Chapter 1
Fury rubbed at the bridge of his nose. “So you can’t take him back to Asgard?”
“Were the Bifrost repaired, ’twould be a simple matter to call upon Heimdall, the gatekeeper, and be gone. Alas,” Thor said, shaking his head, “it may be decades before that damage can be undone.”
“Yet you came here without it,” Coulson observed neutrally.
“Only by the use of dark energy. That is a resource that only the Allfather can make use of, and it leaves him greatly weakened; I should not like to ask it of him again so soon.”
“Understandable,” Coulson allowed. “And the Tesseract?”
Thor huffed his frustration. “I know not how to use it, and cannot trust my brother to return us to the realm where he must answer for his crimes. As you have seen, the power of that artifact is nearly beyond your own scientists… though I hope, by careful trial, that Jane Foster and Erik Selvig might divine its secrets.”
“And in the meantime, we’re stuck with a homicidal maniac.” Fury grimaced. “Well, at least we got a year’s warning; we’ve installed a reinforced cell in each SHIELD holding facility, and upgraded our guard training to compensate. So the only question, really, is which group to place him with.”
“I would strongly urge you not to allow him near other prisoners.”
“Oh, he won’t be able to do anything,” Coulson said calmly. “As long as you’re correct about those shackles blocking his powers.”
Thor drew himself up; surely they were not doubting his given word. “They were designed to contain the strongest of mages,” he avowed. “Even so, ’twould be foolish to let down your guard; my brother is wily enough to raise havoc through his words alone.”
“Unfortunately, isolation isn’t a good solution for more than a few hours,” Coulson countered. “Humanity determined decades ago that solitary confinement is tantamount to torture; it has serious long-term effects on mental health after only a few weeks.”
“No offense,” Fury added, “but your brother doesn’t seem the most stable to begin with.”
Though he wished to debate the issue, Thor pushed down his instinctual familial pride; too well could he recall what it had felt like to fight Loki on the Bifrost, to watch him slip from Gungnir and fall to where they could neither see nor reach him. Would Loki ever be “stable” again?
Coulson folded his hands on the table. “So he’ll be placed in a cell where he can’t reach anyone, but can still see, hear, and interact with them.”
“The strongest location, then, surely.”
“Oh, they’re all strong,” Fury assured him with a dark grin. “Believe me, we’ve held quite a few supervillains before you guys even showed up on our radar. SHIELD has several facilities equipped to hold Doms, a few for flatliners and even a couple for the subs who’ve gone rogue.”
Thor blinked. “You are wise to be so prepared.”
After a moment, Coulson ducked his head a little. “So… which facility should we send him to?”
“One that is nearby,” Thor answered without hesitation, “so that we would be able to return to Asgard the very hour that we find the means.”
“It’ll be a facility in New York,” Coulson said. “What I mean is, does he go with the Doms, the subs, or the flatliners?”
Thor’s sudden fury was as visible as the static charge crawling across the backs of his hands; he calmed himself as best as he could, reminding himself that these mortals were fragile, and not as schooled in honor or diplomacy as he. “I trust you do not intend to insult my brother,” he said flatly, “but surely the answer is obvious?”
Frowning, Coulson shot Fury a look. “Maybe it’s different for Asgard,” he said slowly. “Down here, we can’t tell Dom from sub just by looking at them.”
Thor stared at him incredulously.
“You rang?” Nat asked as she slid in through the door to Fury’s office. It took less than a second to read the situation: Fury cautious, Thor on the edge of outraged yet mostly befuddled, and Coulson (also cautious) looking to her to defuse the situation.
“In your professional opinion,” Coulson said slowly, “where would you place Loki on the gender spectrum?”
The answer leapt to her tongue, but she forced herself to pause, to seemingly consider. “We’d need more data,” she said finally.
“We don’t have time for this,” Fury ground out. “What’s your hunch, agent?”
She raised her chin—a quick show of throat. “If he’s a Dom, he’s seriously damaged.”
Thor’s reaction was immediate, raising the hairs on the back of her neck from the static charge alone. “Have a care how you speak about my brother,” he rumbled.
“I do not mean to disparage him,” Natasha said, softening her tone and body language even further. “I assume we’re trying to determine where to place him?” On Coulson’s nod, she added, “Maybe it would be best to consult with the others? They might have had a different perception.”
“Get everyone together,” Fury groused. “Just get me the answer. Yesterday.”
As they turned to go, Nat shot Coulson a raised eyebrow, and he returned a mild shrug. This was going to be interesting.
Across the meeting-room table, Phil met eyes with each member of the team, a trick he’d learned from Fury for dealing with Doms who didn’t respect a flatliner and for equalizing the treatment of Doms and subs under his command. “All right,” he said, “it seems there are some distinctions between humans and Asgardians that may make it difficult to place Loki in a suitable location. We’re here to assess the cultural barrier, try to bridge it, and determine the best placement for our new and disgruntled guest.”
Thor shifted uncomfortably and folded his arms. “I do not see why this is even a debate.”
“Please bear with me for a moment,” Phil said. “Captain, you were first on the scene in Stuttgart. From the reports I’ve read, Loki caused an entire crowd of people to kneel in a public square. That’s about when you arrived?”
Steve rubbed the back of his neck. “Yeah.”
“And one of them had refused to kneel?”
“Right. I thought—I went into that fight thinking that I was dealing with a powerful Dominant. I was prepared to resist him, but he never tried to command me. Not once.”
“If he’d tried it on me, we’d have had some instant results,” Bruce said softly, ducking his head. “The, uh, the ‘other guy’ doesn’t take too well to being ordered around.”
“He never tried in the penthouse, either,” Tony offered. “After that stunt on the helicarrier, I was expecting it, but he just touched me with that stick of his, got pissed when it wouldn’t work, and tossed me through the window.”
“Not Dom behavior,” Natasha noted quietly.
“What kind of Submissive could get so many strangers to kneel?” Steve asked. “As far as I can tell, he didn’t use his ‘magic stick’ on them.”
“On the helicarrier,” Phil mused, “Loki backed down, or seemed to, when I told him to move away. And I’m just a flatliner. He didn’t push back, didn’t try to control me, just… tricked me.”
“Yes, my brother is well known for resorting to tricks,” Thor said grumpily, and Phil didn’t miss the lines of disgust at the final word. “In combat, he is more than capable, yet he finds it more amusing to turn his victims into playthings.”
“But he didn’t,” Nat countered. “At every opportunity, we expected him to try to play us; he didn’t even make a move.”
“What mean you? The son of Cole has just admitted to falling prey to one of his tricks.”
“Yes, but not commanded,” Phil said. “Not, well, not dominated.”
Thor’s eyes went wide, horrified.
Phil glanced around the room, making eye contact again. “Anyone else feel like Loki’s trying to play a role he doesn’t quite know how to play?”
“Obviously,” Tony said, leaning back and lacing his fingers behind his head. “The question is, why?”
Steve frowned. “Well, if he’s not a Dominant—”
“Why do you all keep saying that? ” Thor bellowed, and all eyes turned to him. “Do you not think I would have noticed, at some point in the past thousand years, if he were not a man? ”
After a moment of cautious silence, Natasha took a breath. “Okay… I’m beginning to think there’s a translation issue. Thor, didn’t you say that you speak something other than English?”
Thor huffed. “We of Asgard converse in the Allspeak; it allows me to understand your meaning and to convey my own, without the words getting in the way.”
“Hmm. Well, I think in this case we’ve hit across something that isn’t translating correctly. If I say ‘Dom’ and ‘man’, are you hearing the same word twice?”
“Not precisely, but they are close enough,” Thor replied. “A dom is one who commands others; a sub is one who receives commands. Yet you debate which one my brother might be? Were we on Asgard, I would already have challenged you to death-fight for the insult!”
Bruce adjusted his glasses. “It’s an insult for a man to be called a sub?” he asked quietly.
“How could it not be?”
“So all men of Asgard are Doms,” Natasha clarified. “Are all women subs?”
“Assuredly!” Thor answered without hesitation—then he looked at her again, and backed down a bit. “Ah, that is… of course I would not insult you, daughter of Roman; you are clearly no sub. And my shieldmate, Sif, was able to refuse orders; it is the only reason she was allowed to train with the others. There are also tales of a group of female warriors of old, but they went to Valhalla long before I was born.”
“So a warrior can’t be a sub?” Steve asked. “Just the fact that she’s a warrior, that she won’t back down and follow orders, that means she’s not a sub?”
Thor blinked. “Surely a sub could be most formidable defending the hearth, as a mother bear defends her cub.” Then he broke into a grin. “But could you imagine a sub on the battlefield?”
“I could,” Nat said easily. “But then, I fought next to at least three of them today, and they held their own.”
Confusion played across Thor’s features before he masked it with a smile. “Why, then! perhaps they should be invited to join our team.”
“They’re already in the room,” Phil said. “Care to take a guess?”
Thor glanced at each of them, his confusion growing. “But…”
“You know,” Phil drawled, getting to his feet, “when Captain Rogers woke up after seventy years in the ice, he had to adjust to a world completely removed from the one he’d grown up in. Some of the concepts that he’d taken for granted—that his entire world had taken for granted—had been overturned by scientific advancement, by cultural shifts across time, or by the interaction between cultures that led to a new understanding of human behavior.
“It didn’t take him all that long to adjust,” Phil continued. “Of course, those of us who’ve helped him to adjust his understanding also had to stop taking things for granted. We had to open ourselves up to the way other people might once have perceived the idea, not out of malice or stupidity but simply because it was a different era, and certain things were considered obvious or important at that time that are no longer perceived the same way. In the same way, certain things that are considered obvious or important now were not so clear at the time.”
Then he turned his gaze on Thor. “Seems like you might be on the cusp of such an awareness shift yourself. Perhaps it’s time for some proper introductions?”