Set Post-Winter Soldier and Post-Dark World. Enjoy!
"Loki Laufeyson of Asgard and Jotunheim," the Council spokeswomen intones, staring down her nose at Loki from her marbled seat high above above his head. "The Aesir Council has weighed your crimes and the testimony given in your defense and has come to a conclusion."
Even before she speaks the words, Loki knows his fate. The derisive glare, the way she spits her words down to the floor on which he kneels in supplication—he is doomed. And worse, his humiliation is displayed to all gathered in the Great Hall of Asgard. Odin had been crowned here and, one day, Thor will be too. His mother had placed Loki's helmet on his head in this hall, so it seems only ironically fitting that this would be the place in which his punishment is be handed down to him.
"For your deceit and treachery through the clandestine imprisonment of our king, Odin of Asgard, the Allfather, you are stripped of your title of Prince of Asgard."
It stings worse than he'd thought, sending his breath out in a rush. A cry goes up in the gallery, joyful and triumphant. The Aesir had been furious when word had gotten out that not only had the Allfather been imprisoned (just for a bit—Loki would have let him out…eventually) but that he had been imprisoned by Loki, the wretched frost child that their benevolent king had taken in as his own son. A Great Council had not been called in over five thousand years, and yet here they are now, for the sole purpose of deciding what to do with Loki Laufeyson, their former (and second-favorite) prince.
"You are expelled from the Castle of Asgard, never to return."
Sunset. This had always been Frigga's favorite time of day. The light passes through the stained glass windows in the Great Hall, casting glittering patterns across the pillars and floors. She'd laughed gaily when Loki had been a child. He'd hop from one patch of light to another, arms flailing, and she would cast the loveliest of magic to make the light dance for him.
"You are barred from the esteemed Hall of Valhalla, never to enter."
Good, Loki wants to scream, but anger and bitterness clogs his throat. An eternity with Odin? He'll gladly take Niffleheim.
"And you are cast out of the realm of Asgard, never again a Friend."
Whatever else the spokeswoman has chosen to say is drowned out as the cries of the crowd rise in exultation. Loki had fought in scores of battles for the Aesir, had used his magic and trickery for the betterment of this realm and its people, yet this is how they choose to respond to his few selfish acts against the weight of a millennia of bowing to Odin's every beck and call.
Well, fuck them. Fuck the whole lot of them.
When his vision clears, Loki tries to not stare too closely at the residual swirls of Heimdall's magic burned into the grass around his feet. Unless Thor plans to undertake regular visits to Asgard and back, this is likely the last time he will see the Bifrost's mark for a good, long while.
But—they have an audience.
Director Nicholas Fury and a well-armed contingent surround Loki and Thor on the lawn outside the tall, reflective building Loki presumes to be SHIELD headquarters. In addition to the lovely display of the Second Amendment by the nameless and faceless agents, Loki's eyes pick up Barton's kneeling form on a shaded balcony and Doctor Banner lurking behind the group in loose, easily-shredded garments.
"Director Fury," Thor says in greeting. He steps out of the Bifrost's circle to extend his hand for Director Fury to shake. No doubt it is a gesture of thanks and humility.
For this has all been planned in advance: Loki's expulsion, the Bifrost, his admittedly warm welcome on Midgard by the very same assemblage that had sought to end his life in recent memory. It had been Thor who had bargained with the Council to spare Loki's life when he'd heard rumors that it planned to have him publicly drawn and quartered. Day in and day out, Loki had felt the pull of Heimdall's magic and the rumble of the Bifrost as Thor travelled to and fro between Midgard and Asgard, politicking in a such way that would have made Frigga proud. The Allfather had still slumbered then, and to Loki's knowledge, still did. Even when he wakes, he will have no power to reverse the Council's final decision.
Loki has Thor to thank for his life, and Thor to thank for his shame.
Director Fury stalks across the boundaries of the Bifrost circle until he and Loki stand scant feet apart. "You understand the terms of our agreement?" the Director of SHIELD grinds out, looking as though he would rather spend this time lounging in a pit of snakes than speak to Loki.
Accordingly, Loki bows his head. "I shall be confined within the walls of SHIELD till such a time that my release may be properly adjudged," he said, parroting the terms Thor had murmured through the shimmer of magic that had kept him imprisoned deep in the belly of Asgard's castle. "I shall provide SHIELD with any and all information that it may require. When asked, I shall participate in 'team training activities.' I shall refrain from destruction and despotic seizures of power. Should I henceforth undertake any destructive or anarchic activities, I give my explicit consent to my own solitary confinement or execution, following an administrative hearing."
"The shackles have reduced his magical capabilities," Thor explains, gesturing to the heavy metal bracelets clamped around Loki's wrists. "Replacements will need to be made. Perhaps Tony can devise a solution."
Director Fury drops his gaze to the reason Loki has not yet simply created a copy of his image and snuck away from this farce the moment they arrived. When he raises his eyes back to Loki's, a shit-eating grin has slipped across his lips. He raises a single gloved hand and all around the Bifrost's circle, agents lower their weapons and click the safeties back on. "Well then. Welcome home, Loki of Midgard."
"You're shorter than I thought you'd be."
Darcy Lewis squinted up at him and did her third once-over of him in the SHIELD elevator. Undoubtedly in an attempt to raise her in Loki's esteem, Thor had placed a 'Lady' in front of her name, as if Loki no longer wore the Aesir's shackles around his wrists and ankles. "I thought you'd at least be as tall as Thor."
"You'll have to forgive me," Loki replied in a bored tone, "I didn't care enough to create a mental presupposition of you before our meeting to which I could compare your true state."
The woman shrugged and hitched up the strap of her bag on her shoulder. "Don't sweat it, man. The reality is better than anything you could have imagined." She winked and waggled her brows lewdly at him, and Loki's mouth twitched downward before he could stop himself. Black Widow's reflection, flanking his on the thick glass behind Jane Foster and Darcy Lewis, pressed her lips together and turned her head to the side with the telltale huff of a suppressed laugh.
Thor bellowed a laugh, clapping his palm down on Loki's shoulder, and Loki rolled his eyes. The oaf cared nothing for their small space, nor Loki's distaste of being touched while his shackles ensnared him, and "She is a funny one, yes? The others fail to amuse me so well here in this low-ceilinged structure."
"It's gotta be the antennae," Darcy concluded with a decided nod of her head. "Those suckers made you look so big on TV."
The elevator dinged and she whirled on the heel of her boot to face the doors. "She speaks of your helmet, brother—" Thor began to explain as Darcy strode off the elevator and into the hallway, shadowed at each step by her silent, pale-faced companion.
Loki jerked his shoulder from Thor's hand. "I know of what she speaks, fool." His shoes were still uncomfortably light as he walked forward; he thought he were half-likely to float upwards to the ceiling. Weeks of wear had done nothing to acclimate him. Loki was no longer allowed his Aesir clothing and armor, a humiliation SHIELD had imposed in the name of "workplace safety." Thor, for his part, had embraced the heavy blue fabric human men wore about their legs, so enamored was he with his new Midguardian friends and culture.
"'Fool,' he says," Loki heard Black Widow mutter to Thor, "as if he wasn't the one running around Manhattan looking like an upended beetle."
"No, no! Loki's helmet is modeled after my great-grandfather's war helm…" Thor devolved into the story of the original Allfather, and Loki tuned him out. He's had a thousand years of Asgard's glory; he can tune it out for five minutes.
Ahead of him, Darcy barks orders at her "intern," who presumably goes by the name of Lauren. Or, so Darcy had introduced him—"This is my intern, Lauren. Say hi, Lauren, geez. I know you went to Harvard but surely Social Interaction 101 was a required course there."—though, judging by the boy's side glances at Darcy, Loki suspected that was not the boy's true name. Garbled her language may be to his ears, it's preferable to the tried and true children's story of how Asgard vanquished the False Supernova.
"You and the other interns, Alice, Johnny, and whatshisname—"
"Uhm, it's Alexandra, Joannie, and Daerron—"
"Yeah, him. I want satellite images of this Charles Xavier's house. I mean, this is ridiculous. It's the 21st Century. Google Maps should be all over this. And I want his bank records, too."
Lauren's steps falter. "I'm…pretty sure that's against the law?"
"Dude! That's what the legal interns are for! Floor 23. Get snappy with it."
The sunsets on Midgard are far lovelier than those on Asgard.
"Pollution," Jane Foster absently tells him, poring over some of Stark's designs. "Or maybe the distance between our sun and Earth and your sun and Asgard—"
Loki gives up on her explanations and returns to the sunset over the Appalachian Mountains. Thor and Jane had crossed the hallway to Loki's chambers nearly two hours before to discuss his magic-restrictive shackles. Given the terms of his stay on Midgard, Loki'd had no choice but to grit his teeth and attempt to describe to Jane exactly how the device inhibited his magical abilities.
Fury has given Stark charge of designing the new shackles, but even Stark'd had to bow to Jane's purview of astrophysics and Aesir technology, given that she'd spent (merely) a few days in Asgard.
Loki had long since completed the monkey song and dance, as required, yet Thor and Jane appear to be right at home at his table. Blueprints scatter the tabletop, interspersed with cartons of Chinese food. He'd hoped that they would leave once Thor had announced his increasing hunger, but the sustenance had been delivered to Loki's chambers instead of Thor's.
(Loki had discovered a window entitled "Netflix" on his television and had watched a series of flat, moving images entitled "Wild China" a week ago. The relation to his favorite dish, General Tso's Chicken, still eluded him, but he would discover it as soon as he determined how to operate the computer in the corner.)
"Tell me, Jane," Thor asks, voice muffled by his second helping of lo mien. "Your girl, Darcy—why does she not follow you about anymore? Have you no further need of her services?"
Jane sets her pen on the sprawls of paper and smiles with pride. Loki knows that smile—it had a home on Frigga's face, once. Before Jane brought the aether to Asgard, his mind hisses, but Loki is fairly certain that should he seek vengeance for his mother's death, Thor would not only not save him from SHIELD, but there would likely not be much of Loki left for SHIELD to dispose of. "No, no. Fury gave Darcy a paid job in deep internet investigatory research. She's extraordinarily good at it. She finds all of these videos of supernatural attacks and sightings way before they ever go viral."
"You do not miss her assistance?" Thor queries, tilting his head to the side, eyes tracking Loki as he moves into the kitchen for another draught of ale. Loki quite appreciated this cool box in which he could store his food and drink. On Asgard, food is preserved with salt or magic, but the result always gives the food a strange taste. Hence, the habit of the Aesir to consume all of the food at a feast, lest they be forced to save it for later. No such guilt here on Midgard.
Jane shakes her head. "No. Darcy and science never really got along. But she's in charge of all of the summer interns, which I think…both helps and hurts her. It would be like…Loki taking command of a bunch of unskilled recruits."
Taking a swig of his ale, Loki braces his other hand on the back of a chair at the dining table, chains between his shackles clinking. Thor looks at Jane, then at Loki, and then laughs. "Ah! She is on, as you say, a power trip."
Giggling at Thor's careful pronunciation, Jane props her chin on her fist. "Exactly." She winks at Thor. "But no one else wants to deal with the interns, so…Fury lets her do what she wants, as long as she's producing material for SHIELD."
Loki arches a brow and traces the grain of the tabletop's wood with his eyes until it disappeared under the scattered papers. "Unchecked power? I can't even begin to imagine the appeal."
Loki respects that Director Fury hates him, because he makes no attempt to hide it. The other "Avengers" try to make small talk and rub elbows with him given his participation in resolving the aether incident and his uneasy truce with SHIELD.
"How are you liking your new jewelry, Loki?" Fury half-asks, half-taunts as he sweeps into the control room with his leather jacket swinging behind him.
From his seat across the room, Loki lifts his wrist, letting the shiny, slim steel bangle slide up his forearm and catch on the sleeve of his shirt. "Oh, these? Quite lovely, actually. And lacking any spontaneous combustion, which I'm sure was the most difficult aspect for Stark."
Fury barks out a laugh and takes his seat in the center of the room on the raised dais, where Agents Romanoff and Hill already tap away furiously on hidden keyboards. Three computer monitors flank his seat, and he quickly become distracted by what the various screens display. For a long moment, Fury forgets that agents wait on the risers to his dais, watching for his signal to approach and allow a debrief on this world-ending situation or that one. If anyone invaded SHIELD headquarters in that moment, they would surely presume that Fury was the king of this realm. Well, Loki muses, pushing lightly on the ball of his foot to swivel his chair back to face the windows, with all of his Avengers at his beck and call, he might as well be.
Rogers passes by, obviously on his way to make hyper-masculine conversation with Loki's adoptive brother on the other side of the room. He peers down at the glints of metal around Loki's wrists and ankles. "Can you still pull a rabbit out of a hat?" he asks with a joking smile, and Loki's fingers itch to pull his atoms apart and rearrange them into the shape of an orangutan.
"I can still cast a glamour on you so ugly that Romanoff would finally stop sniffing at your skirts," Loki tells him, smirking when Rogers blushes and looks away. "Simple and easy and learned at my mother's knee. Unfortunately for you, that child's magic not the type of magic that your Director is interested in keeping at bay. Or, fortunately," Loki adds, "whichever way you chose to look at it."
The doors to the control room slide open almost soundlessly, but the racket that Darcy makes as she comes through them would wake the Allfather from his Odinsleep. "…Oh, stop complaining; it's not that heavy," she fusses at the young men carrying in the ubiquitous cardboard boxes Loki has seen throughout this building he's imprisoned in. It's a much larger prison than his last cell on Asgard, but a cell none the less. "Why are you just dropping them there! Interns don't have interns, you know—it's not like someone is going to come behind you guys and move everything for you."
"You had one," one young woman fires back at Darcy in a self-important tone. She sets her hands on her hips and juts her chin out after dropping her box on the pile. "In England. It's on your file, just so you know."
Loki watches as Darcy pushes her glasses up her nose and purses her full lips. "Is your name Darcy Lewis?"
The young woman's brow furrows over her flinty grey eyes. "I'm Alexandra Kennedy."
"Aka, not Darcy Lewis. No intern for you," Darcy says with finality and a wave of her fingers. Her skirmish resolved, she spins on the heel of her boot and claps her hands together. "So, Nicholas—"
"Director Fury," Fury corrects her, as he always does. He doesn't look up from the current computer screen that has his attention, but Loki can tell that Darcy has his attention.
"—Records on Charles Xavier, what we could find, at least. You know, if you'd have Tony and Bruce do something useful around here, like, I don't know, fix the internal dropbox system instead of building solar panels in Kazakhstan, we could just send you the PDFs."
Fury spins in his chair and rises, snapping the lapels of his coat. He descends from his throne, Hill and Romanoff at his sides. Even Thor steps up to the crowd gathered around the stacks of bins and boxes, picks up a sheaf of paper like he would have the first idea of what to do with it. Loki spins back to the window, sets his ankle on his thigh, and drums his fingers on his knee. Once upon a time, he decides, running his eyes over the lines of the Lincoln Memorial, Midgardians knew a thing or two about architecture. America really should thank him for Manhattan, honestly, destroying all of those horrific, toxin-filled boxes humans called modern architecture.
Someone approaches him from the right and stops behind his shoulder. He tilts his head the slightest bit and sees Darcy staring down at where his new Stark Industries technology stops at the top of his palm.
"Fancy." She looks out of place among the other crisply-suited SHIELD agents with her slim-fitting jeans and gold bangles clattering up and down her wrists. "Is it true that they had to have Bruce sit on you when they were trading out the old ones?"
Loki feels his eyebrow twitch. "I—"
She holds up her finger, cutting off his sentence. "Just know that I'm totally gonna go find the video from the security camera no matter you say, so try to not fudge the truth too much because I will totally call your ass out on it the next time that Sif chick comes to visit Thor."
"It's rude to interrupt," he informs her.
"It's rude to throw a mythological temper tantrum and involve humans in it," she replies, dropping her head to the side. Shiny ringlets slip over her shoulder. "You missed your time frame by about 2,000 years, buddy. Humans these days don't want to actually live the Iliad."
The word sounds unfamiliar to Loki, though it tumbles off Darcy's tongue easily. "The what?"
She stares at him for a moment, then laughs. Laughs, with her head tilted back and cheeks turning pink. "The Iliad. Homer. Ulysses and Achilles? The Trojan War? Oh, my god, dude. You're kidding me right now. Hold on." She whips her tablet out of her bag and taps at the screen. "You would totally dig this, and you actually have enough free time to read it. Aw, no email yet? The Avengers' mascot needs an email. Okay so – Loki at shield dot com…and your password…"
Suddenly, she curses under her breath and drops into a squat. Balancing her tablet on her thighs, she digs through her bag again until her hands emerges with a scrap of paper and a pen. Loki warily watches her from his chair. Each time they cross paths, she's nearly rudely familiar with him, and her fragmented speech, full of hyperbole and layered sarcasm, keeps the wheels in his head spinning double-time.
"Here." She folds the paper in half and passes it to him between two blue-tipped fingers. "Check your email later. Three 'x's, don't forget," Darcy tells him with a wink. When he doesn't immediately move, she waves the paper in figure eights – "C'mon, it's paper; don't be scared." – until he plucks it from her hand.
Director Fury calls out her name, and both Darcy and Loki twist around and see him leaning over his railing, hands braced out to his sides. "Who is this Logan?" Director Fury speaks to Darcy, but meets Loki's eyes as though Loki reached out with some crook and dragged her over to him by force.
"Some ramblin' man. He teaches Art at the Institute." Darcy grips the arm of Loki's chair and hauls herself up to standing.
"Look deeper. Something's off with that guy." Darcy groans and shuffles towards the door, mumbling about late lunches and cramps and chocolate. "And try to not piss off the Kennedy family while you're at it, Miss Lewis."
Darcy waves her hand dismissively as she passes by Fury on his dais. "Don't ask for impossible tasks, Nicholas."
"Director Fury."
Back in his chambers, well-guarded and armed and with Thor resting comfortably across the hall, Loki pulls the scrap of paper from his pocket.
Username: loki at SHIELD dot gov
Password: darcyroxxx
Her neat handwriting surprises him. He sets it on the desk in front of the screen and clicks on various icons on the desktop until he finds the electronic mail application.
A single email sits in his inbox from "darcyjlewis" and holds two strings of words and symbols. "Read this one first," Darcy had written ahead of the first string. He's seen SHIELD agents click on these, and so he does the same.
He recognizes the structure of an epic poem immediately, but the names are, for once, completely unfamiliar to him. It seems the Midgardians had been hard at work since the Asgardians had left them to their own devices.
Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus,
That brought countless ills upon the Achaeans.
Many a brave soul did it send hurrying down to Hades,
And many a hero did it yield a prey to dogs and vultures,
For so were the counsels of Jove fulfilled from the day
On which the son of Atreus, king of men, and great Achilles,
First fell out with one another.
And which of the gods was it that set them on to quarrel?
It was the son of Jove and Leto; for he was angry with the king
And sent a pestilence upon the host to plague the people,
Because the son of Atreus had dishonored Chryses his priest . . .
There's nothing in this world that I love more than getting comments on the story and characters, so please consider dropping me a note about how you felt about this chapter! I'm also on tumblr - my handle is labonsoirfemme. My ask box is always open. :D
