Chapter 8
Steve watched Peggy walk away with Fury to the brig, struck by a moment of memory and longing, of Peggy marching down the hallway in the London office, off to briefings and meetings, Peggy shooting him a small, brief smile over her shoulder as she went. She did the same then, following in Fury’s footsteps as the two walked and talked their way to the area where Loki was being held on board the Chimera. If he closed his eyes, he could almost pretend he was there again. Instead of Bucky at his elbow, eyeing him mockingly, it was Natasha Romanoff, one delicate brow arched as her green eyes flickered between his gaze and Peggy’s retreating form. She shook her head, coppery red hair bobbing. “Man, you got it bad.”
He glanced at the petite woman, shorter even than he had been not so very long ago. “Got what, again?”
Romanoff wasn’t buying his cool response, or the stern frown he shot her, meeting both with a roll of her eyes and mild bemusement. “Seriously, she came through time and space, or whatever, just to find you in some iceberg, while you watch her as if you are afraid she might disappear in a puff of smoke. You are going to try and pretend that things between the two of you are strictly professional?”
Despite himself, Steve found his ears flushing, even if he ignored the implication in Romanoff’s words. “Peggy can handle herself just fine.”
That wasn’t what Romanoff was indicating, and they both knew it.
“Carter isn’t the one I worry about,” Romanoff returned, smirking as she fell in beside him. “Come up to the bridge, I’ll get those cameras going in the brig.”
Of all the strange and wonderful technological marvels he had seen in this world, including the suit that Stark was currently off somewhere attempting to repair, the Chimera had to rank up there as one of the craziest. Beyond the fact that it was at its heart a standard aircraft carrier, no different in its way than the ones he recalled from the war, it had features that the Navy would have killed for back then. Mechanical computers that could analyze data at lightning speed, linked to a communication network that went far beyond the simple telephone and radio of his day, and armed to the teeth with aircraft that moved faster than the speed of sound, it all sounded as if it came right out of an issue of Amazing Stories, right alongside Buck Rogers. He supposed he shouldn’t be terribly surprised, given the leaps and bounds Howard alone made, let alone Armin Zola. For good or for ill, they had changed the world with their inventions, and as impressive and delighted as he was with many of them, Steve kept feeling like he had to play catch up to all the things they could now do.
“Pull up a seat,” Romanoff called over her shoulder as she made her way to the large conference table in the top deck of the bridge, fingers already flying across the glass tabletop. The dark table lit up from within as images formed, and what looked like a small black and white screen into what was clearly a cell of come sort opened. Inside a round, cylinder space enclosed with glass stood Loki, perfectly still in the middle, if a little bored. The cruelly dignified god of mischief he had seen on the ground now looked like a perfectly normal man - tall, pale, wiry, black hair lank and disheveled, his fine leather clothes looking as if they had seen better days. As bored and out of sorts as he might be, the one thing he wasn’t was unobservant. Even with his laconic air, Steve could sense he was paying attention to every detail, his pale eyes watching, his head cocked just so, listening. Loki was someone who didn't miss the details and found the weaknesses to exploit. Well, then, Steve mused, his own analytical mind spinning, what sort of weaknesses would their guest reveal in himself as Fury and Peggy?
The doors to the cell opened, and out of it walked the imposing figure of Fury, trailed by Peggy in his wake, as he waved off the guards who lined the room. “I think we got it from here.”
Several of the guards shared dubious looks, ones Steve shared, but they left, leaving Fury and Peggy alone with Loki. The Asgardian watched them out of the corner of his eye as Fury moved to the control panel with a dramatic swagger. “In case it’s unclear, if you try to escape, if you so much as scratch that glass…”
Fury drew a finger across the panel as underneath the cell Loki stood in a hole opened up wide into the darkness of the North Atlantic. The god nervously crept near to the edge of the glass to stare down at the dark, cold depths below. Steve couldn’t blame him. He felt his own blood go cold at it, vague memories of ice like glass cutting his skin as the slushy, half-frozen water rushed in before his world turned to black. He just did suppress the shiver that tried to radiate from his spine across his skin, despite the relative warmth of the bridge he sat on. Still, Romanoff noticed, watching him from where she hunched against the tabletop with a silent, studious gaze.
“It’s 30,000 feet straight down in a steel trap. You get how that works?” With a flick of his fingers, Fury closed the doors, steel sliding together like an oculus, before turning to regard the god.
“Ant,” he flung a hand out to Loki, before waving back to the console. “Boot!”
Whatever the reference was, Loki seemed to understand, smirking as he laughed, wandering back to the middle of the cell as his gaze flickered over his container, his arms open wide as he took it in. “It’s an impressive cage, not built, I think, for me.”
“Built for something a lot stronger than you,” Fury retorted. Banner, Steve realized, or at least his other half, a precaution in case the good doctor found his control slipping.
“Oh, I’ve heard.” Something dark and delighted crossed the other man’s sharp face. Steve glanced up to Romanoff, who looked as surprised as him, and deeply troubled.
“Do you think Barton...” Steve began.
Romanoff cut him off briskly, dislike of this idea evident. “Maybe…probably. His clearance is higher than mine for some obvious reasons.”
For all that she didn’t display a Russian accent, she also didn’t hide the fact she had once been a Russian spy, either. Steve found himself respecting how upfront she was about it. “If that is the case, Loki could have all the insider information on us, meanwhile we have nothing on him.”
Romanoff nodded, grimly. “We know one thing,” she muttered as she studied the current exchange between Fury and their mugging guest. “He’s got an ego that doesn’t stop and the man loves to hear himself talk.”
“If only he said something worthwhile.”
“Oh, he’s saying plenty, Rogers, you just need to pay attention.” A ghost of a grin flickered, briefly, speaking to something proud and arrogant in herself as well. “A man who tells you out loud just how superior he is usually isn’t, but he sure will keep talking to you, telling you all sorts of things that he is sure will make you think that he is.”
Steve thought of just about every bully he’d known through is life, from Cuddy Neil to Gilmore Hodge. Every one of them had suffered from that particular tendency. Even Schmidt had it, proclaiming himself a superior man, a god even, just before running away from his own burning munitions factory. “What have you got from him so far?”
“Well, beyond the fact that he is trying to overcompensate for something - my guess, unresolved family tension with his brother, maybe the rest of his family - he’s clever, not going to lie.” She pursed her lips, studying the tableau on the screen. “His brother and Coulson said that he disappeared a year ago, been on the run. Don’t know how it is in the great, wide universe, but if its anything like here, he’s had to be smart to keep alive - think quick, talk fast, and put up a front if things got heated. He’s a survivor, he will do what it takes to get what he needs or wants, and if he can’t, he will bluff his way around till he can find a weakness to exploit. But, he’s arrogant, so he can’t help but shoot his mouth off to make himself look bigger than he is. He thinks it’s so he can instill fear and have power over others, but mostly it is a tool by a weak man to make him appear to be strong, to himself more than anything.”
Steve blinked at her, quietly stunned that she got that much out of a singular conversation. “You got all of that watching him shoot his mouth off?”
She shrugged. “Well, some of it I inferred, but I bet it would check out.”
And here her file said only that Romanoff was a spy.
“Director Carter! A word if you don’t mind.” Loki’s call jerked Steve’s attention back down to the matter at hand. Fury had quit the scene, and now Peggy remained, turning to meet Loki with her arms crossed and a firm uplift of her chin. Just as he had so many years ago when he first witnessed her stand up to Hodge, he felt a swell in his chest, the glee and pride of watching her fearlessly stand up to someone else who underestimated her. Perhaps Romanoff had a point…he was a real sap, wasn’t he?
“How can I help you?”
Loki’s lazy smile on his thin, hungry face was mocking. “Ever so polite! Is that just a habit of your birth, or is it how you’ve been educated to be, trained by a society that teaches you that you must be subservient because you are a woman?”
It was a pointed shot, calculated to get under Peggy’s skin, and Steve could tell it somewhat worked. It was a mark of Peggy’s training that she didn’t let it, or at the very least it was a mark of her very proper British upbringing. “Tell me, is Asgard so enlightened that its ever had a ruling queen? Is your society so egalitarian?”
Her return volley was just as sharp and twice as accurate. Judging from Loki’s response, he recognized that, bobbing his head as if to say she wasn’t wrong. “We’ve had our moments. You should ask my brother about the valkyrie sometime. He’s always been rather fond of them. It’s a thrilling tale and somewhat bittersweet. They all disappeared long ago. The fall of the valkyrie! I think it’s a story you might relate to.”
Underneath Steve, the bottom of his world fell out, like the hole that opened underneath Loki, yawning as it tried to suck him down into the cold and ice of the ocean below. The cold sank deep into his bones, stealing his breath and his consciousness as the years scattered through his numb fingers, and everything was lost, trapped in the Valkyrie, presumed dead and forgotten.
“Rogers? You okay?”
He blinked, surprised to see his fingers embedded into the metal frame beneath the table. Not deeply, only just enough to leave an impression. He shook himself, prying his fingers out from it. Loki was looking for weaknesses indeed.
“Captain?”
“Fine,” he replied, giving her a short nod. “I’m fine.”
Romanoff’s expression said she didn’t believe for a second he was fine, but she let it be.
“You’ve waited a long time for your soldier to come home, Peggy, but sometimes soldiers don’t come home. Even when they are physically there, their heart will always still be in the past. Like I said, it’s a pity so much in trying to find yours.”
Loki had hurt her. Steve knew he did, because he’d felt that gut punch himself, the painful ache of Loki’s words, and the whisper of truth that they invoked, curdling deep within him. He hadn’t come home, not really. So much was gone, so much he had lost, and he’d been floundering in that loss, drowning in it, trying to find his bearings and get his feet under him. All he had now was Peggy.
All he had now was…her. Peggy, waiting patiently for him to come home and take her hand.
“I’ve got to say,” Romanoff sighed, sitting back in her seat as Peggy left the cell, refusing to look back at Loki. “This guy knows what he’s doing. If we aren’t careful, he’ll play each of us. We’ll be so busy spinning in our own self-doubt, we won’t be able to stop him.”
“Yeah,” Steve murmured, scrubbing at his eyes, tension pulling him as tight as a bow string. “And somehow he’s still not given us where the damn Tesseract is. So now what?”
Before Romanoff could answer, the solid sound of Loki’s brother coming up the stairs caught both of their attention, alongside Cassie, who looked ridiculously tiny standing next to the mountain of a man, who physically screamed that he was every inch a god. Steve considered Romanoff’s assessment. It was a small wonder that Thor’s brother was the way he was, always standing in the shadow of that. Still, Steve had always grown up next to Bucky, who had been everything Steve wasn’t as a kid - tall, athletic, charming, good-looking, older than Steve by over a year. Never once had Steve considered the path Loki was on.
“Bad news,” Cassie cut in, settling at the table on the other side of Steve, frowning briefly at the indent in the metal frame left by his fingers. “Yeah…anyway, Thor says Loki’s been gathering an army in his time away.”
Somehow, that wasn’t the strangest thing Steve had heard that day. “As in mercenaries?”
Thor mulled over Steve’s question for a long moment. “More or less, I suppose you can call them that. We know little of the Chitauri, only that as a race they have hive-mind tendencies, and there are rumors they are created some time ago as a slave race of soldiers. Because they exist outside of my father’s domain, we don’t have more information than that, but we do know they never act on their own. If they are here at my brother’s behest, chances are high they were hired from someone.”
“For what reason?” That was the part that Steve couldn’t understand. What possible reason would Loki have to invade their home of all places?
It was odd seeing someone who was referred to as a god shift uncomfortably just like any other mere mortal. “Loki…he knows I have a preference for Midgard. I suppose he is attacking your home because it is a place I’ve sworn to protect.”
Steve turned to Romanoff to see if it sounded as crazy to her as it did to him, half relieved to see that she looked as dubious about Thor’s explanation as he did. “So you meant to tell us that because your brother is jealous of you he’s basically trying to break your favorite toy by taking over our world and ruling it?”
When put that way…well, even Thor saw the ridiculousness of it.
“I mean…if it’s any consolation, he used to do the same thing when we were children.”
It wasn't. Steve found himself burying his face in his hands, as he pondered the nature of this entire, world threatening event, that it boiled down to what amounted to a family squabble. None of this made Steve feel any better.