Chapter 5
Tony sat at the crowded dining-island in the Avenger’s communal kitchen, gazing happily at Jarvis. His lips were still tender and his skin still tingled from the epic macking he had received before the strategy meeting.
And then that meeting! They had learned all kinds of new and exciting stuff, including the crowning revelation that Loki was a Swiss Army knife below the belt. Tony would have been jealous of Steve, except for what Loki was like above the belt.
Yeah, Tony was having kind of an awesome day (aside from the brief freak-out earlier) and it was coming to an awesome close. He sat, forgetting to feed himself, as he watched while Jarvis discovered the joys of tempura shrimp and unagi rolls, and the challenges of chop sticks and judging the right amount of wasabi.
“Doin’ great, babe,” he murmured, and Jarvis flashed him a little smile and leaned in for a quick soy-sauce-flavored peck on the lips.
“Oh blerg,” said Clint, who was sitting across from them, lowering his spicy tuna roll in feigned nausea.
Tony smirked, his head resting obnoxiously on Jarvis’s shoulder, and asked cheerfully, “Jealous much, Men in Tights?”
Before Clint could voice any response, Thor was standing up at the head of the island, and pounding his beer can on the granite for attention. Tony turned to see what Thor had to say, expecting one of the usual long and corny Asgardian toasts to stuff like “worthy friends near and worthy foes afar.” Instead, his day got even better when Thor announced:
“Shieldbrothers. Shieldsisters. Honored kith and kin. Loki and I wish to invite you all to come and bear witness to a great proving. He and I shall fight, as you say on Midgard, with no holds barred, until one of us admits defeat. It shall be a mighty spectacle, the like of which has not been seen in this Realm for many, many centuries, not since Asgard routed the troops of Laufey from your northern lands. We bid you come and see, and feast your hero-hearts on the sight of immortal deeds and feats of unparalleled power-”
He probably would have kept on in that vein for some time, but Loki jerked up out of his seat and said, in an irritated tone, “Enough of your boasting, Thor. Let us get it over with,” before turning on his heel and striding off towards the elevators.
“Wait, what?” Tony said, voicing the general thought, “Right now?”
“But – what about movie night?” Steve asked.
Everyone scrambled to catch up to Loki, still hastily stuffing sushi into their mouths.
“Oh fuck yes,” Clint said, grinning and hurrying along beside Thor, “Give him another good ass-whupping for me, wouldya?”
Surprisingly, Loki was holding the elevator for them. Everyone filed in, buzzing with excitement.
Once the whole dinner crowd was packed into the elevator, Loki, still wearing a bored and bitter expression, turned and asked “And what are to be the rules of this farce?”
“No killing each other,” said Bruce promptly.
“And no injuries,” said Steve, “Nothing that will take time to heal.”
“And don’t break my tower,” Tony thought it necessary to add.
Loki interrupted, “Yes, yes, all of that is understood. No killing or maiming one’s opponent, no property damage, no harm to the by-standers. All standard for a proving. What I am asking is, which of my abilities will I be permitted to use?”
They all looked at him in bafflement for a moment.
“Well,” Tony said, “any of them that don’t break the Tower, or kill Thor.”
“No,” Loki shook his head in aggravation, “Which of my abilities will I be penalized for using. Specifically.”
They all stared at him, unsure of what he meant.
“Whichever ones break the Tower or kill Thor-” Tony was reiterating, when Loki cut him off.
“You are not listening to me, you feeble-minded worms!” He seemed genuinely angry and on-edge, but calmed somewhat as soon as Steve put a hand to the small of his back. Loki drew a steadying breath, and asked again, “Specifically, which of my techniques will you consider argr, and thus disqualifying?”
Tony thought he was beginning to see the problem. “It’s no-holds-barred, Blitzen. No technique is off the table.” He guessed that Loki was trying to suss out how a Midgardian audience would react to various spells and such. Asgardian audiences had apparently been pretty judgy. “Anything goes. Magic, throwing knives, yo-mama jokes.” He remembered Thor’s story about the britches-laces. “Nudity.”
The elevator stopped and the doors dinged and opened. Bruce stuck out an arm to hold them open when it became clear that Loki wasn’t moving.
Loki was still staring at Tony. “Magic is permitted?”
“Yeah,” said Tony, “That’s kind of the point. We want to see what you can do.”
Loki turned and looked at Steve, still with that expression of guarded astonishment on his face.
“Magic is permitted?” he asked again, as if Tony’s input didn’t count for shit.
“Yes.” Steve nodded at him solemnly. “Magic is permitted.”
“What magic?” Loki asked, wary.
“Brother!” Thor exclaimed impatiently, a battle-gleam in his eyes, “Hold nothing back! I wish to know your true strength! I wish to test my might against yours!” He did a fancy spin with Mjolnir that had everyone hopping back. “LET US FIGHT!” he suddenly bellowed.
“Oh shit,” said several people, and there was a general rush through the door.
Soon the familiar viewing-room was filled with pushing and jostling, as everyone maneuvered for a spot at the window.
Out in the Hulk-playroom, the fighting had already commenced. Thor was flinging Mjolnir out and back, like a boomerang - except that, unlike a boomerang, it was leaving huge crumbling craters in the stone walls.
Clint was cheering at each shattering impact, everyone else was yelling advice like “There! He’s there! Can’t you see him?!” and Tony was groaning and asking the people nearest to him, “What the hell happened to ‘no property damage’?”
Loki was popping in and out of existence, avoiding the flying hammer with ease. He appeared behind Thor and tapped him sharply on the shoulder while Mjolnir was hurtling back towards them, so that Thor turned and was brained by his own returning hammer.
While Thor stumbled dizzily around, Loki suddenly spoke up from behind the crowd in the viewing-room, making everyone spin and gasp.
“Exactly which of my magics are allowed?” he asked again, sounding uncertain and oddly polite.
“All of them!” Steve hollered, grinning hugely, “All of them, Loki!!”
“Go get ‘im, Loki!!” came Dr. Levitt’s voice from somewhere behind Erik Selvig.
Loki looked at them all suspiciously, made a mysterious hand gesture, then shrugged and vanished.
They all whirled back around to look through the window.
Loki was walking calmly across the huge room. Thor was hunkering down, ferociously twirling Mjolnir with one hand, and beginning to crackle around the edges with white-violet lightning. His hair and cape were lifting away from him, and his eyes blanked out and began to shine almost painfully bright with that same purplish glow.
In the viewing room, everyone began to feel the invisible fuzz of a building static charge, and when their elbows touched they yelped and pulled away from each other at the snap of electricity. Foster, standing right next to Tony, was wide-eyed and panting as she watched her man showing off the full measure of his powers. Darcy, on her left, was in a scarcely better state.
Thor threw back his head and roared like something out of Jurassic Park. The walls shook, thunder sounded loudly enough to reach them in the fifth sub-basement, and the window in the viewing-room was lit by non-stop strikes of lightning in the room beyond.
Everyone stood breathless, and then howled in unison as Mjolnir was released and flew with an inhuman scream towards the slim, defenseless figure of Loki.
There was a concussion like an atom bomb, and Tony thought he might have lost consciousness, or at least hearing and sight, for a few moments, and then he came back to himself in a kicking and cussing mass of humanity on the floor. His hand was still in Jarvis’s, and he did a quick squeeze-check, and got a reassuring squeeze in return.
The power seemed to have gone out – or else Tony had gone blind – and they were in pitch blackness. He barked into his wrist-phone, while somebody heavy crawled across his nads, “ATHENA! – ggah! – can we get some lights?!”
“The wiring in your vicinity seems to have melted, sir,” she informed him calmly, “I will dispatch employees with flashlights.”
“QUIET!” came Steve’s voice out of the struggling, painful, noisy chaos. The room fell more or less silent, and Steve asked, “Is anyone hurt?”
Nobody answered at first, and then Jane Foster’s voice said hesitantly “My thumb hurts.” There came a grunt, and some more wriggling near Tony’s hip, “Erik, I think your elbow is crushing my hand.”
“Oops, sorry Janie,” Tony heard.
“Something really heavy is on top of us,” Darcy informed the darkness, “What is that?”
Tony felt around, his hand first flopping awkwardly onto somebody’s face and then onto the smooth heavy thing that was lying across most of the horizontal crowd. “Jesus H. McGillicuddy,” he said, in awe of the forces that must have been at work. “It’s the window.” Thank God the patented substance (the naming committee had been leaning towards “Starkrystal” last he’d heard) was lighter than glass, or they all would have been crushed by the sixteen foot by eighteen inch by nine-and-a-half inch beam.
“Alright, everybody hold still, and let’s figure out how to-” Steve was saying, when the door at the end of the room opened, and Loki walked in with a glowing orb floating above his head and a large, butterscotch-colored, long-haired rabbit under one arm.
“Be still, mortals,” he said, royally, “I shall replace it,” and, holding out his free hand, he levitated the window back into its frame.
Now that he could see the large, glassy mass, Tony couldn’t help but ask, “How did nobody get hurt? If there was an explosion strong enough to bust that thing out of its – Hulkproof! – frame, it should have taken all of our heads off.” He was mentally calculating velocities and forces and angles of momentum, and it wasn’t making any sense. Then he recalled his most hated dictum: if it just would not freaking make sense…
“Magic,” he concluded unhappily.
“You saw me cast the slowing spell,” Loki said, peevishly. “Once it was in place, nothing in this room could move above a certain speed, slower for larger things. It’s very rudimentary.”
“You did that to protect us?” Steve asked, in such a sappy voice that Tony could practically see the hearts in his eyes.
Loki would have answered, but Foster, who had gotten to her feet and peered through the replaced window, asked in a panicked voice, “Where is Thor? I can’t see him!”
Everyone turned to look. The huge stone room was dark, but in the faint splash of light cast from their own room, it appeared to be empty.
Foster whipped around to glare at Loki, “Where is he?!”
Loki said nothing. Tony was strangely reminded of the scene in the elevator, just a week ago, when Loki had stood in the dark, unspeaking, his eyes wide, looking cornered and tense. Then, Tony had relished the look of tightly controlled fear on Loki’s face, but now he found that he didn’t.
Bruce cleared his throat pointedly and gestured at the rabbit, which was kicking its furry hind legs fruitlessly. It had an impressive set of balls, Tony noted.
“Thor?” said Jane, uncertainly.
“Oh - my - God,” said Darcy, in tones of deepest delight.
Clint stepped forward and scooped the bunny out of Loki’s grasp. “That’s not how you hold a rabbit,” he told Loki, in the most kindergarten-teacher-voice that Tony had ever heard out of the superspy. “You have to support the booty.” He demonstrated, holding the now-docile rabbit against his chest.
Another, higher pitched, “Oh - my - Gawd,” was heard from Darcy, followed by the click and flash of a camera phone.
The sound of running footsteps came from the corridor, and by the time several panting security guards had rushed into the room with flashlights, Loki was gone.
*****
The elevator ride was weird. No one knew if they should be worried or laughing. Jane clutched the very large rabbit to herself, kissing it on the nose now and then, but not saying anything. Darcy was attempting to look remorseful for having taken a picture earlier. Tony, personally, thought the whole thing was deliriously funny, but he recognized that it would become unfunny very quickly if Thor never changed back.
“ATHENA,” he said, into the awkward silence, “Where is Loki?”
“I cannot detect him in the Tower,” Counselor Troi informed him serenely.
There were a few groans from around the elevator, and then a pattering noise as the bunny loosed several dozen dry and tiny turds onto the floor. “Hmph,” was Foster’s only commentary.
“I’m sure it will be fine,” said Steve in his morale-boosting voice, “He’ll probably come back in the morning.”
“But why did he leave in the first place?” Selvig asked.
Dr. Levitt answered, “He might have thought that we would be angry at him. I gather that magic is not very well-received on Asgard.”
They all shifted silently, thinking about how many times Loki had asked which of his abilities would be “permitted.”
“That’s kind of shitty,” said Darcy, finally. “I mean, he used his magic to keep us safe. And Thor seems…” she glanced at the rabbit, “…fine.”
Nobody said anything for a moment, and then the elevator slowed to a halt and the doors opened.
There was Loki, sitting in plain sight at the kitchen island, staring very hard at an inoffensive plate of gyoza.
“ATHENA!” Tony cried out, “What the hell?”
“Mr. Laufeyson detected,” she said smoothly.