Assembling
As always, Natasha’s first thought upon stepping into Iðavoll, the king’s hall in New Asgard, was that it looked like something a Hollywood set designer would come up with. She stood by the doors for a moment, looking around at the elaborately decorated walls and columns, which had gained a few more carvings and some new inlay since the last time she had been here. It was a style that she mentally classed as somewhere between nearly-Celtic and nearly-classical, but not quite either; something about it was subtly nonhuman in a way that she couldn’t put her finger on and grew more so the longer she looked at it, until it felt wholly alien.
Behind her, the great hall opened into a courtyard flanked by two long sides of the building, like an E with the middle missing. Past the open double doors where Natasha stood, it was one big room, large enough to hold the entire population of New Asgard at need. Long wooden tables were spaced between the columns along the sides of the room and there was a raised firepit in the middle whose glowing coals gave off heat as Natasha walked past it. At the far end of the chamber was a dais with another long table on it, behind which sat the room’s sole occupant.
“Whatever you want, the answer is no,” Loki said without looking up. He kept writing with what looked like a quill pen, thin, elegant lines of runic script that were completely indecipherable to Natasha when she stepped up onto the dais and looked down at the sheaves of paper in front of him. The rest of the table was littered with books, daggers, a couple of fist-sized crystals, pieces of pale bone carved with runes, an elaborately-figured shallow metal bowl full of water, and a teapot shaped like a fat-bellied dragon that steamed gently. A matching cup held down one corner of what looked like a map, though Natasha couldn’t recognize anything on it.
Loki flicked the end of the pen at her. “Go. Shoo. I’ve no tolerance for playing polite just now and surely there’s a cat up a tree somewhere you need to save.”
Natasha raised her eyebrows. “I see you’re in a mood.”
“I save my better nature for more important visitors than you,” Loki said.
“Now that’s where you’re wrong,” Natasha said, “because I’m the most important visitor you’re ever going to get.”
“I sincerely doubt that.” Loki went back to writing.
“We have a way to fix this.”
The quill pen paused. “Do you,” Loki said, his voice flat. “And how precisely are you planning to do that? With the Infinity Stones destroyed there’s no power in the cosmos strong enough to ‘fix’ this. I have spent,” he added bitterly, “a great deal of time attempting to discover one, to no avail.”
Natasha blinked; she hadn’t known that. “I’ll tell you when we get to the compound,” she said.
Loki finally looked up at her. He had let his hair grow long over the past five years, now braided back with golden charms at the end of each braid. It accentuated the sharp angles of his face, making him look subtly inhuman despite his otherwise ordinary garb of a black sweater over a collared green shirt. “As I recall, I signed quite a lot of paperwork saying that I wouldn’t enter your country without proper supervision as a condition of my being allowed to stay on this planet. And honestly, I can’t say that I’ve particularly regretted the loss. Typically when you arrive there’s either a great deal more notice or significantly more urgency on your part, so I assume this is something other than the usual nonsense.”
“Well, it is different than the usual nonsense,” Natasha admitted. Some of the strict restrictions on Loki’s travel outside of New Asgard had been lifted over the course of the past few years, which meant that she and Steve didn’t have to escort him everywhere he went, just most places; fortunately he wasn’t inclined to go anywhere he needed a babysitter. They also hadn’t had any recent Avengers emergencies bad enough to require them to go through the political rigmarole necessary to bring Loki in, even though when you needed a Asgardian on your side, you really, really needed one, and the last two times they’d skipped the red tape. Loki had come, since his presence on the Avengers roster had been part of the Asgardian Accords he had signed and he was always punctilious about obeying the letter of the law, or at least the parts of it he thought were most important at any given moment. The last time had been a couple years ago, though.
She hadn’t seen Loki in person since the previous year, since she and Steve had been part of Loki’s escort when New Asgard’s deputation had attended the United Nations session in New York, on the usual grounds that Steve could probably handle him if he had a sudden psychotic break. Loki hadn’t, and instead had spent most of the session exchanging probably-derogatory handwritten notes with the Valkyrie, who had come with him to serve the multiple purposes of advisor, bodyguard, and definitely being able to handle him if he had a sudden psychotic break.
She forbore from mentioning that this time they didn’t technically have government permission for Loki to enter the United States, which had been part of the terms of New Asgard’s settlement on Earth. A surprising number of countries had decided that his invasion of New York had been an American problem and didn’t particularly care, especially in the aftermath of the greater problems the Snap had created, but the U.S. definitely cared. She and Colonel Rhodes had debated attempting to get that permission and decided that it wasn’t worth the publicity and hassle it would take. They didn’t want to get anyone’s hopes up about the possibility of reversing Thanos’s culling.
Loki stared at her for a long moment; Natasha guessed that he was doing what he had mentioned to her once, back in those awful weeks between the Snap and the arrival of the surviving Asgardians, and trying to work out what Thor would have done under these circumstances. Finally, he just said, “Who’s ‘we,’ precisely?”
“The Avengers, all of us,” Natasha said, and bit back her urge to remind him that these days that included him. “I think you’ve met everyone but Ant-Man.”
“Ant…I don’t want to know.” He frowned for a moment. “Lang, wasn’t it? I thought he was on the list of those taken in the culling.”
“False alarm,” Natasha said. “So are you coming or not?”
It took a couple of hours for Loki to talk the Valkyrie or any other Asgardians out of coming with him, then make the necessary arrangements for New Asgard to continue running in his absence. “They don’t need me, particularly,” he explained to Natasha, who watched all of this in fascination; she hadn’t seen much of the settlement the last few times she had been here and she had only the most cursory knowledge of how the Asgardian government functioned when left to its own devices. Usually when Loki had to leave it was either on several weeks’ notice because of all the red tape or none at all because the Avengers really, really needed an Asgardian to punch something. “A few things need to be rescheduled and I need to leave the seal with the Valkyrie in case anything needs to be signed in my absence.”
At her raised eyebrow, he flicked an ironic glance at her. “I was, in fact, raised to be a king,” he said. “Granted, these weren’t the circumstances I expected.”
When he vanished upstairs into the levels of Iðavoll he used as his living quarters in order to pack a bag or whatever it was he did when left to his own devices, the Valkyrie took Natasha aside and said, “If this is some attempt to imprison or execute him, I’ll kill you.”
“It’s not,” Natasha promised. “I swear. If he gets arrested, we’ll take care of it.” Note to self, she thought, don’t call the Valkyrie if Loki gets arrested. She was still more worried about Clint being arrested than Loki; she had dropped him off at the compound that morning with strict orders not to leave the property before she had come to New Asgard.
Loki came down the stairs, his hands empty, and stared suspiciously at them. “If you’re quite done threatening each other, can we get on with this? I’d prefer to get the inevitable unpleasantness out of the way sooner rather than later.”
“Don’t do anything stupid, your majesty,” the Valkyrie said, stepping back from Natasha.
“Perhaps it’s just me, but the entire conceit of this endeavor seems to be to do something stupid,” Loki said. After a moment he added, “Thor would love it.”
“I haven’t even told you what it is yet.”
“As I said.”
He followed her out of the settlement to the field where she had parked the Quinjet amongst New Asgard’s ragtag collection of spacecraft, pausing now and then to say something to one or another of the Asgardians who passed them. He dropped into a seat in the back of the jet as Natasha slid into the pilot’s chair. When she looked back, he had produced a thick leather-bound book from thin air and seemed to be engrossed in it. She waited until they were over the Atlantic and she felt all right putting the Quinjet on autopilot before going back and sitting across from him. He flicked a glance at her over the top of his book and raised one eyebrow.
“You remember that most of Asgard’s problems date from before the culling, surely?” he said. “This won’t fix anything for us, assuming you’ve actually stumbled across a real solution.”
“You still lost half of your people, didn’t you?”
After a moment he nodded. “Half of those who remained,” he said, his mouth tight.
Even after all this time, it still felt odd to think of him as responsible, Natasha decided. After the battle in Wakanda, after everything had ended, Loki had swung wildly between furious rages and silent depression, all while drinking too much. Natasha couldn’t blame him for that; most of the surviving Avengers had been in the same position. When he had shown no sign of leaving on his own, there had been a half-hearted discussion of whether or not to turn him over to the authorities, but after what he had done on the battlefield it hadn’t felt right. They had ended up taking him with them back to the Avengers compound in New York when they had finally left Wakanda, where Loki had taken over Thor’s barely-used bedroom and shown no real sign of caring if the remaining half of Earth lived or died, let alone whether he was arrested. The subject had come up again on Tony’s return and gone predictably badly, but had at least resulted in Loki showing a few more emotions until Steve and Carol had had to keep him from throwing Tony out a window, which Natasha really couldn’t blame him for at the time. He had gone with them to kill Thanos happily enough, which had ended in them learning a lot of things about him and the Chitauri Natasha would have preferred not to know and with Nebula putting her sword through her adopted father’s head.
The arrival of the Asgardian remnant had tabled any possibility of his arrest for good as they and the Avengers wrestled with what was left of the various world governments until everyone involved had gotten a handful of the concessions they wanted and no one was happy, except that Loki had gone off to Norway and was finally out of their collective hair. That had lasted until it had been made very clear to the remaining Avengers that they were expected to babysit Loki any time he did something remotely worrisome, which for the first two years had been pretty much everything. At least it had kept Steve and Natasha on their toes, since Ross seemed to consider dealing with Loki a punishment detail for them; Bruce had spent a lot of time with the Asgardians anyway and Rhodes usually got out of it.
When Loki had turned up in Wakanda during the battle, Natasha’s first hysterical thought had been of the Project Pegasus footage she had seen. She had watched space-time ripple before he had appeared from what seemed to be thin air, already spinning to fling a brace of throwing knives into the throats of the nearest Outriders. To complete the impression of having stepped out of the past, he had some kind of polearm with a curved blade like a bird’s skull, glittering cold and deadly in the wash of his green-gold magic which had followed the knives and incinerated the wave of Outriders who had charged the new arrival. The raccoon with the big gun and the walking tree that had followed him out of the space-time fold had felt almost normal in comparison, or maybe by that point Natasha had just lost the ability to be surprised by anything else. (She hadn’t, though. She had learned that soon enough.)
Before Wakanda, she had never really seen him fight before. His arrival at the Pegasus facility could more accurately be described as a slaughter than a fight and since his intentions at Stuttgart had been to get captured that hardly counted either. She hadn’t seen any of his fight with Thor on Stark Tower.
Between his knives, his magic, and his polearm, Loki had gone through the battlefield like a plague, his face a mask of grief and rage. It was Thor’s berserker battle lust on his brother’s sharper features and it had been that which told Natasha that Thor had to be dead.
Loki had helped. So had Rocket and Groot, but in the end it hadn’t been enough. She didn’t think that anything would have been enough.
“How have you been?” Natasha asked him eventually.
“Well, my brother is still dead, my parents are still dead, my planet is still destroyed, most of my people are dead, my species is functionally extinct and actually it’s not even my species, which somehow makes it worse,” Loki said, gave her a small, tight smile. “And now we’re all stuck on Midgard, of all places. Oh, and let’s not forget that five years ago a genocidal madman killed most of the people my sister didn’t slaughter, murdered my brother in front of me, and then wiped out half the universe. How have you been, Natasha?”
“I’ve been worse,” Natasha said. “It’s been helping to have something to work on, something that really might work.”
Loki scoffed, closing his book and resting it across his knees. “You must be truly desperate if you’ve come to me for help.”
“It takes one to know one,” Natasha said, and when he raised his eyebrows, went on, “You barely even hesitated when I said there was a chance.”
“Perhaps I’ve merely been bored.”
“Do kings get bored?”
“Frequently,” Loki said. “But unfortunately, as I just mentioned, there is no one else, because my entire family is dead and the only one left is me. The criminal. Not even an Asgardian, really.” His mouth twisted. “Nobody actually seems to mind.”
“You know, we’ve got this little thing called democracy –”
“Please don’t tell me you’ve been corresponding with Korg.”
“We might have exchanged a few e-mails,” Natasha admitted. “He seems nice.”
Loki rolled his eyes. “And we’re familiar with the concept of democracy. Even its practice, believe it or not.”
“I thought you guys had an absolute monarchy – god-kings and all that,” Natasha said, testing.
“We’re all gods,” Loki said patiently. “Not just the royal family. That would be…odd. And uncomfortable, surely.”
“How does that work?”
He shrugged. “It just…does? I’ve never known anything different.” His mouth twisted again. “Not that it did us much good. Anyway, yes, we have democracy, or something like it, at least, even by Midgard’s standards. We’ve got the Althing, which is it at the moment; we used to have – we used to have many smaller Things and they’d send representatives to the Althing a few times a year. An assembly, I think, might be the closest word in your tongue, or parliament, maybe; it’s not quite the same as the Things you have on Midgard. We do send someone to the Storting in Oslo now; I’ve been a few times. Most of the actual governing of Asgard was done by the Althing, except at the highest levels; Odin oversaw the Nine Realms, certain internal affairs, and anything that the Althing couldn’t reach a consensus on or thought was an affair for the throne. We’ve still got an Althing and anything they can’t agree on, which is most things, they send to me.” He gave her a small, humorless smile. “Any citizen of Asgard can attend the Althing, speak, and vote, if they so choose. Including Korg and the other former gladiators, though most of them don’t bother.”
“Do you go?”
He shook his head. “By tradition no one from the royal family attends so there can’t be any claims of favoritism or intimidation or anything else like that. It’s worked for the past twenty thousand years, with a few dramatic exceptions.”
“Huh,” Natasha said, digesting that. She had known about the Asgardian assembly in theory, but hadn’t been certain how seriously to take it or, for that matter, how seriously Loki, one-time would-be conqueror, was taking it. Aside from the surprisingly successful attempts to publicly rehabilitate their new king, New Asgard had been very, very quiet since its arrival on Earth. Most of the publicity had been focused on Loki rather than the Asgardian people, which seemed to be both human and Asgardian preference. The most recent had been a minor stir of interest around the Olympics the previous year, but the IOC had firmly declared that nonhumans couldn’t participate, following up on their previous declaration a decade earlier that enhanced humans couldn’t participate either.
Loki picked up his book again, but didn’t open it. “You’re not wrong,” he said eventually. “I am desperate. So are you. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that you humans are quite resourceful when you’re desperate. I am here, perhaps, out of an excess of optimism. And boredom,” he added, before going back to his book.
“I’ll take it,” Natasha said to the leather-bound cover of the book and got up to go back to the cockpit.
The Benatar was already parked when she set down on the landing field. Loki stood up, peered at it, and said, “Oh, you convinced Nebula and Rocket of your madness as well, I see. That’s – not very encouraging, actually.”
“You’re here,” Natasha pointed out.
“Well, I’m somewhat mad, as is well-known.” He followed her out of the Quinjet, remarking, “If I get arrested again, I shall be very displeased and also the Valkyrie will kill you, your friends, and whoever is holding me at the time. I know Earth doesn’t currently think much of Asgard, but we are still very efficient at killing people. Especially mortals. You’re all quite fragile.”
“Yeah, I got that memo,” Natasha said. “Come on.”
She led him into the main facility and put her hands into the pockets of her jacket, fingering the widow’s stings there, since there was every chance she might need them in the next thirty seconds.
The living room was full of people – real people, which made a nice change from holograms and ghosts. Steve looked up at her and grinned as she came in; having something to do, having a plan, seemed to have brought him back to life from the dark place he went to whenever the awfulness of the past five years got to be too much for even him to handle. It seemed to have brought most of them back to life.
“Hey, Nat’s back,” he said, which got almost everyone else looking around too – Rhodey and Bruce tensing in anticipation and Tony surreptitiously letting a repulsor gauntlet spread over his right hand.
“Oh, hey, Nat,” Clint said, twisting around from where he was sprawled over the couch. “Where’d you –”
Then Loki came in behind Natasha.
Clint’s eyes went huge. He vaulted the couch, snatching up the sword he had leaned against the arm, and was shoving Natasha out of the way an instant later. She let him, taking the widow’s stings out of her pockets as Loki just cocked his head and said, “Hello, Clint.”
He put his hand up to catch the sword blade as Clint swung at him; it didn’t even pierce the skin of his palm or fingers. He flicked a glance at Natasha, his eyebrows raised, and said, “Really? A test? After all we’ve been through?”
“You bastard,” Clint said. His muscles were straining as he tried to bring the sword down further; Loki just looked bored.
“Does he need this?” he asked Natasha.
“To be on the safe side, probably, yeah,” Steve said. He had stood up, but wasn’t making any attempt to pull Clint back or get in the way.
“Am I missing something?” Scott said, sounding a little nervous. “Wait – isn’t that the guy who –”
“Hmph,” Loki said, then twisted his wrist and sent the sword spinning out of Clint’s hand and into a wall, where it stuck point-first, quivering.
“– isn’t that the guy who invaded Manhattan with an army of aliens?” Scott said. “Like six years ago – eleven years ago?”
“Yes, that was me,” Loki said graciously. He put his hand up to catch Clint’s fist as Clint swung a punch at him. “But don’t be concerned. This time I’m on your side.”
“Nat, what the hell,” Clint said.
“He’s the only one who knows about the Reality Stone,” Steve said.
“Literally the only one,” Tony said. “On the entire planet. Believe me, I’m not any happier about it than you are.”
“Well, in that case you could have just sent an e-mail,” Loki said, annoyed. “Could someone please get him off me? You mortals have such fragile bones and I’d rather not break any if I’m trying to play nice.”
“You haven’t even broken one of his bones yet, Loki?” Nebula said. “Huh. You are playing nice.”
“Yes, thank you, I’m aware. It’s a pleasure to see you too, by the way.”
Natasha decided she probably wouldn’t have to stun either of them and put her widow’s stings back in her pockets. “Come on, Clint,” she said. “He’s on our side. He was in Wakanda with us.”
Clint gave her a betrayed look. “You know what he did –”
“I haven’t forgotten,” Natasha told him. “He’s here for a reason.”
“I would also like an explanation,” Loki said. “If it isn’t too much of a bother.”
Clint finally pulled his fist back and Loki immediately put his hands down, then smoothed out his shirt cuffs with precise, fiddly movements. His cufflinks were gold and shaped like lightning bolts, Natasha noticed for the first time. His gaze moved across the room, taking in its occupants. He blinked at the sight of Bruce in his Hulk form and edged back half a step, before giving a brief, general nod of greeting.
“It’s still me,” Bruce said.
“Forgive me if I don’t find that quite as reassuring as you seem to think it is,” Loki said; Natasha thought for a moment and realized that they hadn’t seen each other since Bruce and the Hulk had gotten their relationship stabilized.
Loki looked around again, then fixed on the one unfamiliar face and said, “You must be Ant-Man. Lang – Something Lang, isn’t it? Stephen – Peter – do all you Anglophone humans have the same dozen names or so? I thought you’d gotten better since you were all named John and Peter and Henry in the thirteenth century. I suppose there were a few Richards in there.”
“I’m Scott,” Scott said, nervously.
“I am Loki of Asgard.” He grinned wickedly at Clint and added, “And I am burdened with glorious kingship.”
If looks could kill, Loki would have been a smoldering corpse.
“Uh,” Scott said. “Should we be bowing? Or kneeling? Or something?”
“No,” Loki said. “Will someone please tell me why I’m here?”
“We’re going to go back in time to get the Infinity Stones before they were destroyed and use them to reverse the Snap and bring everyone back,” Tony said. “You keeping up, Reindeer Games?”
Loki blinked once. “Well, that’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard,” he said. “You have fun with that; I’m going back to New Asgard before someone notices I’m here and arrests me for trying to take over the planet eleven years ago.”
“That sounds like a great idea,” Clint said. “We should definitely do that. Or, listen, I have a better idea –”
“I do have to admit I’m surprised I haven’t seen you before now,” Loki told him. “I thought I’d be first on your list. I’m almost insulted, really.”
“Loki, stop,” Steve said, massaging his forehead. “It’s a good plan. It will work. We just need your help.”
“My help,” Loki said flatly.
“We can’t possibly need his help,” Clint protested. “Come on, Steve! Nat – Tony – Bruce, come on, you know what he is.”
“A god?” Loki said.
“Shut up,” Clint said furiously.
“The king of Asgard?”
“Only because Thor got killed and from what I’ve heard about it, because you screwed up and handed over an Infinity Stone –”
Loki’s face went cold and dangerous.
“Yeah,” Clint said. “There you are.”
“And where were you during the battle for the fate of the universe, Barton?” Loki said. “I know where I was. I know where the dead were. I know where everyone in this room was – except for you,” he added to Scott.
“Uh, I was in the Quantum Realm.”
“That’s not what I was expecting, but I’ll allow it,” Loki said. An instant later his expression went vicious again, all sharp teeth and the same casual cruelty that Natasha remembered from the helicarrier, like a feral animal.
“Yes, Barton,” he said, his voice low. “I got my brother killed. I made a mistake, I miscalculated, and instead of dying like I expected, my brother was murdered in front of me while I stood there helpless. And then, instead of dying alongside him and our people like I should have when our ship was destroyed, he and his friends found me.” He pointed at Rocket without looking at him.
“Hey, don’t drag me into this,” Rocket muttered.
“I wasn’t strong enough or smart enough or fast enough or Thor so then the bastard who murdered my brother wiped out half of the universe and I still didn’t die, since it seems that is my one great trick, not dying, and now I have to live with that while I attempt to keep my people from going extinct because, if you weren’t aware, Barton, my planet was destroyed and my people were slaughtered and that was before the Mad Titan found us.” Loki’s voice had been steadily rising the whole time, his hands clenched into fists at his sides. “And yes. I gave the bastard an Infinity Stone because I couldn’t watch him torture my brother to death and then he killed Thor anyway and I have to live with that for the next six thousand years. Is there anything else you’d like to say to me or can we get on with it?”
Clint’s mouth worked silently.
Cautiously, Bruce said, “Look, Loki – you know we’re only trying to undo the Snap, right? That’s all. We can’t – we can’t change anything else.”
Loki didn’t look at him, but his voice was very hoarse, as if he was trying to keep himself from screaming, “As I said, Asgardians are now functionally extinct. Restoring those who were destroyed in the culling might – might – keep my species alive. I am willing to take that risk even if your so-called plan is utterly imbecilic.”
He flicked a glance around the room, taking in the silent occupants, and said, “Have whatever conversation you apparently still need to have in order to convince yourselves of my good will. I’ll be in my room, assuming you haven’t given it away to someone since the last time I was here.”
He stormed out, boot heels clicking heavily against the floor.
“So that went well,” Tony said into the silence which followed.
Rhodes gave him a dry look. “Is that what we’re calling it?”
“Nobody’s dead. I mean – no one new is dead.”
Steve put his head in his hands. “Oh my god,” he muttered.
“I can’t believe you just sprung him on me,” Clint said to Natasha, furious. “Why would you do that?”
She tilted her head. “You know why.”
“Yeah, and screw you too, Romanoff,” he said, and stormed out in the opposite direction Loki had taken.
“Yeah, that could have gone worse,” Rocket said. “Hey! What’s for dinner?”
Loki joined them for dinner. He and Clint sat at opposite ends of the big table and the simmering tension between them replaced the nervous, uncertain tension between Steve and Tony that had been dominating the past couple of days, which at least made a change of pace. They opened a couple bottles of wine and passed around a truly enormous amount of Chinese takeout – Steve, Bruce, and Loki together ate enough food for eight ordinary humans. The conversation was polite if occasionally strained, mostly about New Asgard and what everyone else had been up to since the last time they had all seen each other.
At a break in the conversation, Rocket said, “So what’s the story between you two? You guys used to date or something?”
Clint was too horrified to respond immediately. Loki said calmly, “When the Mad Titan sent me to Earth eleven years ago with the Mind Stone in order to retrieve the Space Stone, Barton here was one of the humans I used the Mind Stone to control. He was a very efficient second-in-command.”
Scott gaped at him. “You – what? You worked for Thanos?”
“That’s not exactly the term I would use,” Loki said. He and Nebula exchanged a look, then she silently passed him a container of fried rice and he busied himself spooning some onto his plate.
“You thought we were dating?” Clint finally managed to say.
“No, not really,” Rocket told him. “I just thought it would get a rise out of you.”
Steve massaged his forehead and Natasha patted his arm sympathetically.
“Well, this is awkward,” Rhodes said. “Pass the eggrolls?”
“Wait, New York was him?” Scott said.
“No, it was me,” Loki said. “And – well, yes, it was him.” He and Nebula looked at each other again. Loki’s jaw worked briefly, then he said awkwardly, “If it’s – any consolation, and I understand that after all this time it probably is not – I do regret what occurred. It was not one of the better decisions I’ve made in my life, but at the time it was the best of several bad options, inasmuch as I had options at all.” He made an expression that might have been a smile on someone else, but couldn’t quite manage the expression on his sharp features. “And I think I’ve paid for it in full, with change.”
Clint got up and left the room. A moment later a door slammed somewhere inside the compound.
Loki put his chopsticks down and sat with his head bowed, though he turned a little as Nebula leaned over to say something to him. Natasha gave Clint a minute to himself, then got up and followed him out.
She found him exactly where she had expected him to be, sitting on the edge of the rooftop balcony with his legs dangling into empty air as he stared down at the landing pad where the Quinjet and the Benatar were parked. Natasha walked over and sat down beside him. “Hey.”
“Hey.” After a moment, he added, “Springing him on me was a dick move, Romanoff.”
“Yeah,” Natasha admitted. “I know. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. Me too.” He scratched at his hairline, not meeting her eyes. “I get we need him. And I get that he was in Wakanda when it…happened. It’s just – you know. Seeing him here. Alive. When so many other people, good people, are dead. Gone. You know.”
“Yeah,” Natasha said. She put a hand on his shoulder, and after a moment he tipped his head sideways against hers.
“I didn’t think he’d actually apologize,” Clint said after a while. He frowned. “If that counts as an apology. I’m not sure if it does.”
“I think it’s the best you’re going to get,” Natasha said.
He snorted. “Yeah, probably.”
The sun was setting. They watched it creep below the horizon, and when the world was awash in pinkish-gold light Clint said, “I…might have known that there was someone else pulling his strings. He got weird a couple of times, back then. But you know I don’t remember it very well. I thought I was making it up, trying to find excuses – like maybe he was still in my head. And then Thor took him back to Asgard and then he died – or Thor told us he died, anyway, I – wait, how is he still alive?”
“Faked his death, magicked his dad, pretended to be Odin for a few years while Thor was away, apparently.”
“Wow,” Clint said.
“Yeah,” Natasha admitted. “Well, I didn’t say he wasn’t an asshole, I said he was on our side.”
“Enemy of my enemy, I guess,” Clint said.
They sat in silence watching the sun go down, and when it was dark Natasha stood up and offered Clint her hand. He took it and let her pull him to his feet.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s go fix this.”
“This is the worst plan I’ve ever heard,” Loki said. “And I grew up with Thor, so that’s saying something.”
They had all reconvened in the conference room, where Tony and Bruce had just finished explaining their plan to Loki in greater detail than Tony’s earlier summary. He was sitting on a couch with a half-empty glass of wine in one hand, his expression disbelieving. Going by the bottles on the table, he and the others had already made a serious dent in their after-dinner drinking – everyone drank too much these days, when all the awfulness of the past five years caught up to them. Loki had flicked a glance at Natasha and Clint as they came in, but hadn’t otherwise acknowledged their arrival.
“Messing about with time is a terrible idea,” Loki went on. “I’ve never heard a single tale of it ending well. When you mess with time, it tends to mess back. The universe wants to continue along a single path and when that path is interrupted, it always, always self-corrects. And for the record, as the god of mischief, it gives me no joy to tell you that sometimes the rules exist for a reason.”
“Right, right,” Bruce said. “But the Stones themselves are unnatural, right?”
“They were created at the birth of the universe, by the birth of the universe,” Loki said. “So they’re certainly more natural than you are. No offense meant.”
“None taken. Okay, so the Stones are natural, but what Thanos did with them, wiping out half the life in the universe – that’s unnatural, right?”
“Yes,” Loki said, sounding like he knew there was a trap somewhere in Bruce’s words but couldn’t spot it yet.
“So maybe this is the universe’s way to self-correct,” Bruce said. “It has to be undone and the Stones are the only way to do it. You said yourself that you’d tried to find other ways.”
“It’s entirely possible that there are still many I haven’t discovered yet,” Loki said warily. “My library access is not what it once was, with Asgard’s library destroyed and the great libraries of other realms somewhat reluctant to let me take books out. Everyone in the Nine Realms knows that what’s left of Asgard is now on Midgard and no one wants even the King of Asgard to bring their books to Midgard.”
“What’s wrong with Earth?” Steve asked.
“Would you like that list chronologically, alphabetically, or in order of what I find most offensive about your realm?” Loki said.
“You’ve only been here for five years and the time you tried to take over, which was, what, like, three days?” Rhodes said. “And we’ve been having half an apocalypse the whole time.”
Loki gave him what Natasha privately thought of as his bitch, please smile. “I’m over a thousand years old and I was worshipped as a god on this world for centuries – I still am in some circles. I’ve been on this planet at least once every few decades for the past ten centuries. My father –” His voice stumbled for a moment, then strengthened. “My father used to send me to investigate affairs on Midgard that he thought might require Asgardian attention, as unlike most Asgardians I could name – all of whom are dead now…” He swallowed. “As unlike most Asgardians I am actually capable of blending in.”
“That explains so many things about Thor and absolutely nothing about you,” Tony said.
“Wait –” Clint said. “Hey, you remember that time Thor was invited to go on Ancient Aliens?”
“I was probably in prison,” Loki said. “Or pretending to be my father. One of the two.”
“I wasn’t talking to you. But you remember when he said –”
“The D.B. Cooper thing?” Tony said.
“Oh, that,” Loki said. He smiled again. “That was me. I lost a bet with Thor.”
“What?” Scott said. “Wait. You were D.B. Cooper?”
“Surprise!” Loki said brightly.
“You didn’t see the episode?” Tony asked Scott. “Or the clip? I think it broke some kind of YouTube record.”
“No, I was probably in prison,” Scott said.
“Oh, wow, this was not on my bingo card for how tonight was going to go,” Rhodes muttered. “Seriously, Loki? That was true?”
“Hello, trickster god, remember?”
“Wait, does that mean the thing Thor said about the Loch Ness monster was true too?”
“What’s the Loch Ness – oh, yes, that was also me. I mean, I’m not a bilgesnipe, but I did bring her to Midgard.” He smiled reminiscently. “I hope she survived the culling, I haven’t thought about her in decades.”
“I liked your segment on Drunk History,” Natasha said to Loki; it had been one of the media attempts to rehabilitate his public image, and one of the more successful ones, at that. Steve and Rhodes had escorted him to the studio for that; she had been busy at the time.
He smiled again. “That was fun.”
“I don’t know if any of it was true, but it was fun. And I know how much alcohol it takes an Asgardian to get drunk, so how long did Comedy Central have you in there before you got wasted enough for them?”
“Some time,” Loki said. “And I actually can’t recall if I talked about any Midgardian history.”
“You said you had some of the lost Fabergé eggs,” Natasha said. “And then you tried to pull one out from up your sleeve or something but instead you had the FIFA trophy that went missing in 1983. And then FIFA tried to sue you for stealing it. Since you’d left it in the studio when you went back to New Asgard and wouldn’t answer their phone calls Comedy Central eventually just gave it to them.”
“Oh, is that what that lawsuit was about? I was very drunk during filming and I believe my clerks thought the calls were more death threats.” Loki frowned for a moment, then balanced his wineglass on the arm of the couch and made a twisting gesture with his hands. A large white and blue enamel egg unfolded itself between his palms. It was elaborately decorated with gold and gems, with the figure of an elephant on top and set on a pedestal made up of heraldic lions. Loki looked at it fondly. “Is this what you meant? It’s egg-shaped and these look like Midgardian animals.”
“Oh my god,” Rhodes said, and put his head in his hands.
“That’s the Royal Danish egg,” Natasha said. “It was made in 1903 as a gift for the Dowager Empress of Russia, who was born a princess of Denmark, and it hasn’t been seen since the Russian Revolution. Maybe earlier, maybe later; there’s a description of it from 1934. What?” she added as several people stared at her. “I like Fabergé eggs. They’re pretty. And they always have surprises inside and I like that about them.”
“Would you like this one?” Loki said. “To keep, I mean. I don’t believe I’ve looked at it in the better part of a century. It’s attractive enough, I suppose. A little overwrought.”
“You should probably give it to Denmark or Russia so they feel less weird about you and New Asgard,” Natasha said regretfully. “But I’ll hang onto it until then.” She went over to take it from Loki as he held it out, trying not to gape.
“I’ll have you know that New Asgard has a very good relationship with Denmark,” Loki said.
“Yeah, I know, I watched the livestream of the lecture you gave at the University of Copenhagen two years ago. There were protestors.”
“I get that a lot,” Loki said; that had been after restrictions on his travel had eased in several countries, so Natasha hadn’t been there. “I also teach a class at Uppsala University in Sweden every year. And I’ve given talks at several other universities in Europe. I get death threats every time. And protestors. And marriage proposals.”
“I have literally no way to process this information,” Clint said. “Can we go back to something that makes sense, like time travel and the Infinity Stones?”
“Certainly, but I think I’ll need another drink before that,” Loki said, looking at his empty wineglass.
“I think I need one to start with,” Clint muttered, and Steve said, “I wish I could get drunk.”
“Drunk History really wanted you on,” Natasha reminded him, and he nodded, quirking a grin at her.
“Yeah, but even if I could get drunk, Fury said he’d skin me if I said yes because most of what I remember about the war is still classified.”
“That just makes it more fun,” Tony said. “I still say you should have said yes. They’d probably have you now if you called them.”
“Still can’t get drunk,” Steve pointed out.
“Maybe the Asgardians have something that will work on your metabolism.”
“You guys are weird,” Rocket said, “but I could take a drink.”
“All right, drinks for everyone,” Tony said, getting to his feet. “Natasha, you want to give me a hand if you can stop fondling the egg? I can get you one to keep, if you really want.”
“Aww, that’s sweet,” Natasha said. She handed the Royal Danish egg to Clint and said, “If you drop that, I will break all of your fingers,” before following Tony into the next room where the liquor cabinet was.
“Before you say anything, you should probably know that I’m pretty sure Loki can still hear us,” she said as Tony picked up a bottle of whiskey and frowned at it thoughtfully. “I think it’s an Asgardian thing; Thor always had freakishly good hearing too.”
“I was going to ask about Barton,” Tony said, low-voiced. “What do you think?”
“I think if he’s going to try to kill Loki while both of us are in here, he’s not going to get very far,” Natasha said. “They’ll be fine. Clint’s a professional; he can do his job. Loki’s – I don’t actually think he cares that much, not about Clint. Maybe he actually does feel bad, but I can hardly ever tell when he’s being sincere.”
“That’s not the impression I got,” Tony said.
“What, about me or him?” She picked up a couple of bottles of expensive-looking alcohol at random, figuring that between the ten of them they’d go through them all.
“Did you know?” Tony asked, his voice barely more than a whisper now. “About you know who and – the other you know who? How much in control was he?”
“He said a few things after Wakanda while he was drunk that made me think it might have been the case,” Natasha said carefully. “But not much. And Thanos said a few more things before Nebula killed him, but the truth is that I don’t know, Tony. I’m not sure even he knows. You usually don’t in situations like that.”
“I wouldn’t think they happen all that often.” Tony compared two bottles of wine and said, “Hey, do you think the 2012 would be appropriate, considering?”
“You’re going to do it and see if he notices, aren’t you?” Natasha said.
“Yep.” He tucked the bottle under his arm, then picked up another two and said, “There’s glasses out there, right? Everyone’s already been drinking? I guess we can always make two trips if we need more glasses.”
They took the bottles back into the conference room, where Bruce and Steve had gone back to trying to convince Loki of the wisdom of what they had all started calling the Time Heist.
“This is a terrible plan,” Loki said. “Absolutely dreadful.”
“But you’ll do it, right?” Bruce said.
“Of course.”
He took the wine bottle that Tony handed him, looked at the date on the label, and said, “Very funny, Stark,” before popping the cork and refilling his glass.
When everyone who wanted one had a drink in hand and Natasha had taken the Fabergé egg back from Clint and placed it carefully on a side table, Steve stood up and said, “Okay, so we’re all agreed that this is what we’re doing. The how works; now we gotta figure out the when and the where. Almost everyone in this room has had an encounter with at least one of the six Infinity Stones.”
“Or substitute the word ‘encounter’ for ‘damn near been killed by one of the six Infinity Stones,’” Tony put in, activating the holographic screens that displayed the Stones and their known locations.
“Well, I haven’t,” Scott said, “but I don’t even know what the hell you’re all talking about.”
“Why is he here again?” Loki said.
“He’s the one who figured the time travel out,” Steve said.
“Well, actually that was me,” Tony said. “Well, I mean, I made it work, I guess it was his idea.”
“Wow,” Scott said. “That’s just – god, I wish Hank was here. But he really hates you, so he probably wouldn’t have come anyway.”
Bruce made a gesture of agreement. “We only have enough Pym particles for one round-trip each, so having Hank Pym be here would really, really help with that. These Stones have been in a lot of different places throughout history.”
“Our history,” Tony clarified. “So not a lot of convenient spots to just drop in, yeah?”
“Which means we have to pick our targets,” Clint observed, rolling his beer bottle back and forth between his palms.
Loki tossed back the remainder of his glass of wine and reached for the bottle again. He only looked up from pouring when Steve said, “Let’s start with the Aether. Loki, what do you know?”
“Well, the Dark Elves tried to use it to wipe out reality five thousand years ago and again ten years ago when they murdered my mother trying to get it,” Loki said, and took a gulp of his wine. “Also me. But I got better. She didn’t.”
They all stared at him.
Loki tipped his glass up and drank the rest of his wine in one long swallow, his voice a little raw when he went on. “Five thousand years ago, my grandfather – Thor’s grandfather – King Bor defeated and killed most of the Dark Elves and hid the Aether away on a prison planet somewhere deep within the Nine Realms, a prison only accessible through the Bifrost. It remained hidden until the next Convergence, when the Nine Realms of Yggdrasil all align and the boundaries between the worlds begin to thin. Jane Foster – Thor’s girlfriend – ex-girlfriend – stumbled on it and absorbed it somehow.”
“Wait, it’s a rock, isn’t it?” Rhodes said. “How do you absorb a rock?”
“The Aether’s more like an angry sludge in its resting form, not a true stone like the others,” Loki said. “And I was in prison at the time, so I have no idea precisely what Dr. Foster did to get the Aether inside her. Thor found out, brought her back to Asgard, and then the Dark Elves attacked and murdered my mother. And my father didn’t let me go to the funeral. No one even told me until after it was over. The last thing I ever said to my mother –” He rubbed his hands over his face, closing his eyes briefly, then said, “Thor broke me out to take us to Svartalfheim, homeworld of the Dark Elves, without using the Bifrost – you all recall I can walk between the worlds of the Nine Realms, yes? It’s how I brought Rocket and Groot to Midgard from Nidavellir five years ago. Thor used Dr. Foster to lure Malekith – the leader of the Dark Elves – to Svartalfheim so that he could remove the Aether from Dr. Foster and it could be destroyed. It didn’t work. You can’t destroy an Infinity Stone even by hitting it with lightning, though Thor certainly gave it his best shot. And then I got stabbed in the chest and died or nearly died or – anyway, I’m not certain, it didn’t take, anyway, but Thor thought I was dead. Or at least I hope he thought I was dead, because he left me there and I woke up alone with a hole in my chest –” He stopped, staring off into space.
“Elves are real?” Scott said.
Loki blinked and looked at him. “Well, the Dark Elves are now all dead, which was supposed to have already happened five thousand years ago, but I suppose Grandfather Bor lied about that.” He poured himself more wine. “Which seems to be a family trait, since my father also lied about a lot of things. Though it does raise the question of why I was the one who was born the god of lies and I’m not even related to Bor or Odin. Anyway, the Dark Elves are extinct, assuming Thor got them all, but there are still millions of Light Elves on Alfheim. I got shot in the face once on Alfheim about fourteen years ago. Elves are very annoying.”
“This – all this – was when Thor was fighting aliens in London back in 2013, right?” Rhodes said. “SHIELD did the clean-up.”
“What happened to the Aether after that?” Natasha prompted Loki.
“Oh. Well. Thor brought it back to Asgard after he defeated Malekith and Odin sent it to the Collector on Knowhere. Well,” he said again, and smiled thinly, “I sent it to Knowhere, since I had already usurped my father at that point. We already had the Tesseract and I thought having two Infinity Stones in one place would be too much temptation for the Mad Titan to resist. Two Infinity Stones and me,” he added, looking down at his now-empty wineglass, then reached for the bottle again.
“Okay,” Natasha said. “So we’ve got one day – maybe two? – when the Aether and the Tesseract are both on Asgard.” She wrote that down in her notebook, since she thought better when she could look at something physical instead of a screen. “What’s Knowhere?”
“It’s in space,” Rocket said. “You guys know what space is, right? Not you, I know you know, Asgardian, we pulled you out of it. I still can’t believe you guys can survive vacuum.”
Loki raised his wineglass in a salute. “Unfortunately. Or fortunately, depending on your point of view.”
Clint leaned over to whisper in Natasha’s ear, “I think we’re already getting another episode of ‘Loki does Drunk History.’”
“I’m not drunk, I’m drinking,” Loki said. “I can hear you. If you wanted that, you’ll have to wait at least one more bottle.”
“Well, we still got the Mind Stone and the Tesseract to go,” Tony said. “We could leave them for last, see how you’re feeling then.”
Loki knocked back his wine again, then picked up the bottle, drained the last inch or so of its contents, and turned the bottle around so that the label was facing them. He tapped a finger against the date on it. “I should think,” he said, his voice hoarse and his words very precise, “that the answer to when to get the Mind Stone and the Space Stone was obvious. The Time Stone as well, I suppose.”
“Huh,” Steve said. “When he’s right, he’s right.”
“Please never say that about Loki again,” Clint said.
Loki put the empty bottle down and reached for the full one next to it. “It undoubtedly won’t be as dramatic as whatever adventure you were hoping for,” he said, producing a knife from thin air and sabering the top off the bottle. The sight of Loki with a knife in his hand made all of them except Rocket and Nebula tense. “But there’s a very simple way to get the Scepter and Tesseract.”
“And what’s that?” Steve said warily as Loki poured his wineglass full again.
He put the bottle down and pointed at himself with the knife he was still holding. “I had them both when I was trying to take over your realm, so it should be easy enough to retrieve them from some point before I went to Germany and you kicked me in the face. And I’ve wanted a rematch with the sorcerer.” He looked down at the knife, seemed to realize the tip was pressed against his chest, and made it vanish in a flicker of green-gold light.
Natasha and Steve looked at each other. He was right, but – “We need you to go to Asgard,” Steve said. “None of us have ever –”
“No,” Loki said flatly. “I am not going to Asgard. I am especially not going to Asgard then. You can either fetch it from Knowhere or you can go back to the previous Convergence and attempt not to get killed during the war between Asgard and Svartalfheim, but I am not going to Asgard.”
“Okay,” Tony said. “Not to get weird about it, but why’s that?”
“I have no need to explain myself to mortals,” Loki said, drank his glass of wine in one gulp, then immediately contradicted himself by saying, “Putting aside the obvious difficulty of the fact that I was in prison at the time and thus have no idea where anyone was on that particular day – and that I was in prison at the time – I can’t promise that if I was to go back I wouldn’t do something rash. My father didn’t allow my mother to visit me in prison,” he added, and his voice broke briefly. “She sent her projections through her magic, but –” He passed a hand over his face, wiping furiously at his eyes. “I remember the precise moment that I touched my mother for the last time and it was two years before she was murdered. So it probably isn’t wise for me to go to Asgard. And my father’s there, and the last time I saw him he told me he loved me and then he died and unleashed my secret evil sister, who broke Thor’s hammer, threw us off the Bifrost, and then murdered most of our people until Thor and I had to blow up the planet to stop her. And that was the last time I saw Asgard, when it was being reduced to atoms by the fire giant who was prophesied to destroy it and whom I had to call up in order to destroy my secret older sister – well, Thor’s sister, because I was adopted, which my family lied to me about my entire life.”
He picked up the wine bottle and drank straight from it, then wiped a hand over his mouth. “And Thor’s there and – and Thor’s there. The last time I saw him – I can’t go back to Asgard.” He drank again, emptying the bottle, then frowned down at it “I probably shouldn’t have mentioned all that. What is in this wine?”
“Alcohol,” Tony said cautiously. “Which you’ve had four bottles of, one of them in the last thirty seconds. Uh, you want some water there, Loki?”
“I want Thor and I want to go home,” Loki said, putting the wine bottle down very carefully on the empty air next to the table, then looking surprised when it fell and shattered. He waved a hand that glittered with green light and the broken pieces flew back together. Loki nudged the empty wine bottle under the table with one foot and then leaned forward with his elbows braced against his knees and his head in his hands, his long, braided hair falling down to hide his face from view.
“Okay,” Steve said, looking concerned by the sight of Loki so obviously undone. “So Asgard’s out. Rocket, Nebula, what do you know about Knowhere and this Collector person?”
Rocket gave Loki a look that was equal parts worried and sympathetic, at least insofar as either emotion was visible on a raccoon’s face. “Well,” he said, “we actually did have the Power Stone there for a couple of hours. So that could work.”
“The Collector is supposed to be impossible to steal from,” Nebula said.
“Well,” Tony said, “we’ve never tried. Hey, Polly Pocket, you’re a thief, right?”
“Not a thief, a burglar. Cat burglar. And retired,” Scott protested. “And like – on Earth.”
“It’s the same principle, it should be fine,” Tony said. “So you’ll go with them to steal stuff in space. What else we got?”
“Soul Stone,” Steve said.
“Thanos found the Soul Stone on Vormir,” Nebula said.
“Is that another planet?” Clint asked.
“It is a dominion of death at the very center of celestial existence,” Nebula said, looking like she wished she could follow Loki’s example and get drunk. She had said that something about most Earth alcohols interfered with her altered physiology. “It’s where Thanos murdered my sister.”
“I wish there was less of that going around,” Loki moaned into his hands.
“Okay,” Tony said, “well, Vormir’s in space, so – space team and Earth team, huh?” He pointed at Rocket and Nebula. “You’re on team space – you too, Scott, Bruce –”
“I’m not working with him,” Clint said, pointing at Loki. “I’ll go to space.”
“Steve and I will go with Loki to 2012,” Natasha said, after a quick glance at Steve to make sure they were thinking along the same lines. “Tony? Rhodey? What about you?”
Scott mouthed, please don’t leave me with them, at Rhodes, who said reluctantly, “I guess if anyone can handle Loki in 2012 it’s you guys, but –“ He grimaced. “It’s sounding like we might do more good on the space team. Tony?”
“What’s your plan, anyway?” Tony said to Loki.
Loki raised his head and pushed his hair out of his face, making the golden charms on the ends of his braids chime softly against each other. “My plan was to walk into Barton’s little underground headquarters, pick up the Tesseract and the scepter, and walk out again.”
“Aren’t you forgetting one really important part?” Clint asked.
Loki spread his hands in confusion.
“You?” Clint said pointedly. “Back then? Because I don’t remember you ever putting that scepter down.”
“Oh. I can deal with that – him – myself – easily if it becomes a concern, but I’m not expecting it to be. And your presence wouldn’t do any good, Stark. Your skills are more likely to be useful dealing with the Collector.”
“Did he just say I have skills?” Tony said.
“I’m quite drunk,” Loki said. “I wouldn’t take it to heart.”
“Well,” Steve said. “It sounds like we’ve got our teams. Six stones, two teams, one shot.”