Rescue or something else
- Anon
First, incredulity.
When Black Widow informed them that their missing thunder god had apparently been turned into a child again and that she had learned this fact through channels that none of them, apparently, had access to, it had been hard to believe. But, then, they were a team that included a scientist who sometimes turned into a giant green rage monster, in addition to an actual Norse god and a 100-year-old supersoldier, so maybe it wasn’t flat-out impossible. They’d seen weirder things. When she'd added that the child believed to be Thor had been spotted in the custody of his brother and enemy, that had also been a notion that didn't really fit in their minds, for a variety of reasons.
Not until she actually waltzed back through the door with the little blond tyke in her arms, though, and the whole tower could probably hear the kid wailing while unexpected thunderclouds gathered outside… then they had no choice but to accept that it was probably true.
Next, confusion.
Because it was obvious that whatever had happened to Thor, he didn’t have all his memories. But they still needed to find out what Loki had done to him and if there was any way to reverse it. They still had to find out what else Loki might have been planning. This had to be part of some scheme; they needed to know what it was.
And to find out, they had to—if you could call it this—debrief a very upset little kid. Who still gave Natasha a suspicious frown, his brow knitted, and wouldn’t say a thing to her. He didn’t seem to trust the rest of them, either. He spent a lot of time sniffling back tears and asking where his brother was. It was Bruce, actually, who finally managed to make friends enough to get anything out of him, and he only managed that by bringing him some crayons and a coloring book and then not trying to ask him anything right away, waiting until the kid started talking to him first.
Tony, watching over the security feed, had to admit that that did not seem like the behavior of a kid who’d been rescued from a dire fate at the hands of a supervillain. It seemed more like a kid who’d been snatched away from…
Tony’s mouth twisted at the thought.
In between crayon scribblings, in bits and pieces, they learned that he didn’t know who they were and he’d never heard of the Avengers. He didn’t know what had happened to him and he didn’t know where Loki had been hiding him—”we move a lot,” he’d said with a shrug, not looking up from his coloring.
The next question, Tony could feel the tension in Bruce’s voice, the answer he was steeling himself for.
“Thor, has Loki ever hurt you? Or tried to? Has he ever made you scared?”
This time, Thor stopped coloring and looked up at him, and for a moment he pressed his mouth into a line, the very image of childish consternation.
And then he said, with exaggerated calm as if speaking to someone who wasn’t quite understanding something very simple, “my brother takes care of me and keeps me safe.”
Bruce had surreptitiously glanced up at the camera then, gesturing with his face and his eyes as if to say “well, now what?”
And finally, dismay.
Shock, certainly, and the sort of regret you feel when you realize you have completely misread a situation and made a fool of yourself, and also a fair bit of…
“Oh shit,” Steve said when, a few hours later, Loki burst into existence in the doorway in a blaze of furious green fire.
That was exactly the word for it. A fair bit of “oh shit.”
And he didn’t start attacking right away, but you didn’t have to be a genius to tell that he was ready to burn everything to the ground, probably the whole planet included, if he didn’t get what he was there for. And for once Tony did not feel confident about their chances. This seemed… different than every time they’d ever seen him ready to fight before. Somehow, metaphysically, the gloves were off, and it crackled in the air.
“Where is my brother,” Loki demanded, voice low but oddly frantic. “I know you have him here. Give him back to me now and I will forget this offense. He is not yours, and you have no right to take him from me.”
It was Steve who stepped forward. “Well, excuse me, but last I checked he’s not yours either. Whatever’s happened to him, he has a right to whatever help we can give, or to get him back to people who can help him. Which, we don’t know what you were doing with him, but it clearly wasn’t that.”
Now it was no longer a crackling but instead a rising tension, like the whistling of a tea kettle only too high to hear, and when Loki took a step toward them, arms low at his sides, they all took a subconscious step in retreat.
“You would return him to Asgard?” Loki said. “You think that would be helping him? By stealing him from me and ensuring that I would not see him again, perhaps for centuries? Until he had grown up again without me?”
The tension heightened yet again and Loki took another step forward, menacing, and good god he was terrifying when he wanted to be, and Tony was muttering to himself to summon his armor because this was about to go pear-shaped really fast and—
Loki stopped mid-stride and blinked, seeming to come back to himself. He looked around at all of them, him and Steve and Natasha, and instead of the rage there was again that look of panic.
“Did you tell him?”
“Did we tell him what?” Tony heard himself ask.
Loki took a few quick breaths. “He trusts me again now. If you have ruined that, if you have broken his trust, so help me I will…”
Tony made an executive decision before anyone else could make a different one.
“Bruce,” he said into the intercom, “would you bring the kid up here please?”
(A few awkward, uncomfortable seconds all around. Maybe half a minute of everyone metaphorically twiddling their thumbs and trying to pretend this was all normal, somehow.)
And Tony knew it’d been the right call when the moment he came through the door, the kid went from morose and withdrawn to crying out Loki’s name and running over to him. And Loki instantly shedding the tension, the fury, the fear, instead dropping into a crouch so he could swoop little Thor up into his arms and hug him, both of them smiling broadly.
“Are you all right, brother?” Loki asked, and Thor nodded against him.
“I’m sorry about all this,” Tony said, fairly sure the opportunity would soon be gone. “Just a big misunderstanding. That’s all. We hope you’re both OK.”
Over little Thor’s shoulder, Loki gave a twitch of a nod in acknowledgment, but honestly he looked exhausted. Pretty near collapse. Like… someone whose child had been kidnapped and they’d only just at that moment gotten them back safe and sound.
And then, in a much more subdued flare of green fire, they were gone. And the others were staring at him. Bruce frowning, a little dubious. Natasha with an eyebrow raised.
“Do you really think that was a good idea?” Steve asked. “We still don’t know what Loki is planning.”
“I think we kinda do, actually. It looked to me like he was planning on raising the kid.”
“And do you really think that will be good for Thor? Being raised by a supervillain?”
“Did that seem to you like the same ol’ supervillain we’ve come to know? Come on, guys—am I the only one who was paying any attention? Bruce, back me up. Did that seem like a kid who needed to be rescued from a troubled home?”
Bruce tilted his head, squinted, gave a half shrug. “N-not really.”
“There are lots of other people who will be very interested if they find out that Thor has been de-aged, though,” Natasha put in. “My channels are good but that’s the sort of thing that gets around eventually, and then Loki’s going to have a lot worse than us to deal with. Thor could be in danger from them, too.”
Tony remembered the feeling of tension crackling in the air. “I think what you mean is a lot worse than us will have to deal with Loki. Thor’s probably the safest kid on the planet right now.”
And that’s where it ended, even though there was still a lot of doubt hanging around, and honestly before that day Tony would have never believed it either. What it came down to was that they’d left the kid to be cared for by someone who very obviously loved him.
And Tony couldn’t find anything wrong with that.