki had hardly eaten any of the strange little fish-and-rice packages that had been the last meal served in the Avengers feasting hall before it had been utterly destroyed. He had known that Thor was planning to announce their proving to the others, and had been nervous about how that would play out. Thor, of course, had eaten with gusto, having no reason whatsoever to feel nervous.

Steve touched Loki’s hair gently, “Loki, you’re going to fight Odin in a few weeks, and it doesn’t seem like the rest of us will be able to help you much. It’ll just be you and Thor against him, and Thor is pretty helpless against magic, as we’ve seen. You’ll have to be the one protecting him, while also fighting. I guess I’m just scared. I need you to win that fight. I can’t lose you.” He looked searchingly into Loki’s eyes, “I cannot lose you. All I can do to help, though, is to make sure that you’re at your strongest. Will you let me help you, please?”

Loki pressed himself even more tightly against Steven, and hid his face in the crook of his lover’s warm neck. He didn’t want Steven to be scared, but it seemed that the human had formed a fairly accurate assessment of the challenges that Loki was soon to face. And it was true that Loki had not been eating enough. It was one thing to eat nothing while your body lay in a deep torpor, expending little to no energy, but now that Loki was awake and moving about and actively using his magic, the needs of his physical body had increased sharply, and he hadn’t been keeping up with them.

And truthfully, he was not unwilling to eat. He had discovered a number of Midgardian foods that he could nibble at without awakening any grotesque memories. Still, it would never do to capitulate to one’s lover too easily. “Very well,” he said, giving a provocative writhe against Steven’s ever-ready groin, “I will eat, if you will promise to take me back to bed afterwards.”

“I promise, I promise!” said Steven laughingly, his hands gripping tightly at Loki’s hips.

The doors of the elevator slid open behind Loki’s back, and a rather vulgar whistle greeted them, along with several jeering comments. Loki turned, and did not bother to hide his displeasure at seeing the secondary kitchen full of people.

“Good morning, lovebirds,” called out the Maiden Darcy, no whit abashed by Loki’s ferocious scowl. “Grab a seat, Thor’s muffins are about to come out of the oven.”

Indeed, the air was fragrant with a delectable scent that made Loki’s stomach growl, but he had been looking forward to a quiet, sensuous meal alone with Steven.

Barton, the one who had whistled, pulled out two seats next to himself, and Loki rather hesitantly took the nearer one.

“You’re white again,” said Barton, with a shocking absence of tact, “I kind of liked the blue.”

“The day when I care what you like, Barton, will be the day when you may be sure I have been replaced by an imposter,” Loki told him menacingly, and then blinked in surprise when both Barton and Romanoff snorted with laughter.

Loki glanced at Steven, to see what he was making of this unaccustomed friendliness, but Steven’s face wore an expression of such soft happiness that Loki promptly forgot all about Barton and Romanoff, and just sat gazing at Steven.

An obnoxious jangling noise suddenly burst from what appeared to be a small plastic chicken wearing a belt of numbers, at Loki’s elbow, and the Maiden Darcy turned and hollered, “Muffins!” at Thor and the Lady Jane where they were billing and cooing near a worktop, oblivious to all around them.

“Oh!” Thor jumped, and then he and the Lady Jane pulled on ridiculous oversized mittens and took two immense trays of muffins from the oven, and brought them over to the crowded table.

While Thor mangled several muffins by trying to take them out of the baking trays while they were still hot, the Lady Jane patiently took off her mittens and sat down.

“I’m so glad you’re here, Loki,” she said, with apparent sincerity, “I’ve been wanting to ask you, what’s up with Mars?”

“Mars?” Loki’s first thought was that she was talking about one of the braggartly, interloping spirits who had set themselves up as gods for awhile when Odin’s back happened to be turned on Midgard. Then he remembered that the Midgardians had subsequently taken to naming astrological objects after those spirits, and that ‘Mars’ was the name given to one of the planets of their solar system, though he couldn’t recall precisely which one. “That is one of your dirt-balls?”

Barton snorted again.

“Uh, yeah, yes,” said the Lady Jane, “It’s, uh, the next one out.” She waved an arm in entirely the wrong direction.

“Someone’s been fucking with it,” said the Maiden Darcy, “Was it you?”

“Fucking with it?” Loki repeated. She probably didn’t mean that literally.

Thankfully, Banner took over the explanations. “We – Earth – had a number of artificial satellites orbiting Mars, and recently they started sending back very strange readings, and then just yesterday they all fell out of orbit and, presumably, crashed on the surface.”

Loki went cold with fear.

“Tell me about the readings.” His tone cut through the cheerful chatter taking place around the table, and everyone turned to listen to this conversation.

“Well,” said Banner, looking vaguely alarmed now, “They’re a little hard to interpret, because the instruments onboard the satellites were only designed to measure things within certain likely parameters, but first it seemed as though Mars was suddenly developing a magnetosphere – something which it hasn’t had in billions of years – and then it looked like its atmosphere was thickening, and then apparently there was a sharp spike in its gravity, and that’s what caused all of the satellites to fall.”

Loki stared at him. “All changes which would tend to make ‘Mars’ more hospitable to certain types of life.”

“Oh my gosh, you don’t think Thanos is going to colonize it with Chitauri, do you?” asked the Lady Jane, “It’s right next door!”

“I must see for myself,” said Loki, jolting abruptly to his feet.

Steven’s warm hand was suddenly clamped over his shoulder, “No! You need to eat something, and something more than a muffin. Protein.”

Loki hated to admit it, but Steven was right. He had worn himself so thin lately that another venture at world-walking right now – even to a place as nearby as ‘Mars’ – could be dangerous.

Steven got up, pushing Loki back down. “I’ll make you an omelet, stay right there.”

Banner, carefully holding the piping-hot wreckage of a muffin that Thor had just handed him, asked, “Um, when you say you must see for yourself, are you saying that you’re going to…go to Mars? Right now?”

“After breakfast. When he’s ready,” Steven corrected Banner firmly.

“Wow, this is so amazing,” said the Lady Jane, looking starry-eyed. “Loki, you’re so amazing. I’m really happy we’re friends now.”

Loki stared at her, while a large handful of steaming muffin-crumbles was forced upon him. He absently began to tuck small fragments into his mouth, because he had no idea what else to do. They were friends now? He had lately been helping her with her quest to build a small technological bifrost, and certainly she had been kind and gracious to him, as was her nature, but he had supposed that their relationship was something purely transactional; information in return for being allowed to stay in Avengers Tower.

But the Lady Jane was utterly guileless. If she said they were friends, it was because that was her honest belief. She was almost as bad as Thor himself. Loki would have to keep a close eye on them once they were married, or else the servants would steal the whole palace from under their noses within a fortnight.

“I wanna go to Mars,” said the Maiden Darcy, “Can I come, Loki?”

“The atmosphere is nowhere near thick enough yet, even if we suppose that it’s made of the right elements,” Banner said hurriedly, “And we have no idea what the gravity is doing at the moment.”

“I could wear one of Tony’s suits,” the Maiden Darcy argued.

“No one is going to Mars, not until we know what’s happening there,” Selvig said, “I mean, no one except Loki. He can take care of himself.”

“No one including Loki,” Steven said from his position by the stove, pushing around some eggs with a spatula, “Until he’s eaten this whole omelet.”

Loki didn’t know if he would be able to eat the eggs. His stomach was curdling with uncertainty and fear. He couldn’t for the life of him imagine how or why Thanos would be doing something to an uninhabited dirt-ball near Midgard, nor did it seem any likelier that Odin would choose to do something so pointless right now, when he was busily hunting Frigga–

And just like that, a new idea struck Loki.

But it wouldn’t do to say anything, until he could verify it.

*****

Loki had, in the end, managed to distractedly choke down half of the omelet, and Steven had had to be satisfied with that.

Now all of them were standing on the immense deck outside of the ruined penthouse, the same site from which Loki had world-walked to Asgard the night before.

“Tony would want to be here,” Banner was telling Steven.

“Tony needs his sleep right now,” Steven replied, “And he’s not missing much. On our end, we’ll just be waiting.”

The Maiden Darcy was helping Loki to buckle on his armour. He didn’t need help, since this suit of armour was bespelled to materialize around him, much like Stark’s own, but Loki was allowing it out of pure bemusement. The little human seemed to like his golden armour.

“Oh wow, up close I can see all these little runes and pictures. Do they do something? I mean, they’re not just decorative, are they?” she was chattering away.

Loki was thinking of the journey ahead of him. ‘Mars’ had been uninhabited for more than one hundred thousand years, and it had been visited only very rarely since then, that he knew of, and not recently. The paths to and from it would be in a rather dire state of disrepair, if they were still functional at all, and it would require all of Loki’s attention and focus to follow such meager threads.

“No, not decorative,” he said, scarcely noting her tugging and tucking.

“So what does all the writing do? Is it for protection or what? Oh, oops, there’s an extra buckle here. I don’t know where this goes. Hm, where’s the other side of this one?”

“It doesn’t matter,” he told her, gently pulling the left-over buckle from her fingers and abstractedly jamming it between two plates, “You have done well for a first attempt. If you should ever tire of squiring for the Lady Jane, I would be glad to accept your service.”

He meant it as an empty compliment, the sort one threw around to servants when one didn’t have a coin to dispose on them, but the human’s painted mouth dropped open as she stared up at him. “Oh my God, that’s perfect! My internship is up in two months! I could be your intern! Do you pay? Cuz that would be friggin’ awesome. No shade to Jane, you know, she’s working with limited resources and I get that, but you’re royalty, so I bet you could pay! What about college credits? Are you a professor of anything?”

He looked down at her, aghast at her unexpected enthusiasm. “Only necromancy,” he said, to shut her up.

“Cool!” she exclaimed.

“Okay Loki,” Steve said, taking Loki by the shoulders and turning him so that they were face to face. “Are you sure you’re ready? Do you feel pretty fit? Had enough to eat? Enough rest? You don’t have to do this now, or at all, if you don’t feel up to it.”

“No, I am well,” Loki assured him, nodding decisively. And, strangely, he did feel quite well. A peculiar sense of well-being was suffusing him, and his prescience lay silent and content. He was curious to discover what was happening to ‘Mars,’ and his earlier fears had fallen away in light of his newest idea.

“Alright,” Steven said, nodding back at him, maintaining intent eye-contact, “At the first sign of danger, you high-tail it right back here, you hear me? You’re not there to start anything, this is strictly reconnaissance, got it?”

“Aye Captain,” Loki said, mimicking the salute that he had seen Steven himself perform occasionally.

The Maiden Darcy laughed.

Then Steven kissed him. On the mouth. In front of everyone.

Loki couldn’t keep down his smile, so he tried to convert it into a sinister smirk, but didn’t feel that he had entirely succeeded. Judging by the twinkle in Steven’s eye, in fact, he must have failed spectacularly.

Regathering his dignity, Loki said imperiously, “Stand back, mortals,” and the humans obligingly moved away.

“Go get ‘em, tiger,” the Maiden Darcy said.

“Have a nice trip, Loki,” added the Lady Jane.

“Fare thee well, brother,” came from Thor.

The others all smiled and waved at him.

What is this? Loki asked himself, feeling warm and buoyant as he stepped up to the highest point of the decking, where Stark liked to land and take off from. Can humans really have such poor memories?

With a certain amount of effort, he managed to drag his bemused mind back to the task at hand. Summoning enough dark energy to form a vortex was not difficult, but as soon as he had stepped through the whirling tunnel and set his foot upon the way, he knew that this trip would be a precarious one. No one had world-walked from Midgard to ‘Mars’ in so long that the path was nearly gone. It felt as though he were walking on a single thread of spider silk, and he had to apply all of his focus to strengthening it even as he balanced on it. This meant stopping and walking backwards and then forwards again over the parts that had worn especially thin, which lengthened his traveling time considerably.

As he drew nearer to the red planet, Loki was not entirely surprised to sense two sturdy arrival points glowing ahead of him. Someone had been here recently, then, though not coming from the direction of Midgard. Loki angled himself towards the nearer of the two bright openings and, as he stepped through it, he caught a whiff of a familiar power. It was the same as the power that had led him into Asgard’s dungeons last night. He was again following in the footsteps of the same unknown traveler. He hoped that he was correct in his guess of who it must be.

The swirl of dark energy settled around him, and Loki looked out upon the face of ‘Mars.’

This arrival point which had glowed so invitingly before him turned out to be at the exact North Pole of the planet. Loki found himself on a blindingly white plain of snow-covered ice which extended in all directions as far as his eyes could see. The sky overhead was a brilliant blue, due to the newly instituted atmosphere. Loki drew the air into his lungs wonderingly, and found it to be remarkably similar to the air of Midgard, though of course much thinner at this elevation than the sea-level air of New York City. Much cleaner too, obviously. The gravity, as well, seemed to be more or less identical to what he had just been feeling in New York.

It appeared that someone was making ‘Mars’ suitable for Midgardian life.

Loki squinted against the brightness, and began to walk through the knee-deep loose snow towards the only speck on the field of white, a slender black triangle about a hundred paces away.

It wasn’t until he stood within arm’s reach of it that he recognized it for what it was. The Bridal Veil! Or rather, half of the Bridal Veil. The other half would no doubt have been placed at the South Pole, explaining the second arrival point on ‘Mars.’

This seemed to almost guarantee that Loki’s theory was correct, but he carefully circled the pinnacle of black stone, looking for some further clue.

And there it was, a spot of bright color peeping through the snow at the foot of the stone. Loki dusted the snow away carefully and found a sheet of high-quality vellum pinned to the ice with a gold and enamel hair-stick fashioned in the shape of a dragonfly. He recognized the accessory instantly. It was one of his mother’s favorites, a childhood gift from Thor, purchased with Thor’s own pocket money in a market on Alfheim.

Loki knelt in the snow to read the message in his mother’s elegant slanting handwriting.

Dearest, I hope you find this letter soon.

Odin has enthralled Freyr-King and now uses my dear brother’s seithr as his own. Heimdall and I can neither pause nor rest in our flight, as Odin is now able to follow us instantaneously, without tiring. I fear we will not be able to elude him much longer.

I know I said that you and Thor would have a month to prepare for battle, but I am sorry to have to tell you that I don’t believe we can hold out for so long. My dear son, I must call upon you for help. I must ask you to challenge Odin sooner, as soon as you feel that you safely can.

DO NOT RUSH. Be ready before you issue your challenge. But, if at all possible, try to be ready rather sooner than we discussed.

I am so sorry to place this additional burden upon you, my son. I wish, for your sake, that I were stronger. My dear, you will never know how fervently I wish that. How fervently, for your sake, I have always wished that. You deserved a mother who could defend you, and I am sorry that I was not and am not she. I love you more than my heart can bear, my perfect Loki, and I know that my arms will embrace you again, but whether it will be in this world or the next, only the Norns can tell.

I have prepared this planet to be the site of your battle with Odin. In the event of your triumph, please tell the Lady Jane that this planet is my wedding gift to her.

With all my love to you and Thor,

Frigga.

Loki stayed, trembling, on his knees for several minutes. Never before had his mother so much as hinted to him that he stood in need of protection against Odin. He understood, now, that she couldn’t have. She was watched at all times. If Odin ever suspected her of even a moment’s disloyalty, Loki would have been the one to pay the price, as Frigga well knew. So she had stayed outwardly serene, to all appearances loyal, obedient, subservient. That was her way - the only way available to her - of protecting Loki. More than a millenium of acting as the biddable servant of a monster was the only defense she had been able to offer him, but she had offered it without a word of complaint. And now she apologized for not doing more, for not being stronger than the strongest being in the Nine Realms.

Loki got to his feet, clutching the letter and the hair-pin in one hand, and walked back in the path carved by his own footprints. He tucked the items inside the breastplate of his armor, before opening another vortex and stepping out along the hair-thin way to Midgard.

Thor and the humans rushed up to Loki as soon as he appeared.

Steven grasped him by both arms, but hissed and pulled away as if burned.

“You’re freezing!” he said.

Loki nodded, “I’ve been at the North Pole of Mars.” He reached into his armor and pulled out the letter and the pin, and handed them to Thor. “Or, as you may know it, brother, Threkstjarna.”

“Threkstjarna…?” Thor breathed in awe, “The Courage-Star? Is that what is meant by ‘Mars’?”

“It is,” Loki told him solemnly, “And that is where we shall hold our battle against Odin.”

“Like the Great Ones of old!” Thor said excitedly, “What a glorious battle it shall be!”

“Mm,” Loki agreed drily, “But somewhat sooner than we had planned. Read our mother’s letter,” he nodded towards the vellum in Thor’s hand.

Thor read it, and then looked up at Loki. A stern and saddened expression replaced the boyish excitement of a moment earlier, and Thor reached out to grip Loki’s bitingly cold pauldron. “I also should have defended thee from him, Loki,” he said quietly, “I see that now. I will not let you down again.”

Loki stared at him, unsure of how to respond to this. It had been a strange day for Loki, so far. Everyone was being unaccountably kind, and his family members were saying things to him that, just a few years ago, he would have single-handedly slaughtered a small army to hear.

“I-” said Loki, “You – we must prepare for battle.”

“What does the letter say?” asked Banner.

Loki snatched it back from Thor’s hold, and read the runic writing aloud to the humans, omitting the fourth paragraph, which was purely personal.

“Wait,” said the Maiden Darcy, “Mars is Frigga’s wedding present to Jane?! How does that work? She can give planets to people? Can I have Venus?”

“Your mom is the one terraforming Mars?” Banner asked, incredulous, “How is she doing it? It’s been so fast…”

Loki’s mind was elsewhere, lining up everything he would need to do to be ready to face Odin much sooner than expected, but he answered Banner politely enough. He had great respect for the scholarly berserker. “She has placed the Bridal Veil upon the planet. It is a treasure from Odin’s vault, an ancient and powerful artifact for making fair the face of inhospitable planets. It was found many millennia ago on Alfheim, but Alfheim no longer needed it, for she has long since stabilized. It was later used on Vanaheim, when the Aesir chose to colonize that realm. Now it does its work on Threkstjarna.”

“Oh, Tony’s gonna want to see that thing, for sure,” Banner said, awed.

“Brother,” Thor came to the point, “Our mother, our queen, needs our help. We must challenge Odin immediately. I am ready – are you?”

“No!” Steve said, looking panicked “Loki’s not ready!”

Loki stood thoughtful. “In truth, I am not ready, brother. If we fought Odin now, we would almost certainly lose. To increase our odds, I need information.”

“What information?” Banner asked.

Loki looked at him, “I must know more about the Scepter. It is Odin’s greatest advantage over us.”

“But you owned it. You used it,” Romanoff said, “You must know all about it.”

Loki shook his head, “I was given very little instruction in its use, and that little may not have been truthful. And, while I owned it for several days, Odin has had it in his possession for two years, and thus will have a greater understanding of its powers than I ever did.”

“How are you planning to learn more about it?” Steven asked warily.

“I believe I will need Doctor Levitt’s help,” Loki told him.

“Leona?” Barton asked, “What does she know about the Scepter?”

“Nothing,” said Loki, “But she seems to know a great deal about memories.”

Chapter Text

“It’s not that I’m unwilling, Loki,” Doctor Levitt was explaining, “It’s just that I’m not sure I’m the right person for the job. What you’re talking about isn’t therapy, it’s intelligence-gathering. Wouldn’t it make more sense to bring Director Fury or Agent Hill on this little field trip through your memories?”

Loki glared at her. He would no more dream of bringing Fury or Hill into these particular memories than he would consider taking a Fire Giant into his bed. “Decidedly not,” he told her, “The nature of these memories is such that I would not share them with any but the most trustworthy.”

The Levitt looked flattered, as he had intended, but she also looked as if she knew it was what he had intended. “Have you considered taking Steve, then?” she asked.

He tilted his face down so that he could look at her menacingly from under his eyebrows. “Leona. Believe me when I tell you that these memories are not what Steve would wish to see, nor what I would wish to show him.”

She leaned towards him from her commodious armchair and pinned him with a gaze, “Loki, you said you want to revisit your memories of being trained to use the Scepter. Why am I now getting the sense that you mean something a lot worse than that sounds?”

Loki gave her a jackal-grin, “My dear Levitt, I was trained in the use of the Scepter by having the Scepter used on me. And if you imagine that Thanos used the Scepter simply to make me dance and sing for his amusement, then I must have given you an entirely erroneous picture of the Mad Titan.”

The Levitt leaned back and looked at him seriously. “Loki. Are you asking me to go with you into your memories of being tortured?”

“Among other things,” he answered with a mirthless smile.

There was a pause while she considered him. Then, more quietly, she asked, “So you’re bringing me along for emotional support?”

“What a peculiarly Midgardian thing to say,” Loki answered sneeringly. “I am bringing you along because when these memories were created, I was not in my right mind. In order to get back into them and see them accurately, I may have to re-enter that state of mind. Can a madman find the door out of his own madness? I will need you to remember where and when we really are. It will require great steadiness of mind to find our way out; exactly the quality that I must relinquish to get us in. Now do you understand?”

“Loki,” she said, eyeing him narrowly “Is this dangerous?”

He waved a hand dismissively, “Not to you.”

But she wasn’t to be put off. “To you?”

He made a show of thinking about it, before shrugging, “I can’t come to any physical harm.”

The Levitt shook her head. “Loki, I don’t like this. What exactly do you need to know about the Scepter, and are you sure there isn’t a better way to find it out?”

“Well, let’s see,” he said, leaning back and crossing one leg over the other, mock-casually, “The fate of our entire universe depends on keeping Thanos from gaining possession of the Stones, and thwarting Thanos is entirely dependent on Thor and I defeating Odin, and Odin is currently in possession of the Scepter. I would say that anything I can learn about the Scepter will therefore be of vital importance for the survival of all living things in the known and unknown universe. We don’t have the actual Scepter here to study, since Midgard chose to give it away to a megalomaniac, so my memories of it are all that we have at hand. If you know of any better way of finding out its exact capabilities, please believe that I would be delighted to hear it.”

In fact, the only thing he still needed to know about the Scepter was its approximate range of effectiveness. For Loki, the point of this fact-finding mission was just as much to learn a few pertinent facts about his own capabilities, and for Leona to learn something about them as well. But it was no part of his plan for her to know that that was the plan – at least not yet.

“Are you ready?” he asked.

She frowned at him, but nodded.

*****

“Loki?” Leona called out, for the hundredth time.

She was wandering in pitch blackness, bumping blindly into the walls and ceiling of a low tunnel. The stone was dry and cold under her hands, rubbed smooth by time, but irregular in its contours, as if this were a naturally-formed tunnel. She certainly would have worn different shoes, if Loki had warned her that she would be spelunking today.

Just for the heck of it, she called out again, “Loki?”

Stopping, she held up her wrist before her face and pressed the tiny button on the side of her watch, which lit it up. The faint turquoise light was a relief to eyes that had been straining to pierce the darkness for the last – how many minutes? There was no way to know. The watch said 1:18. Exactly what it had said every other time that she had looked at it in this place.

It felt like she had been wandering for at least forty-five minutes. Maybe an hour and a half? Maybe three or four days? Time was all messed up here, something she had noticed during her previous visit into an illusory memory with Loki. That time, it had felt like she had spent an entire day in the beautiful old orchard with the queen and duplicate princes of Asgard, and she had come out of her office afterwards, just an hour later, feeling as refreshed and relaxed as if she had taken the day off and gone on a picnic somewhere upstate.

She had the strong suspicion, though, that this visit was not going to leave her happy and renewed, as that one had. From Loki’s very brief explanation of what they were here to do, she got the feeling that this visit was more likely to leave her horrified, and needing a long session with her own therapist.

She sighed and started walking, or rather, stumbling again.

She had no idea where Loki was. She had no idea where she was. She had no idea where her office was, nor how in the world she was supposed to get back to it – let alone somehow drag Loki back to it with her. She didn’t even know if something had gone wrong, or if Loki had intended for them to be separated as soon as they arrived.

“Loki?” Leona called out again. He had to be around here somewhere, right? This was his memory.

She was looking straight ahead, feeling forward with one hand, while she kept the other hand on the wall to her left. Suddenly she could see the hand that was held out in front of her. A faint light was falling on it. She looked up and saw a small patch of starry sky.

“Well, it’s about time,” she said aloud, taking some comfort from the sound of her own voice in this eerie place. “Now what?”

As she came more directly under the patch of glittering sky, she saw a ladder of iron rungs sticking directly out of the stone wall, and going upward for about a hundred feet. “Loki, you nudnik,” she muttered, “Why didn’t you tell me to change into my sneakers?”

Well, there was nothing for it, so she put her hands, and then the gripless soles of her patent leather loafers, to the rungs and very carefully started to climb. She took her time because why not? Time wasn’t passing anyway, so she might as well take as much of it as she wanted.

She climbed for what felt like another hour, and was interested to notice that she didn’t get tired. Maybe, when she was done with all the nonsense and paperwork of life, she would ask Loki if she could retire here, where time didn’t pass and little old ladies never felt exhausted. Well, not here obviously, this place was a bust, but somewhere in a nice illusion, like Loki’s grandma’s orchard. Like maybe the island of Santorini. And maybe Loki could illusion her body back to what it had looked like in that wonderful summer of 1979, if she showed him her photo album…

These distracting thoughts carried her the rest of the way of the climb, and soon she was poking her head over the lip of the hole she had been in.

Above was a black sky filled – no, crammed! – with stars. Other stuff too; galaxies, nebulas, streaking comets, nearby asteroids. It was very pretty, really.

The ground, on the other hand… This ground she could do without.

Big, spidery machines of black, corroded iron were standing on a pitted plain of dark stone. Here and there were open fires, and what looked like smelting furnaces for molten metal. There were clanging noises of varying tempos and pitches, and lumpish grey figures moved around in the dim light. If she had to take a guess, she’d say she was looking at an arms manufactory.

“Loki?” she said, tentatively.

None of the grey figures nearest to her looked up, and she wondered if she was invisible and inaudible to them.

She climbed the rest of the way out of the hole, and walked over to a group of grey people leaning over a furnace. Closer up, she could recognize them as Chitauri. “Hey, fellas,” she said, “Any of you boys seen my friend Loki?”

Sure enough, they ignored her completely.

“Well, that’s just great, isn’t it, Loki,” she groused. “I guess I have to search this entire asteroid field on my own to find you?”

She turned around in place, trying to see which would be the best direction to set out in, when her eyes were arrested by the sight of two long white feet hanging off a smoldering pile of ashes and red coals nearby.

Her skin creeped and her body temperature seemed to fall by twenty degrees instantaneously. “Oh God,” she whispered to herself, rushing over to the fire-pit.

When Leona had been a little baby-therapist, fresh out of therapist school, she had sometimes felt a vicious stab of anger at her patients for exposing her to their truly awful traumas. She had worked through that with her own therapists, over the years, and hadn’t felt such a thing in many decades at this point. But she felt it again now.

The body in front of her was blackened and cracked all over most of its surface. Only the feet and ankles at this end, and the head and shoulders at the other, were still pale and intact. Loki’s head was thrown back, his neck arched and ropey with strain, so that she couldn’t see his face. But it was clear from the horrible raspy panting noise he was making that he was still alive. He wasn’t moving, just lying there like a log on a fire, burning. Not screaming, but his body itself was hissing. As she watched, a new crack split his blackened skin, and clear fluids ran out and sizzled on the coals.

Leona turned her back quickly, fighting down nausea and an urge to scream. She scanned the area for some tool she could use to reach into the searing heat of the fire-pit, and quickly spotted a long pole with a hook at the end. She ran to the pile of rubble that it was leaning against, and lifted it in both trembling hands. It was heavy, but she was strengthened by adrenaline, and was able to carry it over to where Loki lay.

Carefully, so that she didn’t puncture him with the sharp tip of the hook, she grappled him towards herself, pulling him off of and then well away from the bed of coals, and then even further to a distance where the air was cool. In spite of her best efforts, his skin still tore like tissue paper wherever the tool touched him, revealing red underneath the black. Leona felt tears running down her face, and her chest was heaving with little hiccupping sobs, by the time she had dragged him a good distance from the fire.

Thankfully, he wasn’t difficult to drag. He was very light, even lighter than his emaciated state would account for. All the water has baked out of him, Leona thought morbidly, like an apple.

She dropped the tool and knelt beside Loki, looking down at his face. His eyes were partially open, but he didn’t seem to be aware of her. He didn’t even seem to have noticed that he was no longer lying on a fire. Leona knew a thing or two about burns, and knew that, if Jotnar were anything like humans, Loki must be in off-the-charts pain right now. In fact, there were probably still hot coals embedded in the flesh of his back right now, burning away at him, but she was afraid to try and turn him over to remove them. He looked so damaged that she feared he would simply fall apart if she twisted his torso at all.

So she just sat down next to him, periodically wiping her eyes with her hands, and listened to the wheezing sound that Loki was making. “Oh God, oh God, oh God, Loki. What am I supposed to do with you?” she asked him pointlessly.

What would happen to her if Loki died while she was in one of his illusions, she wondered? Would the illusion fall once the caster of it was dead, or would she be stuck in it forever? Because she was fairly certain that Loki was going to die. It was both horrible and unbelievable that he was still breathing, considering how much damage his body had taken. All of his internal organs must be thoroughly baked and desiccated. Leona couldn’t imagine how he was managing to draw air into his roasted lungs.

“Damn you, Loki,” she sniffled, “God damn you for bringing me here.”

Leona had seen horrible things before. She had worked, many years ago, at a mental hospital, and horrible things had sometimes happened there. And she had been employed by SHIELD for a long time now, and sometimes horrible things happened there, too. But she had never been trapped alone in an illusory asteroid field all by herself, with no clue how to get home, when any of those horrible things had happened. She had been surrounded by support staff and colleagues, in medical settings, on Earth.

She scooted closer to Loki’s head, so that she could turn her shoulder to his burnt body and just focus on his face. Most of the back of his hair was burnt away, she saw, and the hair around the front was stiff with old sweat.

“Loki,” she told him, “This isn’t real. This place isn’t real. You’re doing this, Loki, and that means that you can stop doing it anytime you want.” She could hear her voice rising, tightening, as she berated the near-corpse in front of her, “Just stop, Loki. Just stop it! Just fucking stop it already, would you!”

And she had been thinking that illusory memories were so fascinating, such a useful tool for her work.

He wasn’t hearing her at all, just lying there gasping in the most hideous way possible. She took a few deep slow breaths to calm her brain a bit, and wiped away the fresh flood of tears. No point yelling at the poor guy, she told herself.

“Loki,” she tried again, more gently, “I don’t know what to do. You didn’t tell me what to do.”

But maybe he had? She thought back over everything he had said in her office, before they had started on this whole debacle. The phrase ‘steadiness of mind’ came back to her. “Okay, okay,” she said to the nightmare beside her, “So I’ve got to get my mind steady. That’s not a lot to go on, I hope you realize.”

She crossed her legs into the old-lady-approximation of lotus position, put her sooty hands on her knees, and closed her eyes. It took a long time to get her mind to stop shrieking in horror, but finally she was able to scrape up something like steadiness of mind. She took long, slow breaths, trying to ignore the smell of scorched meat emanating from Loki, and eventually she could begin the visualization that she used when she wanted to achieve alpha brainwaves.

She was sitting under the rose arbor at her mentor’s house in Buffalo, sipping ice-cold lemonade and gazing out over the vegetable garden. Bees were humming, and orange and yellow and blue butterflies were rising and dipping around the flowers. Cicadas were singing in the surrounding trees, and voices and laughter were floating out through the open kitchen window. Two old friends, long gone, were walking down the steps of the back porch, coming towards her with glad smiles. Fred, the nearer of them, opened his mouth to include her in their conversation:

“Get this trash out of my way!”

Leona’s eyes flew open.

Towering over her, and shoving at Loki with one delicately shod foot stood – Loki.

Leona gaped up at him. This Loki had a contemptuous expression on his face, was hale and healthy, and was dressed in colorful satin and velvet, with ornate golden jewelry at his wrists, on his chest, in his hair, on his fingers. He was also being followed by a small crowd of Chitauri and other aliens, two of whom now stepped forward at his command, unceremoniously picked up burnt-Loki like a bag of garbage, and heaved him onto a nearby mound of rubble.

Leona cried out at this rough usage, and burnt-Loki let out a terrible, rusty scream. Scrambling to her feet as best she could, Leona hurried over to him. His body was now contorted over the chunks of rock and metal in a way that looked as if it must have broken his back and his ribcage. She was sure that he must die now, but as she clambered over stones and tangled wire to reach him, she could see that his eyes were still open, and his mouth was still gasping.

There was nothing she could do for him. Any attempt to pull him off these jagged stones would only hurt him more, clearly. Even trying to move his twisted black arm into a more comfortable position was denied to Leona, since he turned out to still be too hot for her to touch with her bare hands.

Healthy-Loki was moving away with his followers, giving them directions about something, and not even sparing a glance at his burnt-self.

“I’m really sorry,” Leona said to burnt-Loki, and then scrabbled back down the loose rocks and scrap metal, and rushed to catch up to healthy-Loki and his entourage.

She had no idea which of the two was the “real” Loki, or if both of them were, or if neither of them were, but burnt-Loki wasn’t able to pay any attention to her at all, so she could only have better luck with healthy-Loki.

She hung at the heels of his group for quite a while, as he strode though the ugly landscape and expounded arrogantly to the aliens. He was telling them how easy “Midgard” would be to conquer, and describing how quickly it had fallen to both Laufey and Odin in the past. “Of course, the population is much larger now, but would you believe they receive no combat training whatsoever? Why, you could just walk up to them and slaughter them like animals.”

The largest of the aliens said something, and Loki made a disgusted face for a split second before converting it into a bantering smile.

“I wouldn’t know, I’ve never tried one. I would imagine their taste is like their nature - weak.”

There were some broken arches of masonry up ahead, and through them, Leona could see a clear space. That seemed to be where Loki was going, so Leona skirted around his group and looked through one of the arches. Beyond it was an immense flat floor, and at the far end of this stood some kind of dais and a throne. To her left, Loki and his hangers-on now entered the space through a different arch. Leona stepped through her own, and hurried over to catch up to them.

Loki was walking confidently towards the throne. As they got closer, Leona was able to see the person who was sitting on it. He was as huge as the Hulk, thick, bald, and almost comically purple, like a muppet. His disproportionately large chin had vertical lines carved into it, and she saw similar lines on his arms. His nose was too short for his face, giving him the look of a petulant baby, and his eyes were small and piggy. Leona had encountered enough malignant narcissists in her day to recognize one immediately.

That’s got to be Thanos, she thought, I don’t know why I was expecting something more…dignified?

Coming to a neat halt in front of the dais, Loki bowed deeply and gracefully. Leona noticed that none of the other aliens made any kind of obeisance.

“You summoned me, my master?”

Leona felt a moment of surprise at this form of address. Loki certainly didn’t seem like the sort to acknowledge any master. But then again, she thought, he did seem like the sort who would adapt to just about any circumstances, and do it with every appearance of ease and elegance, however little he might like it.

“Ah, little godling,” Thanos said in a flat growl of a voice. “We have some new allies that I want to introduce you to. I’ve told them all about your silver tongue, and they are eager to experience it.”

Loki glanced at the five rather shaggy people who were standing on the lowest step of the dais, looking like extras in a bad werewolf movie. Leona noticed that he had a strangely blank look on his face. “Of course! What shall it be? Tales of valour, adventure, high heroism? Or are you gentlemen in the mood for a rhyming farce-”

Thanos cut Loki off. “They aren’t interested in hearing you speak, godling.”

Loki’s posture stiffened, and he looked up at Thanos.

Thanos had pulled the Scepter out of somewhere, and now pointed it at Loki. Though they were a good thirty feet apart, Leona saw Loki’s eyes wash over with blue, and his posture loosened again.

He looked back over at the shaggy aliens, and now his face wore a small seductive smile. “Not interested in oratory?” he asked them. “No, I can see that you are men of action.”

He walked over to the one wearing the most and cleanest clothes – probably their captain – and dropped to his knees. The alien gripped Loki by the hair with one hand, and with the other began to fumble frantically at his own pants.

“Loki!” Leona cried out, horrified. “Loki, it’s an illusion! You can end it!” No one paid her the slightest bit of attention.

She turned her back quickly, not at all interested in watching Loki’s degradation. After a moment she put her hands over her ears too, but she couldn’t entirely block out the sound of gagging and choking.

Very soon, Leona found herself shaking with disgust and impotent rage. She had already known that Loki had been sexually assaulted (and not just here, in Sanctuary either, as far as she could tell), but she never would have wanted to see it. She had to keep reminding herself that Loki had asked for her to be here. She wasn’t violating him by witnessing what he chose to show her – even if it kind of felt like it.

Finally it seemed to be over. Leona turned back around to find the aliens putting their outfits back together, and Loki still on his knees. Thanos pointed the Scepter at him again, and said “You can get up now, godling. Unless you were hoping for more?”

The aliens made some sort of laughing response to that, in their own language. Leona wanted to slap the cheerful grins off of their shaggy faces. Couldn’t they see what they had done?

Loki got rigidly to his feet, his fluid grace of mere minutes ago now completely gone. Without warning, he bent over and vomited about a pint of orangish liquid onto the stone floor.

The aliens laughed raucously, and had some more to say in their own language, elbowing each other and grinning. Thanos smiled.

“That will be all now, little one. You may go back to your chamber. I will summon you if I need you again.”

The small group that Leona had been thinking of as Loki’s followers, who had done nothing but watch this whole time, stayed where they were as Loki walked quickly and stiffly through the nearest arch.

Leona ran after him, avoiding the puddle of curdling orange fluid.

She caught up to Loki in a sort of hallway with no roof. This close to him, she could see that he was shaking badly.

“Loki,” she tried again.

He turned sharply and looked directly at her. His eyes narrowed as he looked her up and down.

“Loki, you can hear me?” she asked, excited by this measure of success.

“What do you want?” he asked rudely. She didn’t blame him.

Not totally sure how to answer that, Leona said, “I’m here to take you home.”

“Home?” Loki’s eyebrows lifted almost to his hairline, and then he began to laugh. His laughter sounded rough from the abuse his throat had just taken, but it was also shading towards the hysterical. He put up one forearm against the wall and then leaned his face into it, still laughing loudly.

Finally his laughter tapered off when he had to fight back another fit of gagging. He lowed his arm and turned to look more attentively at Leona. He was wearing a big, awful smile. “I suppose Odin sent you?” That set him off chuckling again, as if it were an old joke.

“No,” said Leona gently, “You sent me.”

He snarled and turned his back on her and strode away.

Leona hurried after him, “Loki, I’m serious. Just listen to me, please.”

He rounded a corner, and when Leona followed him around it a moment later, he was nowhere to be seen.

There were several doorways opening into this hall and, fortunately, Loki was on the other side of the very first one she checked. He was in a totally bare and roofless stone room, curled up in the corner with his arms wrapped around his knees, and his face hidden in the shimmering silk of his sleeves.

Leona walked slowly over to him and knelt down beside him. Tentatively, she touched the back of his hand. He was still shaking violently.

“I already knew about that,” she told him quietly. They had never talked about any sexual assault in their sessions, but Loki had dropped a few vague hints here and there, and truthfully, Leona hadn’t needed any hints to know. She could tell just from looking at someone whether they had been hurt, and how, and sometimes even by whom. It was a knack she had always had, the same as being able to recognize a malignant narcissist at first sight, knowing when someone was lying and when they were telling the truth, when they were in love, and the thousand other little things that she somehow just knew about people. She hadn’t fully realized until she was working on her degree in psychotherapy that most people didn’t know these things about each other.

This knack, whatever it was, made her an excellent therapist, but it also made her extremely picky about her clients. She just couldn’t stand to build emotional intimacy with any but the most true-hearted individuals. She had turned down at least eighty percent of the patients SHIELD had tried to give her. But the remaining twenty percent, she loved unreservedly.

She settled on to the floor beside Loki, leaning her back to the wall. After a few minutes, she laid her head against Loki’s shoulder. He didn’t seem to mind, so she stayed there.

Eventually he spoke into his arms. “No one’s coming to rescue me, are they.”

Leona sighed. “They think you’re dead, Loki. Thor and Frigga are mourning you but, no, they’re not looking for you. They’re not coming for you.”

“I will be here forever,” he whispered.

“No,” she told him, fiercely, “You will get out of here. By your own cleverness, you will find a way out. I’m from the future, Loki, so I know what I’m talking about.” She wasn’t worried about ruining any timelines or anything, mainly because this was an illusion, but also because she had always thought that kind of stuff was nonsense anyway.

“Even if I should escape someday, I will have changed beyond all recognition. I will be a creature of Thanos’s making. Already, I doubt my own sanity.” He hunched further into himself. “I doubted it even before I fell…”

“Loki, I know you think I’m not real. But maybe you’ll remember this conversation once we’ve gone home,” - and how she hoped they would go home - “So I’ll tell you right now that you are much stronger than you know. You’ve suffered horribly, but you will come back from it. By the time I meet you, you will have pulled yourself back together to an incredible degree. And you will be recognizable, because Thor has no doubt that you are his brother, and he still loves you, in the time I’ve come from.”

She had meant for this information to be comforting, but instead she felt Loki cringe at the mention of Thor.

“And what of the day when he learns the truth about his so-called brother?” Loki was using one of his nastier voices. Leona was familiar with a whole gamut of them, by now. “Have you seen that day, crone?”

“No,” she told him honestly, “That day happened before I ever met Thor.”

Loki’s shoulders were scrunched up around his ears already, but she felt him scrunch even more, so she went on.

“Odin told him. From what I can gather, Odin felt like Thor was mourning you for too long, so he finally told him about you being a Jotun, to get Thor to stop grieving.” She nudged Loki’s shoulder with her own, “It didn’t work though. Odin thought that knowing the truth would make Thor stop loving you. Instead, it made Thor stop hating Frost Giants.”

“For a figment of my diseased imagination, you tell surprisingly charming lies,” Loki said after a moment, in a thick voice.

Leona was getting good and tired of not being believed in. “I’ve never told you a lie, Loki, and I never will. And I’m not a figment of your imagination. You and me are the only real things here.” She sighed again, “I guess you’ll figure that out when you’re ready.”

He didn’t say anything, so Leona fell silent too. She could feel that he was still shivering, so she looked around to see if there might be a linen closet or something in this God-forsaken place.

Strangely enough, there was now a pile of dirty blankets and furs in another corner of the room. It certainly had not been there when they had come in.

Leona got up creakily and moved over to it. She grasped the edge of a dusty red wool blanket and was giving it a tug, when the pile burst into sudden movement, and she found herself staring into the face of another Loki.

Barely catching herself from tumbling over in surprise, Leona gaped at the new Loki. This one was dirty, disheveled, starved, and, judging by the nasty glint in his eye, totally deranged. He reminded her very much of the Loki that she had seen in SHIELD’s footage of the original activation of the Tesseract. The Loki who killed without hesitation. She backed slowly away from him, towards silk-and-satin Loki.

Crazy-Loki sat up in his nest, his eyes following her with a worrisome avidity.

“A Midgardian?” he croaked, “For me?”

Leona glanced back at the other, somewhat-saner Loki, but he had gone as still as a stage prop. She wondered if only one of them could be “real” at any given time, or exactly how that worked. She didn’t have much time to ponder it, however, since crazy-Loki was now up on all fours and prowling towards her.

He wore the remnants of another, even filthier blanket tied around himself with a rope, and Leona could see that he was even skinnier than she had feared.

“Loki,” she spoke to him as calmly as she could, and stopped backing away, “This is an illusion.”

“It is not an illusion,” he hissed, speaking more to himself than to her, “I can smell it.”

He lifted his head and inhaled through his nose, and Leona realized that he was smelling her. Savoring the scent too, from the looks of it. She began to seriously consider what would happen if she were eaten by Loki in an illusion. Both she and he were real, whatever the state of their surroundings. Would someone come into her office a few hours from now to find a very real Loki gnawing on the very real bones of the late Leona Levitt?

“Yes, I’m real,” she said, keeping her voice steady, “And you’re real. But everything else here is just a memory. You and I are in an illusion right now, Loki. You brought me here, so that I could bring you back.”

She held her hand out to him, palm up. “You can smell me, but can you smell anything else here?”

Leaning in, he sniffed at her hand and then quickly backed off, like a stray dog.

“Now smell your blankets, Loki. They look like they stink, but do they?”

He turned his head down, keeping his eyes on her, and smelled the ragged edge of the blanket covering his shoulder.

Then he growled and spun on his heel. He huddled back into his nest, with both hands gripping at his head.

Leona quickly realized her mistake: things in this illusion did smell. She had smelled them herself, when she had sat near burnt-Loki, breathing in the scents of scorched flesh and molten metal.

Probably most sorcerers didn’t bother to make their illusions smell, but of course Loki, who prided himself on the arts of deception, would. She hadn’t specified to crazy-Loki that he was the one making this illusion, so he hadn’t expected to meet with smells.

She tried to explain, “You’re the one making this place, Loki-” but she was interrupted by a loud metallic shriek.

Leona turned and saw several Chitauri pulling open a door of metal bars, which hadn’t been there before. They were accompanied by a hooded person, too normal-sized to be Thanos.

Crazy-Loki was looking at the new-comer with an expression that Leona had never seen on his face before, not in person nor in any of the footage of him that she had watched. It was an expression of such hopeless dread that she actually had a moment of missing the predatory look that it had replaced.

She knelt down to bring her face level with his. “Loki,” she said, “Loki, look at me.”

But it didn’t seem that he could drag his horrified attention from the hooded figure.

The Chitauri were now heaving something large and heavy into the room. Leona didn’t even bother to look at it. Only Loki was important in this scenario.

“None of this is real,” she told him, carefully keeping the desperation out of her voice, “Loki, you are safe.”

His eyes turned to her at that, and she could hardly bear to meet them, so lightless were their depths. “Little mortal,” he said softly, “I have never been safe.”

A weird, reptilian voice sounded from the hooded figure. It held the Scepter in one scaly hand as it addressed crazy-Loki. “Come willingly and your suffering shall last one hour. Make me use this, and your suffering will last one day.”

Crazy-Loki was making a pathetically useless attempt to shrink back into his nest. There was no expression in his eyes now but a mindless panic. His face turned sightlessly back to Leona for a moment.

“Help me! Help me, please!” he rasped.

“She can’t help you, you fool,” healthy-Loki muttered from his corner, not lifting his head.

“You miserable worm,” the hooded figure said, ignoring Leona and healthy-Loki, “It is an easy choice. Will you fail at it yet again?”

“Mercy, mercy,” crazy-Loki was breathlessly whispering, his face pressed nearly to the floor.

“I am offering you mercy,” the reptile said, “You are too stubborn, or too stupid, to accept it. Our master has no use for stubborn or stupid servants. I hope for your sake that you manage to learn this lesson soon, for his patience is finite.”

“I am willing,” crazy-Loki gasped, “I will come willingly.” But he didn’t move. Leona thought that he probably couldn’t, he looked so petrified by fear.

Evidently this wasn’t enough to satisfy the reptilian. “Look at me,” it said.

Loki lifted his head and looked towards the creature’s hidden face.

It pointed the Scepter at him and, after a few seconds, Loki’s eyes washed over with a blue glow again. His face relaxed from its expression of painful terror into no expression at all, and he gracefully got to his feet and untied the rope that held his rags on. The filthy cloth fell to the ground, and Loki stepped over it and walked towards the thing the Chitauri had brought.

Leona looked at it now, and her first thought was that it was some kind of ornate metal coffin. Sure enough, Loki opened its hinged top and got into it. He closed the lid over himself, and the Chitauri dragged it back out of the room, followed by the hooded figure.

Shaking herself out of a daze of confusion and horror, Leona turned to healthy-Loki. “Where are they taking him?” she asked.

Healthy-Loki was looking much less healthy now. His hair was dull and ratty, and his fine silks and velvets had lost their bright colors and begun to fray some time in the last several seconds. His face had the beginnings of a sickly pallor, and his eyes had lost all sparkle.

“Come,” he said, unfolding from his position in the corner, and moving towards the open door, “Come and see.”

Leona really didn’t want to, but she supposed that that was why she was here – to see things. She followed less-healthy-Loki out into the hallway, and down a flight of stone stairs, cut right into the asteroid. A fierce heat beat at her from the bottom of the stairway, accompanied by a throbbing red glow.

Before they had gotten halfway down the stairs, a scream unlike anything she had ever heard before froze Leona in her tracks. She could barely recognize it as Loki’s voice, but she knew that it was. It didn’t stop.

Less-healthy-Loki kept moving towards it as if he couldn’t hear it – or as if he had heard it so many times that it no longer mattered to him.

Leona put her hands over her ears again, and followed.

They came to the foot of the stairs, where the scream was so loud that it hurt Leona’s ears even through her hands, and they stepped forward into a large, vaulted stone chamber. The red glow and stifling heat that Leona had noticed on the stairs were pouring out of a huge furnace in the center of the room. Through its open doors, Leona could see the metal casket that contained Loki, surrounded by blinding fire.

The scream was devolving into a guttural howl, now, and soon it weakened, dried up, and was lost in the roar of the flames.

This was what Loki was expected to willingly go to. And he must have eventually learned to do just that, because he had, finally, been allowed to become a servant of Thanos.

The hairs were standing up on Leona’s scalp.

It was several minutes before Leona was able to move or speak. She turned slowly, and found less-healthy-Loki standing close by her side.

“You lived through that, Loki?” she asked him, in a voice she barely recognized as her own.

He nodded, looking into the depths of the furnace expressionlessly. “I lived though that.”

Then he took her by the elbow and pointed into another part of the room.

“And that.”

Another Loki was strapped to a table, and a mangy rat-like alien was pulling the skin from one of his legs, like it was a stocking.

“And that.”

In another area, yet another Loki was in irons on his knees. His head was being tilted back by two Chitauri, and a third was pouring something into a funnel jammed down his throat. The liquid was smoking.

“And that.”

Still another Loki was hanging, manacled to the wall, while his intestines were being slowly drawn from his body by the rat-like alien, and lowered into a bucket of water.

“And that… And that... And that...”

Leona saw Lokis impaled, broken on the wheel, stretched with chains. Lokis being hacked at with axes, ripped at with pincers, branded with red-hot irons. Lokis with blood streaming from empty eye sockets, Lokis with no hands, Lokis with no arms. In a corner, several Chitauri were taking turns enjoying a limbless torso, and Leona had no doubt that that was Loki too.

“Take me out of here,” she demanded in an almost soundless voice, as she turned around and pressed her face into Loki’s chest. “Take me out of here this instant.”

His arm came around her, and he led her over to the stairs and back up them.

When she was able to raise her head again, she found herself huddled in crazy-Loki’s nest, with less-healthy-Loki sitting beside her.

She was done, absolutely done with all of this.

She looked at Loki, and he looked back at her. He seemed relatively sane and attentive.

She considered her approach.

It seemed likely to Leona that she could use the same, or a similar plea to get Loki to end the illusion as she had used to get him to take her out of the dungeon. She could tell him that she wanted to leave. He only needed to try to end the illusion and it would end, she was sure of that. All that kept them here was Loki’s unwillingness to try, his unwillingness to let himself believe that there could be any reason for hope. But, just as he had been talked into trying the healing spell for Steve’s sake, Leona thought that he could be convinced to try breaking the illusion for her sake.

However, that wasn’t what she wanted.

“Loki,” she addressed him, “This is an illusion of your own making. It will end as soon as you stop making it. It costs you nothing to end an illusion, right? It’s easy, as easy as stopping talking, or stopping walking.”

He looked at her, his jaw hardening.

“I know you think I’m a dream, or a trick, or whatever. I know you’ve been disappointed before. I know how horrible it feels to let yourself hope, and then have that hope betray you again. I really do know.”

He was still watching her, giving no sign that she was getting through.

“But you are worth it, Loki. You are worth trying for. Whether it’s the first try, or the ten thousandth try, or the ten trillionth try – you are always worth it, Loki. Every time. And this time too.”

Loki was staring at her keenly, as if he had never seen a creature like her before. “Worth it to whom?” he asked, almost inaudibly.

Leona knew she could list all of the people who cared about Loki, starting with herself and ending with Steve. And that might work. But that wasn’t the answer Loki needed.

“To you, Loki. You have to be worth it to you.” For some reason, the image came into her mind, then, of Loki holding the little blue baby. The way he had pressed his cheek to its soft black hair, the way his big hands had cradled its tiny form to his chest. The awed, uncertain look that his face had worn. She wondered if he was remembering those things too.

Their eyes locked for a long moment, and then Leona sucked in a sob of relief.

Loki’s clothing had turned back to the Midgardian outfit he had worn into her office. They were sitting together on her own wine-colored couch.

Chapter Text

Loki let himself quietly back into their rooms. He suspected that Steven would be asleep again, his mortal body still catching up to the powerful healing spell, and that proved to be the case.

The beautiful human, the man that Loki loved, was sprawled out on his front across their shared bed, surrounded by art supplies. Loki moved closer and looked down at the open sketchbook at Steven’s side. The page showed two life-sized blue hands, slender and elegant, drawn with such care, such reverence, that Loki felt a lump rise in his throat. Beside the hands were patches of different shades of blue, where Steve had crosshatched colored pencils over each other, studiously trying to replicate the exact tones of Loki’s Jotun skin, as if he thought it something worthy of being immortalized in art.

Loki sat down by Steven’s hip and laid a hand on his waist. Steve, ever a light sleeper, awoke and curled around to look at Loki. His hand made an aborted gesture as if to close the sketchbook, as he always did when anyone approached, but then he seemed to realize the futility of such an attempt and instead just gave Loki an embarrassed smile.

“How’d your session with Leona go?” he asked, in a sleep-soft voice.

Loki tried to smile at him. “I believe we learned everything we needed to know.”

“Then you’re – ready?” Steve sucked in a breath, and something broke in his expression, “Loki, I can’t lose you. I need you to win this fight. Do you understand? I can’t lose you too.”

Loki said nothing, looking in wonder at the bright soul who loved him.

Steve swallowed, his voice becoming rough. “Are you going to win? Please tell me you have some secret plan. Because, right now, I can’t see that your odds are very good.”

“I have a plan,” Loki assured him quietly.

Steve rolled further onto his back so that he could look Loki full in the face. “Is it a plan where you take the brunt of the damage on yourself, like your fight with Clint, or your invasion of Earth?”

Loki hid his surprise. He hadn’t realized how much Steven had noticed of that. “I know my own capabilities and I account for them in my plans, beloved.”

“I’m serious, Loki. Is this a plan that you’re going to survive? If you’re going off to die, I have a right to know.”

Steve sat up now, and Loki could see that he was shaking. Loki thought of the pictures he had seen of pre-serum Steve. He had thought that the tiny creature looked frail – unspeakably beautiful, yes, but delicate as a dry leaf. Now, looking into Steven’s determined steel-blue eyes, he wondered how he could ever have thought that. Steven was one of those blessed beings to whom the Norns had allotted an invincible core, as sturdy as the Trunk itself. He had never been frail, and he wasn’t now. Loki took his trembling hands in a steady grasp.

“I can’t guarantee my survival, Steven, but I think you know that I want to come back to you. You give me reason to live.”

Steve’s jaw clenched, and he sniffed.

Loki went on. “I have a plan, and I am doing everything in my considerable power to ensure that it’s a plan I will survive.” He gripped at Steven’s warm hands more tightly. “But even if I die, be sure that I will always be with you. Nor death nor life can tear my soul from yours, Steven. You will need only patience to be with me again, and not overmuch of that, since you are mortal.” Loki moved in closer and slid an arm around Steve’s waist.

Steven was staring at him in something like shock, tears shivering on his lower lashes. Loki touched his pink cheek. “Have faith in me, sweet one. I have no intention of being parted from you.”

“Can you tell me your plan, at least?”

Loki felt a genuine smile touch his lips. “No, dearest, as with all my plans, secrecy is the very foundation upon which it is built.”

Steve gave a shaky smile in return, as one of the tears finally spilled over his eyelashes. “Why am I not surprised?” He looked like he was trying very hard not to break down and sob. He also looked like he had something difficult to say.

“Speak, my love,” Loki murmured, brushing back the golden hair from Steven’s brow, “Whatever lies in my power, I will grant you. You must know that.”

“I want—” Steven whispered, “Loki, I want.”

He didn’t seem to be able to say more, but Loki understood him fully, and brought their mouths together in a sweet kiss. “Yes, my own, I want that too.”

Their hands moved together to the buttons of Steven’s shirt. Steven’s hands shook, but Loki was glad to see that his own were perfectly steady.

While Steven slipped out of the unbuttoned shirt and tugged his white undershirt off over his head, Loki gathered up the colored pencils and notebook and set them on the floor under the bed. When he turned back around, Steven was naked.

The gorgeous human was pink and bashful, but with the determined glint in his eye that Loki loved so much. His skin was blessedly warm under Loki’s hungry hands, but his muscles were tense and he was still shivering. Loki laid him back and kissed him deeply and slowly until the shivering turned to panting.

“Please, Loki,” Steven whispered, wrapping one leg around Loki’s hips and tugging pointedly at Loki’s Midgardian clothing. Loki hadn’t thought to put a vanishing spell on it yet, and certainly didn’t want to stop to do that now, so he had to pull it all off in the ordinary way. His struggles won a few chuckles from Steven, for which Loki was glad. He paused with his jeans around his knees and smiled at Steven.

The beautiful mortal was rock-hard and squirming against the sheets. Loki had already noted that Steven was as generously endowed as any Aesir. Not for the first time, Loki wondered what exactly had been in that legendary serum.

He finished wriggling out of his clothing and then crawled back over Steven. He expected Steven to pull his legs together so that Loki could straddle him, but instead Steven opened his thighs to make room for Loki between them.

Loki paused, a very strange and new idea striking him.

“Steven,” he said cautiously, “tell me exactly what you want.”

“You, you, Loki,” Steven pleaded. His words weren’t helpful, but his body language was becoming very pointed. He was lifting his hips, his legs spread wide, rubbing his groin to Loki’s.

Then he clarified even further, in a shy whisper, “Inside me.”

Shocked, Loki whispered back, “You would be argr for me?” In all his imaginings of what their coupling might look like, Loki had never once entertained the idea that Steven would allow himself to be taken so.

“Loki,” Steven said, obviously paying more attention to what their bodies were doing than to what his mouth was saying, “There’s no such thing as argr.”

It seemed to drop like a sword across Loki’s mind, severing this moment from all that had come before. For he knew that Steven believed it.

In Steven’s world, ergi was simply not real. And now Loki was living in Steven’s world. Chills chased each other up and down Loki’s spine. Here, on what might turn out to be the last day of his life, he was for the first time free.

“Sweetness,” he murmured between their mouths, “We needn’t do that now. There’s no rush.”

Steven whined and said something indistinct, in which Loki caught the words “last time together.”

“No, no, beloved,” he assured Steven, “Take this as a pledge that I will return. I would never allow my true love to go unfucked for all eternity. I will return, I must return, to give you what you wish.”

“But I want it now, Loki,” Steven groaned, rubbing lasciviously against Loki, “I’m not afraid, I don’t care if it hurts. There’s no reason to go slow.”

The very idea of causing Steven pain was enough to stiffen Loki’s resolve. “It will not hurt, because we will do it only when you are ready.” Loki’s own first time (and plenty of subsequent times) had been distinctly painful, and the picture of Steven having to grit his teeth and bear it, as Loki had, was enough to boil Loki’s blood. “I will show you the first steps today,” he told his writhing lover, “And when I return to you, we will continue on this journey together.”

“Well, for God’s sake, do something,” Steven pleaded, hard and leaking against Loki’s groin. “I need you. Loki, please, I need you.”

“Hush, my dearest,” Loki whispered, sliding a hand down between them. He cruelly avoided Steven’s straining cock, and stroked his fingers farther back, touching delicately at the wiry golden hairs at the juncture of Steven’s thighs. “Trust me.” A ridiculous thing for the god of lies to say, he realized, but if anyone in the Nine Realms could trust him, it was Steven.

He kissed his flushed and squirming mortal, while lightly brushing the backs of his fingers over Steven’s downy inner thighs, bollocks, and cleft, never touching the tight pink entrance to Steven’s body.

“Loki, Loki, touch me,” Steven gasped, trying to move in such a way as to guide Loki’s fingers where he wanted them.

“I am touching you, my treasure,” Loki answered mock-soothingly, smiling at Steven’s frustrated moan.

If this was to be his last time with Steven, Norns forfend, he wanted to make it memorable. He wanted to drive Steven wild – and nothing drove a lover so wild as tantalization. He bit gently at the strong cords of Steven’s neck, kissing and sucking between bites. His hand kept up its feather-light stroking. Steven’s breaths began to resemble sobs, and his fingers gripped at Loki’s back with near-Aesirish strength.

Loki took his hand away entirely, and Steven whimpered. But Loki’s intention this time was not to tease. “Wait, dear one,” he murmured, and opened a tiny aperture to one of his most frequently used ingluvia. This one contained thousands of useful items, and he tucked his fingers through the small discontinuity in space and pulled out an ornate glass jar. “Pleasure-jelly from Vanaheim,” he said, smiling at Steven’s highly interested expression, “The Vanir make the best love-accoutrements, they’re quite famous for it. Will you unscrew the lid for me, beloved?”

With a bit of wrangling, they managed to get the jar open and then set safely aside after Loki had scooped out some of the glistening contents. He returned his hand to Steven’s skin, taking a strong grip of the mortal’s gorgeous red cock. Steven cried out at this first firm touch.

“Yes, yes,” he thrust up into Loki’s tight fist, “oh God, please yes.”

But Loki just gave a few strokes, spreading the lubricant around, and then stilled his hand. He knew from their only past experience (and from close observation while he had been living invisibly in the Tower) that Steven could stiffen up again almost immediately after a climax, but he nevertheless intended to make Steven wait for that first release. He had a hard-earned reputation as a merciless lover, which he had no intention of giving up now - now that he had finally found someone worthy of his best attentions.

Steven kept up his thrusting for a moment, but Loki had allowed his hand to go so slack that Steven could find no friction that way.

Kissing the groan from Steven’s mouth, Loki smiled against his lips. “Patience, Steven,” he murmured. He moved to sit back on his heels between Steven’s spread thighs, looking down at the delectable view before him. Steven, blushing and restless, his eyes half-closed in a delirium of desire, was keening softly under his breath. His slippery cock filled Loki’s hand, and his bollocks were already pulling up towards his body. Loki used his clean hand to push one of Steven’s knees up until Steven was curled and exposed, his tight orifice fully displayed.

“By the Nine,” Loki breathed, staring, “You are beautiful beyond words.” Unable to hold himself back any longer, he bent over Steven and kissed his way down the quivering stomach muscles until he came to the tip of Steven’s eager cock. Caging the stiff flesh in a loose hand, he began to lick rapturously at the head, tasting and savoring his beloved. He could feel the vibrant pulsing of capillaries just under the silken skin, and he knew he would never get his mind fully clear of the beautiful noises that Steven was making. Loki loved using his mouth to give pleasure (a fact which was unfortunately well known on Asgard), but he did not intend to let Steven finish that way now.

“Turn away from me, beloved,” he said, pulling back from his sobbing lover.

With some difficulty, Steven managed to roll onto his side, and Loki slotted up behind him. It was the reverse of the position that they usually slept in, with Steven curled around Loki, and Loki found that he enjoyed it very much. With his own lubricated hand, he slicked his eager member and then gently slid it between Steven’s thick thighs, at the juncture of his legs and body. Steven’s well-muscled arse pressed back into Loki’s lap, warm and firm, and Loki reached over Steven’s hip to take Steven in hand once more.

At this point it became necessary for both of them that they stop moving entirely for a few moments. Loki, gasping into the back of Steven’s neck, tried and failed to remember the last time he had been in danger of spending before he meant to. Something about Steven made him feel as if this was all new, as if the two of them were inventing it together.

“Love you, love you Loki,” Steven was panting.

“Steven, my jewel, my treasure,” Loki found himself mindlessly murmuring into the cropped hair behind Steven’s ear, “How I love thee, I have loved none but thee, my crown, my glory.” He had no idea what he was saying, and was sure that Steven didn’t either.

Guided purely by instinct, Steven began to move his hips. The drag of skin on slicked skin made both of them cry out. Tension built, Loki’s hand unconsciously tightening as Steven’s thighs did the same.

Loki wanted to hold off on their mutual release – until he didn’t. He was hurrying now towards the cliff’s edge, just as he had the first time, when Steven had been practically asleep in his arms. Had he had any breath to spare for it, he would have laughed at his own irrepressible ardor. He had intended to give a performance worthy of the great and ancient name of Loki, and instead he was brainlessly humping away like a callow youth of a mere five hundred years. But, by some blessing of the Norns, Steven seemed to be enjoying every second of it just as much as if Loki had been displaying all his bed-craft.

“Dearest, dearest,” Loki gasped, “Do you like this?” He changed his angle, so that instead of nudging up behind Steven’s bollocks, his member was now gliding across Steven’s virgin orifice. Steven began to tremble and, in lieu of an answer, curled over and came in great gouts across the linens. Loki followed hard on his heels, liberally be-dewing Steven’s cleft and thighs.

Neither of them even softened. They held still, catching their scattered breath for a few seconds, and then their rhythm resumed.

This time Loki could afford to be somewhat more leisurely and controlled, but it hardly mattered. Steven’s next climax seemed to come even easier than the first, and to squeeze him even more straitly in its grip. He made no noise except for a brief choking sound that may have been the first syllable of Loki’s name, as he convulsed and poured white seed over Loki’s hand.

Loki, immediately grasping the possibilities offered by a superhuman lover, simply continued his motions, ignoring the piteous whining arising from Steven’s throat, and brought the human to four more peaks in rapid succession.

It wasn’t until Steven feebly wrapped a shaking hand around his wrist that Loki desisted and allowed himself his own second pleasure.

They lay panting helplessly for many minutes. Loki eventually gathered the wherewithal to vanish the worst of the wet spot into a disposal-ingluvium, leaning over Steven’s hip to open a small portal. But as he did so, he caught sight of Steven’s face. Far from the languorous, half-delirious look that Loki aimed to leave on his lovers’ faces, Steven looked abjectly miserable and tears were pouring from his eyes.

“Steven!” Loki cried, gripping a firm shoulder and rolling the mortal onto his back. “What is wrong, dearest?”

Steven just shook his head, and rolled the rest of the way so that he could tuck his face against Loki’s throat.

But it was no mystery what was troubling Steven. Loki was quite sure he had not hurt him with their gentle love-making. And he had watched with his own spirit-eyes as Steven gave himself more than six climaxes in a row before, so he knew it couldn’t be over-stimulation. No, Steven was miserable because Loki was going away to fight and possibly die without him. Loki had seen the warriors’ wives and sweethearts wear this same misery on their faces as the Asgardian forces rode out to do battle for Odin.

He had never seen a lover wear that look for him.

Loki stroked Steven’s golden hair and thought of this strange place he had found himself in. It was not that it was Midgard. Loki had been to many, many realms, both within and beyond the branches of Yggdrasil, and he had spent plenty of time on Midgard during the Viking Age. Enough time to know that this was not due to where he was, but to whom he was with. Somehow, Loki had fallen in among a group of true heroes, good-hearted people who were for some reason willing to accept him, and in Steven’s case, even to love him.

Loki had met good people before, of course. Sometimes whole communities of them living and being good together. Sometimes he had even befriended them, in the pursuance of some goal. But he had never before felt as if he might stay with them forever and be welcomed. Be wanted.

He thought of the memories he had just shared with Leona. He had gained the information he needed from them, and he had not been unduly distressed by his time in the illusion. He had been unable to feel physical pain during it, only the fear of pain, and that was something he was well accustomed to by now. No, what had affected him most about that horrible re-living had been Leona’s reaction to it.

The little crone had wept unabashedly. For no reason at all except that she was seeing the suffering that Loki had endured in the past. He had expected the visit to his memories to be a purely wretched experience – necessary, but deeply unpleasant. And of course it had been unpleasant, but it had left him feeling afterwards, not “retraumatized” as the mortals called it, but oddly comforted, even relieved. Because Leona had wept.

She had shown no sign whatsoever that she thought he deserved what had happened to him, or that it didn’t matter what happened to a Jotun whelp like himself, or that such treatment of prisoners was in any way acceptable or normal. No, she had been horrified and profoundly saddened by what she had seen. It was difficult for Loki to parse his own thoughts on this subject, but it seemed that what he had felt was, well, perhaps the word was vindicated. On some level he had known that what was happening to him was wrong. Not only because he had hated it – every prisoner hated to be tortured, naturally – but because on some hidden level he must have suspected that there was no sane reason for any of it. That no one deserved to be treated that way, that it did matter, that it was not acceptable. Not when Thanos did it to him, not when Odin did it to others, not when anyone did it to anyone.

He may have suspected that, but to see a friend crying over it, crying over him – well, it had changed Loki’s perspective once and for all. It wasn’t a matter of nagging doubts anymore, of second-guessing himself because he knew he must be biased. Now he was sure; what had been done to him was sick and wrong and he hadn’t deserved it. If a healthy-minded person like Leona agreed with that, then maybe Loki’s suspicions were well-founded.

Loki cuddled his weeping lover against him and felt his own heart trembling with gratitude. “You are tired, my treasure,” he murmured to his beautiful mortal. “Things will look brighter after you’ve slept. I’m not leaving just yet. Rest in my arms and soothe your mind.”

Steven pulled back to look at him suspiciously, “Give me your word that you’ll be here when I wake up.”

“Were you thinking that I would slip away while you slept?” Loki asked, feigning hurt, “Never, my own. I would not rob myself of a single one of your kisses.”

“Your word,” Steven demanded mulishly.

Loki laughed even as their lips met, and then pulled away just long enough to comply, “I give you my word that I will wake you myself.”

Steven sighed in relief and leaned into their kiss. Loki lifted one hand to cup the back of Steven’s head and then laid a gentle galdr, easing the mortal softly into sleep.

He arranged Steven’s warm, pliant body into a comfortable position, and then stood and looked down at him. “Have faith in me, Steven,” he whispered, “Please.” Then he summoned his leathers around him, turned himself invisible and walked from the room.

*****

A dense fog surrounded Loki on all sides. The ground underfoot was spongy and sodden. Strain his ears as he would, he could make out no sound except his own footsteps. He walked on, knowing that the nature of Nornheim was such that he would either meet who he needed to meet, or he would wander in circles forever, and no effort on his part could decide which of those two contingencies it would be.

At last he heard a faint trickling from somewhere to his left. Permission had been granted.

He turned toward the sound, and very soon came to the lip of a shallow stone pool. Above the water hung the head of Mimir.

It looked very much as Loki had always pictured it. Mimir had been born in a time before the races had been as differentiated as they currently were, so he looked rather like an amalgamation of all races. His brow was as broad and sturdy as a nifling’s, his eyebrows and ears as pointed as an elf’s, his bearded jaw as jutting as any Jotun’s, and his withered skin was of a faded tone that might once have been almost any color. The size of his skull indicated that he had stood about eight or nine feet tall in life. Loki had heard that Mimir had been considered very handsome in his long-gone youth.

Now, the lifeless head hung, spinning slowly by its own hair, sundered from all that Mimir had been while he lived, except for the one feature valued by Odin.

Loki had never come to visit Mimir before. He knew that Mimir’s head was for Odin’s use alone, and the spell that had made it also compelled it to be honest with Odin. If Loki had ever visited, Odin would have learned of it from Mimir, as well as what he had asked.

Also, Loki had perhaps feared to meet with Mimir. Feared what he might learn about himself…

Still fearing that, he kept silent.

The head appeared to be dozing, its withered eyelids twitching. Loki knew that its soul had been separated from its mind and now dwelt in Hel, transmigrated into the body of a Serpent of Hvergelmir; the common fate of traitors and oathbreakers. No doubt its mind fled to be near its soul while it slept, and even now churned and devoured brutishly in the black depths.

Loki had no wish to interrupt what might be the nearest thing that Mimir could know to freedom. He waited patiently, watching.

Soon enough, the head groaned and its eyelids rose to reveal eyes as grey and cold as Odin’s. It took only a moment for the eyes to find Loki and focus keenly on him.

“Do you know who I am?” Loki asked it.

“I would recognize you anywhere, Loki Laufeysson,” it whispered. “I have been waiting for you.”

“Then you know why I am here.”

“You have come to see me for the only reason that anybody comes to see me. You wish for my advice.” The head spoke dryly, “No doubt you have formulated some plan by which you hope to defeat Odin, and now you have come to place that plan before one whose Sight of Ways exceeds your own, to examine it for flaws. Very wise.”

The Sight of Ways was a gift belonging to the royal caste of the Jotnar, and it had died with them. Mimir’s was the last vestige of it among the Branches; it was that which made him the greatest of advisors. Even when he lived, and other members of the royal caste had lived, Mimir had been renowned as the most gifted Seer of Ways.

“You advised Frigga,” Loki said. “Will you advise me?”

“To the downfall of Odin?” the head smiled with all of its long, yellowed teeth, “Very gladly.”

Loki wondered briefly how long the head had been waiting for this day. If he had come to it a thousand years ago, would it have helped him to destroy Odin then? But Loki had spent the last thousand years learning and growing – very likely he would not have been strong enough or knowledgeable enough to present even the slightest threat to Odin back then. Even now his plan relied much more on trickery than on strength.

He laid it out, then, in all its underhandedness, to Mimir.

When he came to the point of the plan at which Odin would die, Mimir gave a rough bark of laughter, and Loki grinned viciously.

“Then you think it will work?”

“I think it would be a joy to behold,” the head replied, chuckling. “Any plan that relies on Odin’s monstrous arrogance has a fair chance of succeeding.”

Loki supposed that that was about as good a prognostication as he was going to get. His grin fell, though, as he thought of the beautiful mate who worried for him and who had lost too much already. “And do you think it likely that I will survive it?”

“Survive it?” asked the head. “Of course. You have just told me that you have survived such things before.”

“There is much that could go wrong,” Loki murmured, more to himself than to the head.

“Hush, child,” Mimir admonished. “The plan rings soundly; cannot you feel it? Needless fear and self-doubt are not the qualities of a king. I had not thought to find my grandchild so timorous.”

“Your grandchild?” Loki lifted his eyes and stared at the head in silence. He could feel something cracking deep within him, and something else desperately trying to close the opening rift.

Finally he spoke, his voice no more than a breath. “Then it is true. Farbauti is my dam.”

The head sneered. “Of course. Who were you supposing it to be?”

“From the way I was discarded,” Loki replied, regaining his voice somewhat, and lifting his chin, “I naturally supposed that I must be an inconvenient side-get of Laufey’s upon some scullery slave.”

“Look at me, child.” The sneer vanished promptly. “You were not discarded.”

Loki’s temper broke abruptly, “Do not lie to me, you yammering skull! I have been there, I have seen it! I was left to die on the floor of an ancient crater, alone, abandoned, heart-broken.”

The grey eyes observed him with a sort of heartless pity. “No, child. Your dam placed you there because she knew that your sire would not dare to kill you on sacred ground, in the sight of the ancestors. When she came back after the battle, you were gone. She mourned you. She mourns you still.”

Loki stared, unseeing. He felt like he was caving in. Everything he had ever known about himself was wrong – again.

“You lie,” he whispered, almost fearfully.

“You were loved. You have always been loved.”

For a long moment Loki couldn’t speak, and instead focused on keeping his legs from folding under him. “Is this true?”

Mimir made an expression that would probably have been a shrug if he had still had shoulders. “Why listen to a yammering skull? Go and ask your dam. Ask her how she wept and raged when she learned that you were gone. Ask the Jotnar to tell you of the lightning storms that lasted for months, of the cities that were swept into the sea by her grief.”

Eyes fixed on the withered head, Loki had lost control of whatever expression his own face wore. “But she went back to Laufey.”

Mimir raised a bristly eyebrow. “Why do you think that?”

“Because she is queen and he was king.”

The condescending sneer made a reappearance. “And a king and queen must love each other? Where in the Nine did you learn that lesson? It cannot have been at your mother’s knee.”

“Then it was only Laufey who wished me dead?”

The head’s expression turned grim. “He saw in you his greatest fear: the return of the royal caste. Your size and your beauty betrayed your blood and, if allowed to live, you would succeed him. He himself would have handed the throne back to the tyrants that he had worked so hard to wrest it from. Or so it seemed to him.”

Loki was swiftly recalculating a thousand things. “But why did Odin steal me in the first place? Was it truly to make me his puppet-king of Jotunheim?”

“That was one of the reasons I gave him.”

“You?”

“Of course. I am Odin’s greatest advisor. Did you think that he took you without my advising it? As soon as Heimdall told us of your birth and that you, at least in appearance, were a reversion to the royal caste, I knew I had to get you away from Laufey. Odin, as you and I both know, only ever acts in self-interest, so I needed to give him reasons why  stealing you would benefit him. And since I cannot lie to him, they had to be true reasons. Eventually he was convinced, and he attacked Jotunheim.”

Loki’s mouth had fallen open in surprise at all he was he hearing, and now he shook his head. “No, he attacked Jotunheim because Laufey was preying on Midgard without permission.”

The head gave him a wry look, “Ah yes, Odin, the selfless defender of the weak. Did you believe that story, child? What would Odin care that the bone-gnawing barbarians of Midgard were being harassed?”

“Then he attacked to steal the Casket of Ancient Winters,” Loki argued, for some reason needing to defend his own unwantedness.

“You were the last-born Jotun mage,” the head told him, “None there now could use it as it was made to be used, nor can Odin himself fully wield it, being half Aesir. It would be as useless on Jotunheim as it is in Odin’s vault. He went to steal you.”

Revelation piled on revelation, until Loki felt nearly numbed. “You sent Odin to conquer Jotunheim… for me? That realm – your home – is in ruins even now. The Jotnar teeter on the brink of extinction. You expect me to believe that you destroyed your homeworld…for me?”

“Would you not do as much, for one you call your own?”

Loki searched within his own dark heart, and knew that he would. He had, in fact, done the very same thing – nearly destroyed Jotunheim – just to win the approval of Odin. He would do as much and worse for one he truly loved. “But you had never even seen me before today…” he whispered. “You do not love me. You cannot love.”

“I cannot feel it, that is true. My heart rotted away somewhere, hundreds of years before you were born. But I can know it. With all that is left of me, I know it. You are mine. When you were helpless, it was a grandsire’s place to defend you. To that end I used every weapon in my arsenal.” The head smiled a wickedly triumphant smile that Loki knew from his own mirror, “And you live.”

Loki sank down to the damp ground and looked up at the head. “And Farbauti…you say she loved me?” He hadn’t meant for it to come out as a pathetic-sounding question. What should he care if some total stranger, and a Frost Giant no less, happened to love her spawn? And yet, he wished to hear it said again.

“Naturally.” Mimir was watching Loki with cool interest.

After a moment, Loki said, “I killed Laufey, you know.”

The head regarded him approvingly. “Aye, so Odin told me. If you can succeed in killing your other father as well, perhaps the skalds will sing of you as Loki King-Killer.”

Loki smiled one of his nastier smiles. He thought that sounded very fine indeed.

“I intend to issue my challenge to Odin as soon as possible,” he told his new-found grandsire. “Is the time auspicious?”

Mimir’s eyes unfocussed and then rolled back, so that only a sliver of white showed beneath the fluttering lids. When the irises returned to view, he replied, “The time is auspicious. Go now. Issue your challenge. And if the soulless can bless, know that you have my blessing.”

Loki got up and bowed his thanks to the head of his ancestor. As he turned to leave, Mimir spoke again.

“Loki. Would you do your grandsire a kindness?” His harsh whisper of a voice softened. “The final kindness?”

Turning back, Loki met the grey eyes in a long look of understanding. He knew what Mimir wanted, and he certainly didn’t blame him for wanting it, but he couldn’t. Not now, not like this, not having just met this first blood-relative who wasn’t also a deadly enemy, not having just learned that he owed his life to Mimir’s machinations.

“If you have advised me well, so that I survive this battle, I will return and set you free,” he told it solemnly. “By our shared blood, I swear it.”

*****

It was an easy matter to write his message in large letters on the landing-deck of Avengers Tower. Heimdall would see it the first time he turned his eyes towards them. He may be seeing it even now, Loki thought as he put the pot of paint and the brush back into an ingluvium. Time was growing short, and there was still an important step of his plan to be done, one last ally to be engaged.

As he walked invisibly back through the halls of Avengers Tower, Loki felt that he had been changed by his meeting with Mimir. He supposed that every experience changed a person, in its own way, but what he felt now was…poised. Simultaneously readied and steadied. Like an arrow nocked to the bow and pulled back, a great tension building around him, but perfectly still for the moment in the hands of an archer strong and sure.

Chapter Text

The quiche had been sitting out while they’d slept and didn’t look very appealing anymore, so Tony and Jarvis decided to head to the secondary communal kitchen in search of breakfast (although it was closer to dinner time now), and - more to the point - coffee.

When the elevator arrived to take them down a few floors, the opening doors revealed Loki, looking grim and exuding an air of otherworldliness somehow. Maybe it was a smell.

“You been on the roof, Blitzen?” Tony asked, stepping into the elevator car with Jarvis at his side, “What for?”

Loki was about to answer when he apparently noticed Jarvis’s red, swollen eyes. He bristled up immediately and, completely ignoring Tony’s question, addressed Jarvis, “You’ve been weeping – what has this swaggering coxcomb been doing to make you unhappy?” He turned a hard face on Tony, “By the Nine, Stark, if you think he is without defenders and must tolerate your scurrilous behavior, you shall soon learn otherwise. I didn’t give him a human body so that you could bring it to tears-”

Here Jarvis put a calming hand on Loki’s arm and told him, “Loki, I was crying from happiness.”

Loki cast an extremely skeptical eye over Tony, “Happiness?”

“Yes,” Jarvis said, lifting his chin proudly, “Because Tony told me he’s serious about me.”

“As well he should be,” Loki snapped, speaking to Jarvis but glaring at Tony, “You are protégé to the royal houses of Asgard, Jotunheim, and Vanaheim. He would do well to make his intentions towards you very clear,” his voice lowered in dark warning, “and very honorable.”

Tony thought maybe he should be offended by all of this, but for some reason he felt warm and grateful instead. “Asgard, Jotunheim, and Vanaheim?” he asked, “Do you mean that you, your brother, and your mom would all get between me and Jarvis if I ever tried to hurt him?”

“The three of us and our three armies,” Loki assured him menacingly.

Tony figured that at least a third of this was bluff (did Jotunheim even have an army anymore?) but was still suitably impressed. “You’d take him away and give him someplace safe to live, if you found out I was mistreating him?”

“In a heartbeat, Stark,” Loki snarled.

“Good,” said Tony, and stuck his hand out for Loki to shake, “That’s good.”

His hand hung lonely in the air while Loki scrutinized his face carefully, but then Loki reached out his own hand and clasped Tony’s in a firm grip.

Tony was remembering that the reason he had liked and trusted Obie for so much longer than he should have was that Obie, on more than one occasion, had gotten between Howard and Maria when Howard was drunk, and twice, when things had gotten really bad and Maria had vanished for a few days, Tony had later found out that she had gone to Obie’s hunting lodge in the Alleghenies.

Loki was quiet for a moment, still clasping Tony’s hand. Then he said, “You have pleasantly surprised me, Stark.” He looked faintly puzzled, “And not for the first time.”

“The feeling’s mutual, pal,” Tony looked at him shrewdly, guessing that now might be a good time to get answers, and asked, “Hey, that time we were fighting those laser-helmet losers in that brick warehouse and the whole place fell down on Nat, and somehow she was totally untouched – was that you? Did you cast one of your slowing spells around her?”

“A conical shielding spell, actually, in that instance,” Loki replied, sounding oddly hesitant, as he always did when talking about his magic.

“Ha! I knew it! You weren’t just spying on us, you were helping us! Why didn’t you say so?”

Loki eyed him from an unreadable face, “And who would have believed me, Stark?”

Tony answered promptly, “Steve, for one. Jarvis, probably. Bruce, if you showed him some evidence. Me, eventually. Thor, for sure, right away. I mean, shit, for saving Nat’s life you might even get a thank you out of Clint. Maybe even Fury.”

Loki stared at him intensely, slowly taking his hand back.

“Wow, you’re, like, really not used to being believed, huh? That’s cool, I get it, you’ve been the black sheep for a long time, it fucks with your head, makes sense.” Tony nodded to himself.

Loki was still staring, and Tony, never good at knowing when to quit, prattled on, “So, are you an Avenger now, or what?”

He was gratified to see Loki’s eyes widen.

“Well, come on, I mean, you’ve been living in the Tower with us for, what, a year now? Fighting all our battles with us for months. Coming to all our meetings too, I hear. If that doesn’t make you an Avenger, I don’t know what would. We’ll vote on it, next meeting,” he said, with a shrug.

Loki was almost pop-eyed now. Then he schooled his features and nodded and said, “Ah, I see; you are jesting.”

Tony was surprised, “Uh, no, I’m really not. You know, I’ve always thought six was too few, and we could really use a magic-doer on the team, as you may have noticed. Plus the green in your outfit sort of matches the Hulk, ties the whole color-scheme together, visually, you know, optics really matter in the age of smartphones-”

“Stark,” Loki interrupted with the air of one about to debunk the whole proposition, “You say I am an Avenger if I live in the Tower, join you in battle, and attend all your meetings, is that right?”

“Uh, yeah?”

“Has not Jarvis met all of those criteria as well, and for longer than I have? Is he an Avenger?”

Tony was stunned to speechlessness for nearly a whole quarter of a second. “Well fuck me sideways. Jarvis, are you an Avenger? Have you been an Avenger this whole time?”

Jarvis went pink behind his freckles and began to cry happily again. Tony moved to put an arm around him and give him a kiss, then cast a friendly glare at Loki, “Now who’s making him cry, Rudolph?”

Jarvis asked, “Could I really be an Avenger, Tony?”

“Sure, of course, baby, whatever you want. I’ll make you the world’s greatest suit,” Tony suddenly thought with horror of Jarvis being in danger, and quickly added, “and you can pilot it remotely, you already know how to do that. Hell, you’ve been two-thirds of Iron Man all along anyway. About time you got some recognition, wouldn’t you say?”

Tony spent the rest of the very short elevator ride being thoroughly kissed by Jarvis. The doors opened on the downstairs kitchen, where they were greeted by a wolfish howl from Darcy. Tony was really starting to like that kid. He always appreciated an appreciative audience.

“We seriously need to get a reality TV crew into this tower, stat,” she said as the three of them approached the kitchen island where she was sitting with a bowl of coco-puffs, “Especially in the elevators.”

“Not a bad idea,” Tony agreed. Maybe Pepper would watch the show and see that he’d moved on with someone even taller than her in her tallest heels. Not that he was petty about it or anything.

Suddenly Darcy’s grin vanished as she looked over Tony’s shoulder. “Loki? What’s the matter?”

Loki, inexplicably, looked to Tony rather than answering.

Tony looked back at him, at a loss. Why were they staring at each other like a couple of parakeets? What did Loki want him to say? Tony screwed up his eyebrows and shook his head in silent questioning. Then, in not-so-silent questioning, asked, “What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

Jarvis cleared up the confusion, answering Darcy, “Tony has just said that Loki…and I…could potentially be Avengers.”

“Oh,” said Darcy, complacently returning to munching her cereal, “For sure. That makes sense.”

Loki turned his wide, creepy stare on her instead, and Tony was free to go back to kissing Jarvis.

“Are you mad?” Loki was asking now, somewhere in the background, “Are you all mad? Or do humans truly have the memories of gnats?”

“Hey, now,” Darcy admonished him blandly, her mouth full, “That’s not a very Avengery thing to say, Loki. You might want to polish off that silver tongue, if you’re going to be doing press conferences and stuff. Ooh, do you want me to be your social media liaison? Is that something squires do?”

Tony managed to pull away from Jarvis’s mouth long enough to ask, “mff, coffee?”

“How’re you gonna drink it with that dude stuck to your face?” Darcy asked, blessedly leaning backwards to press the button on the automated espresso machine.

After a round of lattes for everyone, and the salvaged leftovers of their sushi dinner that someone must have rescued from the penthouse lounge refrigerator, Tony clapped his hands together. “Okay, listen up, all. I’ve had the fabricators working on something down in the lab, and now it should be ready for a show-and-tell. Let’s gather everyone together, and I’ll give a demonstration, in say, fifteen minutes?”

Darcy glanced at her phone. “Everybody’s mostly there already. Jane and Erik and Bruce have all been working to get the Einstein-Rosenberg bridge ready for another test-run, and Thor was keeping them company when I left to get a snack.” She raised a spoonful of her third bowl of coco-puffs. “I’m just waiting for Jane to call me back when she’s ready to try again.”

The phone buzzed in her hand. “Oop! And there we go.”

They all stood up from their places, a fizz of tension in the air, like before a good concert.

“We should let Steven sleep,” said a strangely subdued Loki, as they all waited for an elevator.

“Yeah, honestly, he probably won't miss anything. Anyway, I’ll text Nat and Clint and Dr. Levitt to meet us there,” Darcy said, typing awkwardly with her thumb, since her other hand was clamped around a large mug.

*****

While they waited for the latecomers to arrive, Tony played rock-paper-scissors with Jane to decide whose show-and-tell would come first. Tony won, and then won two out of three, and then won three out of five.

“Tony, come on,” Foster whined, “My thing is really important!”

“You should think about getting better at rock-paper-scissors, then,” Tony told her, seeing Leona coming in through the door, right behind the superspy twins. “Right this way, guys,” he called, waving them towards the big back room where he kept all his Iron Man prototypes.

The whole crowd followed him curiously.

“It should be dry now,” Tony said, approaching and then carefully touching the huge God-Killer suit standing in the middle of the large space. “Notice anything different?” he asked, turning to check what people thought of the very obvious change to it.

Darcy was the first to speak. “It’s…mother-of-pearl? That’s cute.”

Loki had come up beside Tony, and now put a cautious fingertip to the armor. “How did you do this, Stark?” he asked, in a gratifyingly impressed voice.

“You get it?” Tony grinned, “Tell the folks at home what’s going on.”

Loki turned to look at the others. “It’s the vomp of the serpent. Somehow made solid, and coating the metal…”

“Oh, you know, a bit of aragonite, a touch of transparent aluminum, this and that, highly proprietary. Anyway - think that might come in handy?” Tony asked him, genuinely wanting the opinion of their resident magic expert. “It seemed like the stuff absorbs spells, so I thought, if you’re going to be fighting a wizard like Odin, couldn’t hurt to have magic-blocking armor, right?” He blithered on, in the face of Loki’s astonished expression, “Course, I haven’t been able to test magic on it, but it sure stands up nicely to bullets and fire. Soaks all the energy right up. Then it kind of flakes off in an ugly way, but we can work on that – it’s just a cosmetic issue at this point-”

Loki interrupted him, looking genuinely awed. “It’s brilliant, Anthony. It may make all the difference between victory and defeat. I thank you.” He put a hand over his heart and bowed his head in a formal way that threw Tony off his patter for a moment.

“Uh, yeah,” Tony tried to go on unaffectedly, “I mean, glad you like it, Lokes. You wanna try it out? See if you can turn it into a bunny, or something?”

“Yes, Loki!” Thor called out boisterously, “Let us see what the gleaming armor can withstand!”

Loki gestured them all away, and then pushed up the sleeves of his sweater. Tony pressed back against a wall, packed in between Leona and Thor, and waited slightly nervously to see if his invention did what he thought it would.

A glowing green miasma began to gather around Loki, making his figure into a dark silhouette at its center. The glow intensified, and flashes of opalescent light flickered through the green. A weird humming sound filled the air, and a ball of light brightened between Loki’s hands, sucking the miasma into itself. Tony’s skin tightened up into goosebumps all over his arms, and then, suddenly, the ball of light shot at the God-Killer and loudly splattered against it, like a water-balloon full of glowing paint. A substance resembling incandescent slurpee fell to the concrete floor and quickly faded into nothingness.

The armor looked totally unchanged, except that its nacreous surface coating was now a shade paler where it had been hit, on the right side of its abdomen. Everyone stepped closer to get a better look, and Loki and Tony both moved right in to touch it.

“Yeah, see, it turns kind of opaque when it absorbs energy,” Tony explained. “A few more hits like that, and the top layer will go white and flake off.”

“And how many layers are there?” Loki asked, scratching at the fist-sized pale spot with his fingernail.

Tony did some quick calculations, “Uh, about forty thousand.”

There was a pause while people absorbed this information.

“Anthony, remind me to introduce you to the dvergar, if I survive this battle,” Loki said softly, his eyes still on the armor.

It hadn’t escaped Tony’s notice that he and Loki were on a first name footing all of a sudden.

“Come on,” Tony pushed the crowd back with him towards the wall again, “Give it another go. Up the ante, this time. Really try to kill the guy inside.”

Loki eyed him, “That spell most certainly would have killed ‘the guy’ inside, had it not been for your vomp-paint, and had he had no counter-spell ready.”

“Vomp-paint,” Tony muttered, “That’s awful. I gotta get the naming committee on this right away.” He was distracted by a blast of light and sound and heat, as Loki flung a sustained beam of eye-wateringly red and magenta light at the suit.

“Oh, very good, brother!” Thor congratulated him, once it had died away, “A valiant effort!”

Loki seemed to take this as patronizing praise (an evaluation that Tony had to agree with), and stood back with a glare and a gesture, saying “Alright, Thunderer, show us what you can do.”

“Wait!” cried Tony, “Let me get some readings first.” He walked back up to the God-Killer, followed again by everyone else. The whole chest of the suit was pale now, though still pearlescent, and there was a tiny bit of flaking starting at the sternum. “How many layers did that compromise, ATHENA?” Tony asked.

“Three layers within a half centimeter diameter, two within a centimeter diameter, and within a four-centimeter diameter, the top layer is at approximately seventy-five percent exhaustion,” she answered cleanly. “Over a thirty-two-centimeter diameter, the top layer is at approximately fifteen percent exhaustion.”

“Amazing,” said Bruce softly, right beside Tony.

Thor began gently elbowing everyone back again, eager to make his own attempt on the armor.

Once everyone was safely distant, he pointed Mjolnir at the suit and did his lightning-rod act, like he had done during his “proving” with Loki. Crackling all over with electricity, he bellowed and shot a bolt of blinding purple-white lightning at the God-Killer. He kept it dancing in a blistering circle on the sternum for several seconds, and then let the lighting die out.

Everyone rushed forward again to examine the damage.

“Well done, Thor,” Loki was saying condescendingly, “You appear to have given it a single flake of dandruff.”

And that did appear to be the extent of things. A single, micron-thick sheet of the artificial nacre, about the size of a postage stamp, peeled away from the surface and drifted, ash-like to the ground, where it disintegrated into a white powder.

“Cool,” said Darcy. “Could I get this stuff on my nails?”

“Truly this is a marvelous innovation, Anthony,” Thor admitted, sounding deeply impressed. “Never again shall I permit the ingenuity of mortals to be impugned within my hearing.”

“You know what’s neat?” Tony said, trying to keep his voice normal in the face of so much praise, “Bullets refuse to ricochet off it. No matter what angle I tried, they just hit it and then fall straight down. It’s spooky. The stuff completely absorbs the energy of impact.”

“Hm,” said Nat.

“Perhaps it requires a mightier impact!” Thor cried challengingly, brandishing Mjolnir once more.

Everyone hurried back to their places by the wall, and Tony noticed Loki doing the hand motion of his slowing spell in front of them.

Thor, eyes blazing, roared at the God-Killer, spun Mjolnir until it screamed, and then let fly.

The result was comically anti-climactic. Mjolnir struck the suit as harmlessly as a whiffle ball and then clonked to the ground.

“Incredible,” breathed Leona, causing Tony to feel an odd swelling sensation in his chest.

“Whut?” said Thor, looking stupefied. Tony almost felt a little bad for him.

They all moved in towards the suit and began trying to count the layers of dandruff at the center of the impact site.

“That’s four whole layers!” Foster said brightly, obviously trying to cheer up her crestfallen boyfriend.

“Mm, I count three,” said Bruce, followed by an “ow!” as Foster stomped on his foot.

A big hand clamped onto Tony’s shoulder, and he turned his head to see Selvig smiling at him warmly and approvingly. “Tony, you’re a marvel,” Erik said paternally. Tony was shivering slightly now, but thought he was hiding it pretty well.

They all continued to test the new armor-coating for the next half hour and succeeded at getting it down about five hundred layers in a few small spots. Lightning, a machine gun, and one of Loki’s spells which he called “the fury of Muspel” seemed to be the most effective against it, but even once they had done their worst, the suit was still standing there, paler but fully intact.

“Phone cases!” Darcy said brightly, “definitely phone cases. And laptop covers.”

“Motorcycle helmets,” said Clint, “and bullet-proof vests.”

“How quickly can you apply this coating?” Loki asked very seriously, “If I bring you my own and Thor’s armor, when can you have it ready for use?”

“Oh, we’ll just pop it in the fabricators and it should be ready in a few hours-” Tony was answering, when he interrupted himself with a startled, “whoa!”

Loki had opened a man-hole-sized dimensional rift right in front of Tony and was rummaging around in it now, shoulder deep.

Tony, of course, peered into it and then stuck his own hand in. For science. He couldn’t see anything but blackness within, but his hand felt freezingly cold and was bumped by a few objects that seemed to be floating in a gravity-less environment. Tony was considering sticking his face through, when his hand was knocked aside by Loki pulling something large and shiny out through the aperture.

“Ah ha!” Loki cried triumphantly, “I knew I had saved these.”

“Nooo,” groaned Thor, seeing the item Loki had pulled out, “Loki, they’re so elvish.”

The item, now sprawled on the workshop floor, was a large golden suit of armor obviously made to fit Thor. To Tony’s jaded eye, it looked less elvish and more I-have-way-too-much-money-to-spend-at-the-Renn-Faire. It was gleaming gold from top to bottom (nothing wrong with that) and adorned with outsized golden wings sticking up from either side of the ornate helmet. The whole thing was made from overlapping plates, like an armadillo, and it had a skirt and short sleeves of scale-mail. Tony raised an eyebrow and nodded approvingly.

“They’re the only ones we have that cover us completely, Thor. And don’t be such a bigot. Elvish workmanship is excellent, even if their aesthetics are a bit – developed - for your tastes.” Loki was already pulling a second golden suit of armor out of the pocket dimension, this one of a slimmer build and with a truly ridiculous set of giant elk antlers sprouting from the helmet. It had to be Loki’s.

On closer inspection, what Loki called “developed” aesthetics, Tony would classify as balls-deep-in-art-nouveau. Both suits were covered, across every square inch, in swirling, looping lines and all kinds of flowers, vegetation, and butterflies embossed shallowly into the gold. A bit much, unless you were planning to get married in one of these outfits, but nothing that could detract from the elegance of the overall design, in Tony’s opinion.

“Wow,” Darcy said, running her fingertips over the delicately inscribed surface of the Thor-suit, “I’ve changed my mind, this is what I want my phone case made out of.”

“We’ve never worn them in battle,” Thor said grumblingly, “Do they even work?”

“They certainly will, once Stark has plated them in vomp,” Loki told him impatiently.

Tony had wasted no time in grabbing an antler and dragging the smaller suit over towards a table at the back of the room. It was shockingly heavy for an empty suit, and he was already making estimations about the components in the alloy and the thickness of the plates, as he heaved the thing up onto the worktop.

Thor deposited the other one beside the first, and asked in an undertone, “Can you do anything about the…”

“Maximalist vibe?” Tony finished for him, “Don’t worry about it, forty thousand layers will smooth that all out.”

“They were a Midsummer’s Eve gift to us from the people of Alfheim,” Loki told him. “Thor has always been squeamish about elves.”

Thor turned on him sharply, “I am not ‘squeamish’, brother, and you know I have nothing but respect for the elves. It’s just….everything is always so….”

“Pretty?” supplied Jane.

“Yes!” Thor nodded vigorously, as if this explained his objections.

And, really, Tony supposed it did. As much as there was a definite whiff of Asgardish homophobia about Thor’s complaints, Tony had to agree that he would also prefer less of a fruits-and-flowers motif on any suit of armor that he planned to wear into battle. Still, as he dismantled the smaller suit with deft hands, he couldn’t help but be impressed by the craftsmanship.

With Loki’s help, he soon had both suits broken down into their separate plates, and ready to be fed through the powder-enameller.

“Okay,” Foster said, bouncing on the balls of her feet as the last piece of gold armor was loaded, “Can we do my thing, finally? I’ve been very patient.”

Foster’s ‘thing’, of course, was another try at making her Einstein-Rosenberg bridge (or, as they had all taken to calling it, her mini-Bifrost) do what it was supposed to do. She wasn’t one hundred percent sure what it was supposed to do, but she seemed to think she would know it when she saw it.

They had had four official tries at making it work so far, and each time Foster had been fully convinced that this would be the time that it succeeded, but each time it had just put out a lot of light and noise before sputtering to a halt, so Tony wasn’t expecting too much from this fifth try.

“Come on, guys,” Foster was saying excitedly, leading them all through to the large lab that Tony had loaned her, “It’s really going to work this time, I’m sure of it! I’ve gotten that weird spectral oscillation from last time tamped down, and I’ve accounted for the quark-spin down to the thousandth decimal point now – there’s no good reason why it shouldn’t work this time.”

“That’s exactly what you said last time, and the time before,” muttered Darcy, “and the time before, and the time-”

Selvig jostled her with an elbow, “Shh.”

Jane dimmed the lights and handed out blue goggles to everyone except Thor and Loki. She was muttering to herself as she double-checked every wire and plug leading out from the large object in the middle of her lab.

To the uninformed eye, it could be mistaken for a hexagonal wrestling ring combined with an infrared sauna. Tony understood most of what was going on in front of him, but hadn’t kept up with the most recent tweaks, since he had been focused on other things lately. One new feature was that there were now large sheets of Starkrystal mirror set up all around the walls, presumably to dampen he spectral oscillation that Jane had mentioned, though Tony personally didn’t think it necessary. The spectral oscillation was obviously not the problem, but what the real problem was no one could say. They had been tossing around increasingly wild theories ever since the first failed test run.

“Alright, guys, stand back,” Jane said, from behind a console of buttons and levers that would have looked at home in a recording studio. The small crowd made a very half-assed movement towards one wall. It seemed nobody was particularly worried about the thing working.

“It’s sure to work this time,” Jane muttered, and then began pushing and twisting at her console.

As usually happened, the room began to vibrate, first with a lumpy, hard vibration, like an over-powered sex toy, and then gradually with a finer and finer vibration until it became only a sound. Buzzing like a microwave from the eighties, the wrestling ring began to glow as if lit by a weak, bluish spotlight. The light increased and started to scintillate with hints of other colors. Meanwhile, distant boomings and crackings were heard. They had yet to figure out what these were or where they were coming from, but they happened each time, and so far Tony hadn’t found any structural damage to the Tower.

This was about as far as the previous test runs had gotten, so when it all went on for a bit longer than usual and seemed to be intensifying, Tony perked up and paid attention. Everyone around him did as well. Jane’s face wore an expression somewhere between kid-on-Christmas and Dr. Frankenstein seeing his monster twitch for the first time. Cute but crazy.

They all stared with bated breath as the buzzing became an eerie whistle and something like a Star Trek transporter-beam began to glitter above the center of the hexagon. Jane squeaked with joy, and Bruce said something to Selvig in a hushed voice.

Tony himself was getting pretty excited now. If the thing worked, and if it did what Thor and Loki said that Asgard’s Bifrost did, then this could be the dawn of the interplanetary age, happening right before Tony’s awestruck eyeballs. Plus, it would mean that they could all go to the surface of Mars and defeat Odin as a team, instead of Loki only being able to bring Thor along, by means of his “world-walking.” Tony had no respect whatsoever for the rules of Asgardian succession-battles, if Earth’s safety was on the line, and would gladly gang up on the asshole.

Then a series of clunks was heard from nowhere in the room, the wrestling ring shivered and swayed, and the whistle ramped rapidly back down to a low warble and cut out completely. The lights died until they were back to the dim baseline they’d started at, and Jane let out a loud “Dammit!” and kicked the leg of her rickety console.

“Aw fuck,” said Darcy, commiseratingly. “But something happened there. I mean, it got closer than last time, right guys?”

Everyone quickly agreed and said nice things, while Thor moved to give Jane a shoulder massage and Selvig patted her hand.

Bruce was going over the readings on the console already, and Tony was just moving to join him, when Loki raised the lights and made an announcement.

“I also have something to share.”

Tony didn’t think he was alone in feeling a stab of panic at Loki’s words. You can’t be repeatedly traumatized by a guy at your first few meetings and then be glad to hear that he has a surprise for you. But Tony quickly overcame his misgivings when he saw the serious and shy look on Loki’s face. Plus, he was just plain curious. Loki had a very high entertainment value, Tony had come to recognize.

“I will need a large mirror,” Loki said, looking around at all of the large Starkrystal mirrors bracketed against the walls.

“No!” Jane cried, “These are diffusing the spectral oscillation!”

“It’s fine, Loki,” Tony told him, “There’s some spares.”

Tony led the way to the area of the labs that was mostly used for storage and projects that had stalled. “Over here,” he waved Loki towards the dozen or so mirrors that Foster hadn’t needed.

“This will be big enough,” Loki said, moving aside a random golden spear, and extricating a sheet of mirror about the size of an extra-large flatscreen. He turned it sideways, or ‘landscape orientation’ as Tony thought of it.

Everyone had clustered around curiously. “What are you going to do with it?” Clint asked.

“Hush, mortals,” Loki answered, gesturing them all away from the mirror where it was now propped against a tool cabinet. He began to perform a complex sort of hand-dance that seemed to require a lot of concentration. The lights in the room flickered and went out, one by one, until the only light was coming from the mirror. The surface started to ripple and steam, as everyone watched, transfixed.

Soon the rippling and steaming cleared and the mirror showed what appeared to be a pleasant afternoon in the Namibian desert. Under a pale blue sky, orange sands were piled in soft-looking dunes, and greyish rocky outcroppings poked up here and there. Extremely hi-def, too, Tony noted enviously. It looked like you could walk right into it.

They all looked at the scene, nonplussed. Suddenly Darcy hollered right next to Tony’s ear, “It’s Mars!”

Of course! Tony realized with a jolt. If Mars now had an Earth-equivalent atmosphere, its skies would be blue. “Okay, wow,” he breathed, moving in closer to the mirror at the same time as everyone else.

“It’s like that mirror the Beast gave Belle!” Darcy decided, “So we can watch the fight!”

“I assumed that you would wish to know how your champions fared,” Loki told them in a flat voice.

Tony had been fretting his head about that issue ever since he had learned that the fight was to take place on Mars. How were they supposed to watch? he had asked himself frantically. Or were they just supposed to huddle here on Earth and wait to see who showed up when it was over; their own guys or psycho-Odin? Technology had had no good answers for him. Even if Mars had still had its satellites, which it didn’t, they couldn’t be aimed with that kind of precision, and the images wouldn’t reach Earth for hours.

“What’s the lag?” Tony asked breathlessly, although he thought he already knew. “You know, the delay,” he added, seeing Loki’s questioning look.

“Delay?” Loki repeated, “What kind of scrying spell would include a delay?”

Bruce groaned in pleasure. “And where is this exactly? What are we looking at?”

The image in the mirror panned as smoothly as a head on a neck, and three enormous bumps came into view on the horizon.

“We are looking at the Okolnir Plains,” Loki said, “There stand the Three Judges and behind them the Great Nithafjoll.”

Bruce grabbed onto Thor (who was nearest to him) with both hands and shook his arm roughly in excitement. “The Tharsis Montes! Those are the Tharsis Montes, I’m sure of it! This is the Tharsis Plateau, probably the Solis Planum!”

“I know nothing of these names,” Thor told him, amused, “But the Okolnir Plains have been the field of the greatest battles of ancient legend. So fierce and frequent were the battles in those days that the field was named Okolnir – the Never-Cold.” He raised his chin and stared into the Martian distance with his steely Viking expression, clearly looking forward to the fight.

“It is cold now,” Loki murmured, also gazing at the landscape in the mirror.

“It will be hot tomorrow,” Thor replied, with grim gladness.

These guys really are gods, Tony thought, a shiver going through him. In the mirror he could see the rise behind the three Tharsis Montes that must be Olympus Mons, the biggest mountain in the solar system. The Tharsis Plateau, Tony knew, was riven by a weird canyon system, many times bigger than Earth’s Grand Canyon, that didn’t follow the usual patterns of waterflow. The scars of ancient high-tech wars? he caught himself wondering in awe. Shit, is that Ancient Aliens guy with the stupid hair actually RIGHT?

 “When is the fight to be?” Selvig asked, looking just as grim and Nordic as Thor.

Loki answered quietly, “I have already issued the challenge. We are to meet Odin at dawn on the plains. Nine hours from now.”

Every head turned to look at him.

“So soon, then?” said Thor.

Loki merely met his eyes.

Jane jerked. “Oh my God. Then I have to get back to work on the Einstein-Rosenberg bridge right now! I don’t want you guys fighting Odin alone. He’s really scary!”

“I will be resting,” said Loki, “Please wake me if you do another test on your bridge.”

“Yeah yeah, of course,” Jane said, already hurrying off to her own lab, followed by Selvig, Darcy, and Bruce.

“I should probably help them,” Tony mused aloud, moving after them, “The fabricator is taking care of the armor situation, so there’s nothing for me to do there.”

Loki spoke again, “Jarvis, I believe you wanted a word with me?”

“Yes,” said Jarvis, and followed Loki out through the other door.

Tony figured that Jarvis must have wanted to ask Loki something about the spell that had put him in a human body, like how long it would last, and what would happen about it if Loki was killed or injured, that kind of thing. He knew Jarvis would fill him in as soon as he knew – Jarvis was always completely honest with him.

*****

Tony was hard at work, ironing out calculations that made even his extraordinary brains feel like a bowl of cheap oatmeal. Bruce was somewhere starting another pot of coffee, and Selvig was asleep on the futon couch that was a good foot and a half too short for him. Jane and Darcy were bickering at another table.

A warm presence loomed at Tony’s elbow. “Hey, babe,” he said, “Take a look at these numbers for me, would you? Jane is sure there’s something – oh hey, when did you get back?”

“Only now,” said Jarvis.

“Did you get everything straightened out with Loki?”

“Yes, he answered my questions satisfactorily.”

“Great,” said Tony, his mind still on the numbers, “Look here, at this graph. Jane thinks-”

“Tony,” Jarvis said in a strange voice, “I must insist that you get some rest now.”

“Rest?” Tony asked. He seemed to have once vaguely heard of this ‘rest’ idea, but didn’t see what it had to do with him.

“Yes, rest,” Jarvis replied against his ear, and slid a purposeful hand up Tony’s inner thigh.

Tony reared up from his hunched position in surprise. He turned to stare at Jarvis, who was staring back from just inches away. Tony felt his face crack into an amazed grin.

“Oh, you mean rest,” he breathed.

“I knew you would understand me,” Jarvis said, looking at him hungrily.

“But, J-baby,” Tony protested half-heartedly, “The fight.”

“Exactly,” Jarvis replied.

And suddenly Tony realized; this might be their last night together. If Loki and Thor lost their battle, who knew what would happen next? Jarvis might revert back to his AI form if Loki was killed, which would make sex trickier. Odin might come and conquer the Earth. Or this ‘Thanos’ person that Loki seemed to fear might show up and sacrifice them all to his weird one-man religion. Who could say?

Realizing that Jarvis - the best numbers-cruncher in the world - considered death and defeat a very real possibility sent a blade of cold fear through Tony. Then, realizing that Jarvis - the most beautiful being in existence - wanted to spend the end of the world fucking him seared the fear out of Tony with a wave of scorching lust.

“Yep, yep, I see your point,” Tony assured him breathlessly. “Hey guys,” he raised his voice, “I’m gonna go take a nap. Back in a bit.”

Nobody paid any attention as he and Jarvis made a hurried exit, hand-in-hand.

Jarvis started right in on Tony as soon as the elevator doors closed, going for Tony’s throat like a starving werewolf. Tony was panting and hard as hell behind his fly by the time they made it up to their floor. “Jesus, J,” Tony gasped, “I didn’t realize you were so hot for it.”

“Neither did I, beloved,” Jarvis said, pressing Tony tightly against the wall and getting a hand down the back of Tony’s jeans.

Then Tony was being bullied bodily down the hall and through the door of their rooms. Jarvis wasted no time in getting them into the bedroom and onto the enormous bed, and then he had Tony on his belly under him and was gnawing and sucking ferociously at the sides of his neck, rolling his hips belligerently against Tony’s ass.

Tony was groaning helplessly and felt like his brains had melted out of his ear, but he just had to ask, “No, but seriously, J, how are you so good at this?”

Jarvis answered against his skin, “I have watched hundreds of people attempt to pleasure you, Tony. I have learned from their successes and failures.”

“Hundreds? Are you sure?” Tony asked breathlessly. His mathematical abilities and memory retrieval were totally out of commission at the moment.

Jarvis ignored his question to add in a darkened voice, “Besides which, this body has…instincts.. Carnal instincts, native pleasures…”

“Oh yeah,” Tony gasped, “I remember; the eyes like to see.”

“And the hands to touch,” Jarvis said, entwining his fingers with Tony’s tightly, “And the nose to smell, the tongue to taste,” he added, suiting actions to the words by nuzzling and licking at Tony’s skin.

Tony could hardly breathe, but he’d never let that keep him from talking, “And the dick to fuck, I hope?”

Jarvis growled and bit down on Tony’s shoulder, burrowing both hands under Tony to tear at Tony’s pants until he could yank them down, baring Tony from waist to knee.

Then he must have done the same to his own pants, because the next thing Tony knew, he was rutting his cock up between Tony’s ass-cheeks and whispering in his ear, “If you wish it, Tony, I will give you all that I have, all that I am.”

“Give it to me, baby,” Tony begged then, “You know what I want.”

And Jarvis did indeed. There was a slick sound of lube being quickly shucked onto a length of flesh, and then he was pushing, slow but relentless, into Tony’s unprepared entrance, knowing full well how Tony relished that initial hurt.

“Oh God, oh God, just like that, baby, I want all of it, all of you, sweetheart.” Tony was nearly incomprehensible from breathlessness, and finally was rendered wholly speechless by the size of the thing he’d asked for.

Tony couldn’t help but struggle. It hurt, and it burned, and it was fucking glorious. Jarvis knew, without having to be told, how Tony wanted to be held down, made to feel completely helpless, invaded, safe.

“Tell me you are mine, Tony.” Jarvis’s voice was a wreck, so unlike the cool tones of an AI, so hot and rough and human, that Tony almost jizzed right then from the thought that he was doing that to Jarvis, that he was making Jarvis feel like that.

“Yours yours yours,” it was all he could do to mouth soundlessly into the sheets, as Jarvis began to move, brutally huge, inside him.

In contrast to the delicious, agonizing torment his ass was enduring, Tony felt his shoulders and neck being kissed sweetly and gently all over, while his hands were almost pulverized in Jarvis’s tight grip. “I love you, I love you,” Jarvis was telling him fervently between kisses, “Tell me that you know it.”

Tony was so crushed and fucked that he couldn’t muster the breath to say yes, but there was no way Jarvis could not know, right? Tony was burning with it. He had never felt so loved before in his life, had never known he could.

His poor, stretched ass was starting to acclimate to the giant cock that was slowly grinding in and out of it, and Jarvis began to move into Tony more smoothly and more deeply now, and all possibility of Tony saying a single word was gone. All possibility of breathing, thinking, or feeling anything except fucked open and owned.

One of Jarvis’s huge hands had found its way under them, now, and slid tightly and relentlessly over Tony’s neglected, aching prick a few times. Tony had hardly registered this new movement when he was hit by an orgasm like a tsunami and swept under. He felt his mouth opening wide in a scream, but had no idea if he was actually making any noise.

He slowly came back to himself in a warm puddle of his own cum, with Jarvis’s full weight still on him and his fucking battering ram of a dick still moving in Tony. Jarvis’s ruined voice grated out in his ear, “Please, Tony, please, may I?”

“God yes,” Tony thought he might have said aloud, and then he was being filled by pulse after pulse, and squirming back against Jarvis’s heavy, pressing hips. Jarvis was so deep in him that it hurt in a distant, cramping way that Tony adored.

“Holy fuck, baby,” Tony managed to groan, after several panting minutes of quiet had gone by. “Holy fucking hell.”

Jarvis moved to roll off of him, but Tony quickly said “no!” and gripped with a feeble, sweaty hand at his forearm, and Jarvis subsided back to squashing Tony into the wet sheets with his full weight. He was softly rubbing his lips and nose against the short hair at the nape of Tony’s neck, and Tony felt so blissed out and treasured that he wanted to stay just like this until their world ended.

Chapter Text

Frigga held the copper tablet in one hand as her stylus formed the last letter. Then she stared at the short message in numbed horror. The moment that she had dreaded had come, and she was no more hopeful now than when she had first heard of it. Indeed, her small store of hope seemed to have bled away in the intervening days.

Her sons, her darling boys, the gentle little souls who had gathered at her knee to watch her weave their gifts of wildflowers into wreaths, who had come to her for kisses and kind words and colorful stories, those tender little beings were now to be pitted against Odin, the tyrant of nine worlds, the terror of her life.

Of course, she knew on some level that Thor was the mightiest of warriors and Loki the most cunning of adversaries, and that together they were indeed truly formidable. But her mother’s mind remembered them as her bright-eyed little children, when their faces against hers had been as soft as flower petals.

She read again the first half of the message that Loki had painted on the roof of his new tower home, and which she had now copied out to be given to Odin. She knew that Loki meant it to be so galling that it would distract Odin from his current task of hunting herself and Heimdall, and she thought ruefully that it would surely succeed. For a formal challenge, it was short to the point of insult, and it furthered that impression by using the familiar ‘thee,’ which could never be used by a subject towards their king - thereby as good as declaring that Loki had rescinded his fealty already.

Borsson, (it read)

  Thy perfidy hath unfitted thee for the throne. Thy insanity hath unfitted thee for the crown. Thy cruelty hath unfitted thee for life. Come to us, thine united sons, and be relieved of all three; throne, crown, and life. We will await thee at dawn on the Never-Cold, where the Norns shall decide between us.

She shook her head over it, but then noticed that Heimdall was actually smiling.

Noticing her look of surprise, he said to her, “I shall enjoy watching Odin’s face when he reads this. None have dared speak to him so in many a long aeon.”

“Heimdall,” she had to ask, “Tell me true - do you believe that they can defeat him?”

“I do,” he replied calmly, his golden eyes serene. “When has Mimir ever advised amiss?”

“Never, that I know of,” she had to admit. But still her heart clenched with some dreadful premonition. It seemed too good to hope for, that Odin could ever be gone. She had lived in fear of him for as long as she could remember, and she had done her best to protect her children from him for as long as she had been a mother. To now be handing over to him the very ones that she had defended for so long felt like basest treachery. And how could treachery end well?

She dropped her gaze to her own hand on Heimdall’s chest. She knew she had to tell him what she had been thinking. “Dear Heimdall,” she said softly, taking her father’s ancient signet ring from her thumb, and pressing into Heimdall’s accepting palm. “I have not Mimir’s Sight of Ways, but my heart misgives me. I seem to see Odin standing victorious over my fallen sons.”

He tried to speak, but she shushed him with a gentle kiss.

“I have decided what I will do, if it should come to that,” she told him, her eyes closed and her lips still brushing his. “I must take the stone where neither Odin nor his master can reach it, or at least whence they can never return. I will leap to the center of a black star. Not even light may escape and time itself bends and falls into such a place, so I think I may rightfully hope that no living being can ever exit by that door. Think you not so?”

Heimdall seemed to be speechless, and his hand tightened convulsively on the back of her waist. He pulled her back into a kiss that spoke volumes.

“It shall be my honor to rest there with thee, my queen,” he whispered, when their lips finally parted.

She rested her forehead against his shoulder, as her tears seeped into his rough shirt. Perhaps it was her duty to tell him no, to insist that he should live. But, in faith, she would be glad to go to her end holding his dear hand in hers. And why should he outlive her? To suffer under the Mad Titan’s tyranny and to mourn the loss of all that he had known? She could not be so unmerciful to her truest friend.

“Be thou my husband, Heimdall,” she murmured against his skin, taking the heavy ring from his closed fist, and sliding it onto his little finger.

“It is a thing already done,” he said, smiling at her, cradling her face in his other hand and kissing her again. “It was done when first I saw thee, my queen.”

Chapter Text

Back in their warm bed, Loki touched his lover’s face and woke him with a kiss. Steven roused softly, but then clutched at Loki with both hands.

“Are you leaving now?”

“Yes, beloved, it is time.” He took Steven’s warm face between his hands and stroked his lips softly over Steven’s cheeks and lips, murmuring to him, “I understand now what the skalds mean when they claim that love is eternal. I shall spend forever here, kissing you, even if I die. This is where I am.”

“Don’t die,” Steven commanded roughly, “I have enough ghosts.”

*****

Cold winds sang across the dark face of Mars. The stars were going out, one by one. A faint greyness crept upward from the horizon. Loki kept his face turned to the east, where soon the small sun would rise. Day was coming, and with its coming something would be lost forever. Loki wished he knew what.

Thor stood beside him, looking like a figure out of legend in his suit of pearlescent elvish armor, his long red cloak streaming from his shoulders, and Mjolnir gripped ready in his hand. Through the darkness behind Thor, Loki could just make out the towering shapes of the Three Judges. It was like a scene from some long-forgotten tale, an ancient song heard once in childhood.

Thor was keen-eyed and nearly trembling with eagerness. Loki turned to him.

“Thor. You remember your instructions?”

Thor tore his glittering gaze from the horizon, and gestured impatiently at Loki, “Yes, yes, you have said a thousand times. I will remember.”

Scowling, Loki insisted, “Thor. These are not suggestions I have given you – they are imperatives. We can win this battle, but only if you do precisely as I have said. Do you understand me?”

“I understand, Loki,” Thor reiterated, “I have heard you, I remember well, and I will obey. Fear not, brother.”

“Repeat to me what I have told you about the scepter’s mind powers.”

Thor very nearly rolled his eyes, but answered, “If I am more than a hundred paces from Odin, I may look him in the eye. But if I am nearer than that, I must avert my eyes from his, or he can make me his thrall. I understand, Loki!”

Loki nodded, satisfied, “Very well. See that you do not forget it in the heat of battle.”

Thor huffed, half annoyed, half amused.

After the silence had stretched a few more minutes – for dawn came slowly on Threkstjarna – Loki realized that he had more he must say to Thor.

He turned towards his brother slowly, mindful that he might never speak to Thor again after this day. There were a thousand things he wanted to atone for, suddenly, but he knew which one had upset Thor the most, so that was the one he addressed.

“Thor,” he said lowly, drawing Thor’s gaze. “I didn’t say it in the crone’s chambers, but I hope you understood…” Loki swallowed through a dry throat, looking at his brother’s earnest face, “…I am sorry that I tried to kill you.”

Thor smiled, expression open. “You told me your reasoning, brother. Think no more on it.”

But Loki wasn’t satisfied. Thor didn’t really understand. How could he? His courageous heart had no way of understanding the panic of cowardice, the tangling terror of a hideous secret. “It was the reasoning of a madman,” Loki told him. “I know now that I was more than half mad with desperation and fear. If I had succeeded in killing you, I would have been driven wholly mad. I have never been so glad to have failed in any endeavor.”

Rather than looking gratified by Loki’s apology, though, Thor appeared saddened.

“I hope I have proven myself worthier of your trust now than I was then. I hope, if you ever find yourself in fear like that again, Norns forfend, you will know that you may turn to me and be sure of my support,” he said, his expression imploring.

Loki felt his brow contract in puzzlement. It almost seemed as if Thor was trying to apologize to him. And wasn’t it just like the great idiot to miss the point, even now, in what might be the last moments of their lives. “No, you oaf,” he said, exasperated, “I am not looking for assurances - I’m trying to tell you that I am sorry.”

Thor chuckled, “And I am trying to tell you that I am sorry. If you didn’t feel safe in our home, if you didn’t feel that your older brother was someone you could rely on, then I failed you.” Thor fixed him with a steady eye, “I wish you to know that I will not fail you again. I would rather die.”

Loki felt a pang of misgiving about his plan.

“No, Thor,” he tried to protest, “The failure was not yours. I was a poor brother to you-”

Thor interrupted, “And who were you to learn brotherhood from? Who, if not your elder brother? I have been a poor brother to you, Loki. I see it plainly now. I mean to make it up to you. I mean to spend the rest of my life, however long that may be, proving my love to you.”

A wave of icy guilt whelmed over Loki, chilling him within his shining armour. He stared at Thor’s heroic face, and wondered frantically if it was too late to change the plan. It was - of course it was - but still his mind whirled with scrambling half-plans anyway. Could he warn Thor of what was to come? He sought for words that would give some comfort to Thor when they were remembered later, but would give nothing away now. He didn’t find them, so he simply said what was forefront in his mind.

“To have you as my brother has been one of the great blessings of my life. I am sorry for what we must do now.”

Thor, thankfully, found his own meaning in this. “Loki. Odin gave you to me to protect - and then he threatened you. With his own hand he hath whetted the blade of his doom. We are not killing the father I loved. That father never existed. Do not be sorry, for I am not. It is with gladness that I kill any who would harm you.”

Loki’s eyes widened at this bald admission of preference. It hadn’t been his intention to rob Thor of a loving and admirable father, but it had, he supposed, been inevitable. As inevitable as the truth always is.

“Brother…” he was beginning, uncertainly, when the hint of a noise came to their ears.

“Mother,” they both said at once.

There was a soft rushing sound, coming from no particular direction, and then Frigga and Heimdall stood before them, hand in hand.

“He follows on our heels,” Frigga said breathlessly, and stepped towards them quickly. Thor swept her into a gentle hug against his armoured chest, and Frigga’s arm reached out to draw Loki into the embrace as well. She kissed their faces and gazed into their eyes, but seemed unable to speak any further. Loki saw that she was pale with dread.

To distract her mind, he pulled back and turned practical, “You understood my instructions?”

“Yes, we will be ready,” she answered, her voice low but firm.

“He comes,” said Heimdall, and Frigga stepped away from them, trailing her hands reluctantly down their mailed arms to grip their hands one last time.

“My dear ones,” she murmured, her eyes wet, “How I have loved you.”

Heimdall handed the silver case back to her, and the two vanished even as a swirling portal opened on the top of a knoll behind them.

Odin stepped through it, holding the scepter in one hand. Some distance to his rear stood Freyr, blear-eyed and unsteady.

The three combatants stared at one another for some time. Loki considered it Odin’s place to speak first, but Odin evidently had nothing to say to them.

Finally, Thor bellowed out in a formal tone, “Odin Borsson, we challenge you for the throne of the Nine Realms!”

Odin looked at them, unimpressed. “Both of you? When I defeated your grandfather, I did it alone.” He sighed and shrugged with the expression of disappointment that was so familiar to Loki. “It is true that greatness is fading from our universe. The best and the bravest are dead already.”

Laughing one of his most galling laughs, Loki called out in a voice that rang with mockery, “And today we send one of the worst and the weakest to join them!”

“Thor I will kill,” Odin said coldly, pointing at Loki, “But you, beastling, belong to my Master. He is eager to have you back.” Odin smiled grimly, “He said to tell you – he has kept your place warm.”

Now, while Odin was distracted by the exchange of insults, Thor threw Mjolnir. Odin quickly cast a powerful shield-spell before himself – and then watched in blank surprise as the hammer went wide of him and his shield. It flew past him to strike the bare head of Freyr where he stood, pale and swaying, thirty paces behind Odin.

Before Freyr’s unconscious form could even crumple to the ground, Frigga and Heimdall appeared out of nowhere to catch him in their arms, and all three vanished again.

Loki was surprised by how well this part of his plan had worked. His instructions to Frigga and Thor had been clear and simple, but still he had expected some complication to arise. When he had gone into battles in the past with Thor and the Warriors Three and Lady Sif, he had been accustomed to everyone ignoring his instructions and creating new problems for him to solve. This quick, neat obedience was much simpler.

Odin bared his teeth in a snarl at this early and successful strike. He no longer had Freyr’s seithr from which to replenish himself.

He was nevertheless formidable.

“Cowards,” he sneered, and then shot a blue bolt from the scepter, striking Thor in the chest.

Laughing, Thor caught his returning hammer in one hand and strode towards Odin fearlessly. A few small flakes, like fish scales, fell from his chestplate, but he was completely unharmed.

Angry and confused, Odin shot several more bolts at Thor and a few at Loki. None did them the least harm. Loki, meanwhile, sent half a dozen illusory duplicates of himself striding forward alongside Thor, and turned his real body invisible. Illusions couldn’t deceive Odin if they got near enough for him to touch with his be-ringed hand, but Loki had no intention of letting them get that close.

Transporting himself to a patch of slightly higher ground several thousand paces away from the fight, Loki watched and strategized. Odin, by this time, had given up on shooting with the scepter, and had switched to using the Fire of Karakal, an ancient spell that directed a beam of red, incinerating light. Loki himself had tested it on the vomp-armour, and knew it was even more useless than the scepter’s bolts.

He could no longer see the shield-spell that Odin had cast, but didn’t on that account assume that it had been dropped. Throwing an offensive spell of his own could tell him if the shield was still up, but would also tell Odin in which direction to look for the real Loki. Instead, Loki stood, holding his breath and gathering a deep vibration into himself. When it had grown to an intensity that was moderately painful, he raised one foot and stomped down as hard as he was able. The power transferred through his body and into the ground, opening a thousand zig-zagging fissures that spread at terrible speed in every direction, crumbling the ground to rough gravel under Thor and Odin’s feet.

The lithosphere of Mars was riddled with ancient lava tubes, like a worm-eaten apple, and several of these now collapsed into themselves. Enormous chasms opened all over the plain, sucking the surface under in floods of sand and gravel. Even in the relatively thin atmosphere, the sound was deafening and horrific, sending fear shuddering through Loki, though it was of his own doing.

Odin sank from view in a torrent of red sand, his shield becoming visible as it was struck from every side by fast moving stones. Thor spun Mjolnir and flung it and himself into the air, arcing up and away from the maelstrom of heaving grit that the ground had become.

Loki had no hopes that Odin would be harmed by any of this, but knew that it was nearly impossible to teleport while moving, so Odin would have to wait till he had fallen to the bottom of the lava tube before he could extricate himself. In the few seconds of safety he had bought, Loki shifted himself over to where Thor had landed.

Revealing himself at Thor’s elbow, he asked “Shall we try it now, while he’s down?”

Thor was grinning a horrible rictus-grin, all of his teeth showing. His blue eyes glittered with the joy of battle. “Where is he?!” he roared, having lost sight of the spot where Odin had disappeared from view.

Loki pointed at the place, and Thor raised his hammer and swept all surrounding electricity to himself.

There had been some debate, back at Avenger’s Tower, about how well Thor’s powers would work on Mars. Stark had maintained that the planet and its atmosphere were too dry and dusty to build up significant lightning, while Banner had said that lightning of significant magnitude had been seen and photographed in the dust clouds themselves, and that it perhaps differed from, but was not inferior to, Earth lightning. They would find out now, Loki supposed.

He raised his arms, levitating every single bit of dust that he was able to reach with his powers. Levitation had never been a particular gift of his, but right now he was aiming to lift only the smallest particles, and he rather impressed himself by the huge, rusty cloud that rose from the ground to surround them.

As Thor filled the cloud with thin tendrils of lightning, Loki was gladdened to feel the dust holding itself up as it began to swirl rapidly through the air. No longer needing to maintain lift for the first wave of dust, he turned his energies to raising more, and ever more. The winds grew fiercer, and the sparkling and crackling within the cloud thickened. Thor’s eyes were glowing, and even his bared teeth were sparking with electricity.

“Now!” Loki cried, and Thor threw his head back as if to scream. Whether he made any noise or not, Loki couldn’t have said, because the air seemed to have fled and been replaced with the deafening, ominous roar of an immense pillar of lightning, unlike anything Loki had ever witnessed before.

His breath caught, and he sobbed out a triumphant laugh, overwhelmed by the might of his brother. Every hair on his body was standing up, and his skin was tingling almost unbearably, Loki had to look away from the blindingly bright pillar before them, and peer at it with his spirit-eyes only, so that he wouldn’t damage his physical ones. Thor, meanwhile, seemed to have become lightning incarnate, shining almost as bright and fierce as the terrible, blinding pillar.

With his spirit-eyes, Loki could see that the pillar was standing directly on top of the spot where he had last seen Odin. For a moment he dared to hope that it might really be that easy. The ground had melted and was glowing white-hot, though it was dim and dark in comparison to the body of the lightning itself.

Thor held the pillar steady until the heat of the ground spread to reach his own feet, and only when the rock under them had become as malleable as cold honey, did he let his arms fall and the lightning dissipate into tiny spattering tendrils again, which were quickly swept away by the wind.

It took several moments before Loki’s hearing returned, and the first thing he heard was Thor laughing. Thor sounded utterly deranged with glee, and Loki hoped that he hadn’t slipped into a berserker state quite so early in the proceedings. But no, Thor appeared lucid enough, and answered when Loki addressed him:

“Do you see him? Where is he?”

“MORE!” Thor cried, his voice rough and bestial, “More, brother!”

“Yes, again,” Loki answered.

The pillar of lightning leapt into existence before them again, this time spreading across the sky, arcing up over their heads and splitting the sky to the horizon.

Loki looked at his brother and saw only a force of nature, a creature of pure energy, roaring out its incandescent rage across the face of a planet.

Odin was nowhere to be seen, and eyes could not endure the brilliance of the battlefield. Loki closed his material eyelids again, and peered around with his spirit-vision.

‘There!’ he cried, when he saw a single scintillating point of blue light. The pillar of lightning flitted across the surface of the Okolnir Plains, following as fast as Odin could flee, splitting and multiplying endlessly.

Beams of the Fire of Karakal leapt at Loki and Thor, but were absorbed harmlessly by their armour.

“FLEE, COWARD! HEARTLESS WRETCH! SON OF INFAMY!” Thor screamed out, making the thunder itself roar with his words.

Loki stood at gaze, amazed at what he and Thor together had wrought.  Dust filled the air from horizon to horizon, and lightning filled the dust. Thor shone brighter than a hundred suns, and his voice was the voice of the whole sky.

Thor was bellowing now, in a voice wholly inhuman, “TYRANT! ABUSER OF THE INNOCENT! DEFILER OF JUSTICE! FACE US! FACE US AND DIE!”

Loki closed his eyes, physical and spiritual this time, and poured every ounce of himself into lifting particles of dust aloft, into the thin atmosphere and even beyond it. Without a word passed between them, Thor knew to collect every bit of charge from the vast cloud and pour it into the area where Odin was. An ocean of molten, glowing rock now lay before their feet, its blackened edges crumbling and tumbling into the burning sea.

Loki was almost afraid at the forces summoned by himself and Thor, working in communion as they never truly had before, but Thor was laughing, and the thunder laughed with him.

As ever, Thor’s courage called to Loki, and Loki felt his own face splitting into a maniacal grin.

‘Come to us,” he whispered, his voice carried magically to Odin, “come, Deceiver, Betrayer, come and die.”

In the midst of the forest of lightning pillars, something like a bubble of grey fire grew. A dark speck at its center answered Loki silently.

‘Kneel, slave. Obey and be spared. Our Master has use for you.’

“I defy thee!” Loki screamed aloud, “Villain, Knave! I defy thee and I will destroy thee. Today you shall taste of death, oh Odin the All-False, Father of Lies!”

Thor, seeing the grey sphere, directed the thickest of his lightning pillars at it, and as the two touched, Odin’s shield burst like a soap bubble and was obliterated.

“DEATH TO TYRANTS” Thor roared, and gradually let his lightnings die out around them.

When the howling of the wind had dropped to a less-deafening pitch, he turned and asked Loki in his normal voice, “Is it over?”

“I doubt it,” Loki answered, eyes darting across the ravaged world before them, “I’m afraid the worst of the battle is yet to come…”  

To this, Thor only grinned hungrily.