Chapter 8
Loki sat through the movie in a state of deep puzzlement. Of course, the movie itself was puzzling, as were all “movies,” and indeed, all effusions of Midgardian culture in general, but it wasn’t the movie that had his mind churning around and around in confusion right now.
It was the proving. Thor had instigated it, naturally: Loki had had no desire for any more such pointless humiliations. But just as Loki had been bracing himself for the usual smash-and-gloat, Thor had informed him that this time it was to be “no holds barred.”
The whole point, Thor had told him to his bewildered face, was for Loki to show what he could do.
Naturally, Loki knew what mortals meant by the Midgardian idiom “no holds barred,” but it seemed that Thor did not. If he had, the request would make no sense, and Loki wondered if Thor realized, or was even capable of realizing, how little sense it would make. To fight with muscle against magic was sheer foolishness. Even someone as overconfident and coddled as Thor must, on some level, be aware of that?
After some consideration, Loki thought he had figured out what was actually expected of him; he was to put on a good show with his magic, and still lose.
Of course he was to lose. That was his role in life; to lose to Thor. This was just Thor’s way of demonstrating that to his new teammates, no doubt. Loki was to turn belly-up again, in order to solidify Thor’s position. He had hoped that that wouldn’t be necessary in this new place, since the Avengers had all seen him defeated at the Battle of New York anyway, but perhaps it was the submissiveness of losing willingly which Loki was meant to show now?
That, combined with some display of the abilities which he would bring to the fight against Odin? It did make sense that the humans would wish to see him in action, since so much was depending on him.
Fine. Loki could show them a few of his lesser tricks, dazzle their eyes with his abilities, and then give Thor the victory which was his due.
Loki had sullenly ridden the carrying-cell with the rest of the Tower’s inhabitants down to the same huge, echoing chamber in which he had given Barton the victory which was his due.
It was all so repetitive and unnecessary. Hadn’t Loki shown, over and over, his willingness to lose? But one more humiliation could hardly matter at this point.
Here was where things had become really puzzling.
The Midgardians had then insisted that Loki was free to use any and all of his powers.
Loki knew that they were intelligent enough to see that that must mean that he would win.
How could mere physical might defeat a great magician? Steve was a strategist; he would know that Thor could stand no chance against magic combined with speed and cunning. Stark was a genius and a designer of weapons and war engines; he must understand the realities of battle too. The Widow Woman was a brilliant warrior who was adept at using her cleverness and quickness to take down much larger and stronger opponents; she must see that no amount of strength could overcome cleverness, quickness, and magic. Jarvis was much too good at situational analysis to have any illusions about how Thor would fare against Loki if Loki were permitted to use the full range of his powers. All of them, in fact, were too smart (for mayflies) not to see what they were asking for.
And yet they insisted upon asking for it.
Loki stared at them, wondering if he dared to pry into one of their minds. They would notice it, and certainly resent it, but he was having so much difficulty in parsing their wishes that he very nearly did it anyway.
Instead, he had simply asked them, again and again, what exactly was expected of him.
Each time they reiterated that he was permitted to use all of his magic.
All of his magic.
The unavoidable conclusion was that they wanted to see Thor lose.
But nobody wanted to see Thor lose. Everyone loved and admired Thor. And surely they must understand that if Thor lost, then Loki would win. Even more than people didn’t want to see Thor lose, they most especially did not want to see Loki win. Loki understood that clearly, and had from a very early age. Any time he was good at something, it only served to make him more unpopular, more whispered about, more mistrusted.
The proving began with Loki still puzzling this over.
He asked again, even in the midst of the proving, and they had given the same answer; he was permitted to use all of his magics.
If they asked for it, nay, insisted upon it, then they couldn’t later be angry with him for doing it, could they? (Loki knew the answer to that one; they most certainly could.)
There was just enough of a doubt in his mind, though, just enough curiosity to see if, by some slim chance they really meant it, that he had gone ahead and done as they asked.
He had gone ahead and won the proving. He did it in the most harmless-seeming way that he could think of, just to minimize the damage. And he had tried, truly, to draw it out a bit, so that it wouldn’t look as if it were too easy for him – but, in all practicality, there wasn’t much he could do to drag out so unequal a fight.
After his victory, he had gone to face them, the watching, judging audience, the ones that he had wanted so badly as his allies.
He regretted his rash decision immediately. Their faces registered only shock at first, but he knew that it would soon turn to fear, disgust, hatred, anger. What was I thinking? He berated himself, looking around at their wide, wary eyes, My place is to lose – how could I have thought that it could ever be otherwise?
But the anger didn’t come. There was a touch of fear, yes, but though he waited, withstanding their eyes on him as best he could, the anger never came. Loki had withdrawn then, to give himself a moment to think.
It wasn’t until Stark offered to strengthen Loki’s bond to the household that an inkling of understanding came. Perhaps - possibly - just maybe…they could see the value of having a great magician on their side, even though the Aesir had persistently devalued his abilities. Perhaps – possibly… the Midgardians were simply more practical. Perhaps… if he was valuable enough to them, they wouldn’t require him to play the role that he had played on Asgard. They were very different from the Aesir, after all, in a number of ways. He had noticed already that their hierarchies weren’t as rigid, and that not quite so much abasement was expected from the lower rungs.
He had looked around the table, then, as he sipped at the drink that would strengthen his bond to the household. The familiar faces were open with laughter and enjoyment of each other’s company. No one seemed tense or afraid anymore. Even Thor’s paramour, the Lady Jane, had only asked for his reassurance that Thor would resume his accustomed form, and had then accepted that reassurance with politeness and no show of skepticism.
When it was time for the whole crowd to move over, with beer and bowls of popcorn, to the long, soft seats of the movie viewing area, Loki had tucked himself in as close to Steve as he dared.
The strange, silvery movie passed like a dream before his eyes, as he mostly ignored it in favor of pursuing his thoughts.
The Maiden Darcy, however, seated right beside him, was making this difficult. She kept elbowing him abruptly and pointing out things on the screen to him.
“Loki, you could totally pull that off, that would look great with horns.”
Loki scanned her face carefully from the corners of his eyes. Was she mocking him? If so, she was able to keep an admirably straight face. She looked, for all the world, as if she were sincerely recommending the item of clothing to him. Loki glanced once more at the screen. The gleaming metallic hose were perhaps a bit showy, but then again, enormous golden horns almost demanded that the rest of one’s outfit be equally striking. In truth, with a few modifications, and a few armouring enchantments, the interesting sartorial choice of the lead actress might be quite suitable…
Stark, sitting on a cushion on the floor, loudly interrupted these thoughts with yet another barrage of questions about magic.
It was hard for Loki to know how much he should tell the inquisitive mortal. It seemed doubtful that the information would be of any real use to a person with so little seithr of their own, but, then again, Stark had used purely mechanical means to perform what Loki would have sworn could only be accomplished by magic, namely the creation of an independent mind and spirit, the astonishing JARVIS.
After temporarily quelling the little mortal with a show of teeth, Loki sat back to consider the issue.
By the time the movie ended, he had decided. If the information was useless, or mostly useless, to humans then there could be no particular harm in sharing it, and it might win him more trust from these people that he hoped to turn into allies. Stark especially had always spoken disparagingly of magic and magic-users, but if his eager curiosity now was anything to go by, that might simply have been a symptom of jealousy. If the little human thought that he could come to understand magic, he might grow to like and respect it.
This thought struck an echoing chord in Loki’s mind. What was it that the crone had said? ‘The more you allow people to know you, the more they will love you’? Egregious and blatantly untrue twaddle, of course, in general (after all, no one had ever known Loki better than the Other, and their relationship was hardly characterized by love…), but it might have some meaning here in the land of the foolish, open-hearted heroes. It was just backwards enough to make sense in this place where everything was backwards. The weaker you are, the safer you are. The more you are known, the more you are loved. The more argr your fighting methods, the more you are respected. Loki shook his head. If he spent the next ten thousand years among them, he was sure he would never plumb to the full depths of Midgardian ridiculousness.
He was still patiently answering questions, and plying the humans with the second-finest vintage of Alfheim’s famous summer mead, when he stopped abruptly, chilled by a sudden wash of terror.
“Run,” he told the mortals, and they sat up to look at him dazedly. Barton and the Widow, he was glad to see, moved quickly out of view, though he would have preferred if they had entirely left the building. The others were in various states of unreadiness when he repeated the command more vehemently, “RUN.”
And then he saw with his eyes what he had already seen with his prescience. A rush of air, a roiling of the stratosphere and atmosphere above them, and then Odin was there.
Loki was already on his feet, facing the hated figure. The meeting was slightly more equal than it had been last time, when Loki had been utterly exhausted and outside of his material body, but he well knew that even at his best (which he hardly was now) there could be no truly fair fight between himself and Odin. Odin was many thousands of years older, and had spent all of those thousands of years studying magic and testing his fearsome powers against the most formidable of opponents. And that wasn’t even accounting for his possession of the Mind Stone.
The single eye glowed a brilliant blue and Odin bore the Scepter in one hand. Loki plummeted into a moment of utter despair, which turned, in the span of a single heartbeat, to resolute calm. This was it. They had lost, and now he would die. Odin might conceivably try to take him back to Sanctuary, but Loki would not permit it. He would fight and continue fighting until Odin was forced to kill him. He would die in battle, and whatever was left of his poor mutilated soul might even stand some chance of going to Valhalla, if the Norns were kind.
With Loki’s death, Odin would hopefully have no further interest in Midgard, and if the humans would only get out of sight quickly, Odin very likely wouldn’t give a single thought to any of them. A certain percentage of them might conceivably survive the ascendency of Thanos...
These projections of grim futures were flying through his mind, when a clear, bold voice wrenched Loki's head around.
“Odin! Drop your weapon, you’re surrounded!”
Steve, his shield on his arm, was striding fearlessly towards Odin.
Fortunately, Odin paid no attention whatsoever to the foolhardy mortal, his glowing eye fixed on Loki.
“Beastling,” he ordered, “Come here.”
With a clenched hand, Odin drew the filaments of Loki’s seithr towards himself, until Loki was dragged to his knees, gasping with the pain of it. Loki writhed, casting blocking and deflecting spells, all of which sizzled against Odin’s grip like drops of water on a river of lava. Some ensorcellment which Loki had never been allowed to learn was wrapped around Odin, a sheet of invisible fire, letting nothing through.
A gunshot rang out, and Odin’s grip faltered for just a fraction of a second. Loki ripped his seithr free, crying out at the snapping of filaments. The bullet had, of course, not touched Odin, and Odin turned his back on the shooter, who was crouched near the elevators behind him, to reach out again for Loki. But by now Loki had had time to weave a quick defense, a repelling field to turn Odin’s magic away from his own. He could feel the blinding pins-and-needles sensation that meant that it was working, as a seithr much older and vaster than his own groped over the surface of the protective bubble.
Loki was sobbing for breath, gripping at the soft rug under his hands, just barely keeping Odin at bay, when several more shots rang out.
The idiot humans seemed oblivious to the complete uselessness of their weapons. Loki groaned for their stupidity, their danger. Banner and all of the non-Avengers seemed to have fled, but Romanoff was firing from around the corner of the stone table, Barton was up in the rafters raining ineffective arrows down on Odin, and Loki was able to identify the first shooter as Stark, now half-clad in his self-assembling armour. Rogers, the idiot of all idiots, was wading straight into Odin’s own repelling field as if pressing himself through a brick wall. Since this was the same repelling field that was turning lead bullets into red-hot liquid runnels on contact, Rogers’ skin and clothing were searing and smoking, his eyes squinted shut in pain.
Odin ignored all of them as the total non-threats which they were. His eye and his tightening magical grip were focused on Loki.
“RUN!” Loki cried out again, willing the fools to understand what he hadn’t breath or time to explain. They were nothing to Odin, not even powerful enough to be counted as nuisances. They would be crushed underfoot like ants, and Odin wouldn’t even notice that he had done it. Loki could feel his protective spell weakening as his mind was distracted by the plight of the moronic little creatures.
And then he was fully distracted, and his warding spell dropped entirely, as he received a second warning.
This time it was a glimpse of a danger that he hadn’t even thought to fear. It made no sense at all, and for the first time in over a thousand years, Loki had cause to doubt his own prescience.
That lasted for scarcely a breath.