Hel looked at the sheaf of papers she'd printed out and sighed deeply. Three hundred odd years of keeping an eye out for signs of heightened inter-realm travel via the Bifröst by the Æsir, and after centuries of next to nothing, all signs were pointing to New Mexico being the new Midgard-Asgard Grand Central Station. This was, in short, Not Good.

At the sound of her sigh, Fenrir's ears pricked up and he lifted his massive head from his paws to look at her. 'What is it?'

"Trouble," she said grimly.

'Earth trouble?'

"I only wish." She pushed her chair back from her desk and stood. "I need to tell Nick."

Her brother, who resembled not so much a wolf at the moment as an enormous pile of fur and claws taking up half her office floor, lumbered to his feet as well. 'Want a ride?' he asked, giving her a big doggy grin.

"I really shouldn't," Hel demurred. After all, as the senior-most field agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., having been with the agency since it was the S.S.R., she had a certain responsibility to maintaining the company's image of efficiency and respectability.

'You know you want to,' Fenrir wheedled. 'I'll get you there faster than if you go on foot.'

"No playing bowling with the baby agents," Hel said firmly.

'Deal.'

Hel stuck the papers between her teeth to free up both her hands, grabbed hold of Fenrir's shaggy fur, and hauled herself up onto his back.

Screw respectability. If she had to go deliver 'Oh shit no' level news, then she was at least getting a wolf-back ride from her little brother out of it.

Fenrir waited just long enough for her to tuck the papers into the waistband of her trousers and twine her fingers into his ruff before he burst out of her office and into the corridor.

'GANGWAY!'

"Make a hole!"

Agents dove to either side as Fenrir thundered toward the end of the hall, and the stairwell.

"Move it!"

"Hel?" Agent Coulson called out as she and Fenrir drew closer.

"Nick's office," she yelled back.

They barreled through the door to the stairwell, took three flights of stairs in three giant leaps, sped out the door into another corridor, and came to an abrupt stop twenty yards down right outside the director's office.

"I thought I made it clear that running in the halls was to be reserved for emergencies only, Agents Lokadóttir and Lokason," Nick Fury greeted them dryly.

Fenrir beamed at the honorary title. He wasn't an agent – Hel had made certain that S.H.I.E.L.D. knew early on that, by æsir and jötnar standards, he was the equivalent of a gigantic eight year old. If he concentrated, he could shape-shift into a somewhat unnerving looking Midgardian boy, but strong emotions always forced him back into his true shape, and as odd as people found a prematurely gray child with burnt umber eyes, said child exploding into a wolf larger than most horses was far stranger. It certainly didn't help that, thanks to certain events in his early childhood, he was terribly shy and retiring outside of their Manhattan apartment and the S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters. It put serious limitations on where she could have her brother spend the work week, so she had asked for and received special permission to bring the giant furball to work with her. It was both easier and harder for their older brother, Jörmungandr, who refused to allow himself to be caught in so defenseless a form as a Midgardian child and instead spent all his time in his normal, five hundred foot long sea serpent shape just off the New England coastline.

"Hiya, Nick," Hel chirped. She slid off Fenrir's back and dropped to her feet. "And it was an emergency, kind of."

Fury looked between Hel, whose normally impeccable appearance was slightly rumpled from the ride to the office, and Fenrir, who stood twenty-one hands high at the withers. "Not an Earthly emergency, I take it."

Hel handed him the papers and flopped down in the chair across from his desk. "Take a look."

"Why don't you ever show me any respect, Agent Lokadóttir?"

"Because I've been around since long before you were a baby agent," she said with a sweet smile, and propped her feet up, combat boots and all, on his very shiny desk.

He scowled at her boots briefly and turned his attention to the papers. A few paragraphs in, and his eye widened slightly. By the third diagram, his eyebrow started to creep up his forehead. He reached the end and looked up at her, consternation writ large across his expressive face.

"I'm no astrophysicist, but this looks an awful lot like what you briefed the brass on when you first joined up."

"Bifröst One-Oh-One," Hel quipped. "How to identify common means of travel for the Æsir."

"Required reading for Level Five clearance and above," Fury said, nodding. "Someone here on Earth is studying this?"

"One Doctor Jane Foster, based out of New Mexico," Hel confirmed. "And you know how it goes."

Fenrir laid his head on Hel's shoulder. 'Where there's smoke, there's fire.'

"I don't like the sound of that," came a mild as milk voice from behind Fenrir's bulk. Hel twisted around to grin at Coulson as he squeezed by to take the remaining seat.

"That's because you have a functioning brain," Hel said. "Well?"

"I agree," Coulson said. "If she's studying the Bifröst, that implies that there's something happening worth studying."

"And that means we need eyes on that project. Lokadóttir, think you can handle that task? You'll know better than anyone what to look for."

Hel gave an eloquent shrug. "Scientists are always looking for unpaid college interns, and despite my age, I only look like I'm twenty-one or twenty-two. Foster's no different; I checked her website. I'm going to need a better alias than the one I have for everyday use outside of S.H.I.E.L.D. – Helena Locke's laughably transparent, not to mention over seventy years old. Do me up a good background, make sure wherever I'm staying is clear for ginormous pets, and we're good."

'I'm not your pet,' Fenrir huffed. 'And the only reason you look like an adult is because Dad made sure you were born to Midgardians. If he hadn't told Fate to screw itself by hiding you away, you'd look like a kid.'

"Don't be jealous, baby bro," Hel said, scratching him under the chin. "It just means that any æsir that come looking for me – if they ever wise up to the fact that I'm missing – will look for an elementary school kid and not a grown woman."

"We can pull out your old alias," Fury suggested. "The one you used during the first Gulf War."

"I like the surname, but Helene's a bit on the nose, considering that if it goes wrong, we might actually get an ás-hole or two in person, and depending on who it is, there's no telling how well I'll keep my temper," Hel said. Her hands drifted down to brush against the seaxes strapped to her thighs.

"If your relatives do show up, try not to call them ás-holes," Fury said as Coulson coughed to cover a laugh. "And there'll be no stabbing of the alien visitors until we've had a chance to interrogate them first."

Hel pouted at him cutely. She knew it was a cute look, because she'd tried it in the mirror a few hundred years before and discovered that when she widened her big, changeable gray-green-blue eyes in her porcelain-fair face and stuck her bottom lip out, men and women alike tended to cave.

"That hasn't worked on me in thirty years," Fury said, unmoved.

"It works on Býleistr and Helblindi," Hel said. "I just pout, and they immediately offer to teach me something new. I'm their very favorite part-jötunn."

Fury rubbed his forehead. "Can we get back on track?"

"Darcy," Coulson said. "You can use Darcy. It's my sister's name."

"Darcy Lewis," Hel said experimentally. "Darcy. I like it. Thanks, Phil."

Coulson nodded. "About backup. You are a certified field agent, but I don't know how comfortable you are with taking on this mission alone, considering its nature."

"I'm not taking it on alone; I'm going with Fen," Hel said. "But you're right. I'd like to have another field agent in the immediate area."

iIf you think I'm setting a foot outside the apartment while we're there, you're nuts,' Fenrir told her.

"I'll make sure that Agent Barton is free to take the mission as well," Fury said. "His cover, since you'll share living quarters, will be to pose as your significant other. Of course, it's just posing, as I'm certain that none of my agents would ever break fraternization regs." He glared mildly at Hel with his one good eye.

She looked back at him with perfect innocence. "I have no idea what you're talking about. Agent Barton and I are scrupulously following the frat regs." They really were. There wasn't anything in there about platonic friendship – one that had evolved into Clint giving her his Oath after a particularly hairy mission a few years back. He wasn't her boyfriend. He was her soldier, her messenger, her hand, and above all, her friend. If she had to have a fake boyfriend for the mission, it was best it was Clint.

"That's what I thought," Fury said. "Keep not knowing anything. It's better for my health."

"Although if you want to get technical, 'boyfriend' would really only be the right term on Earth," Hel continued. "Given that I'm queen of the unrighteous dead, the halls of Helheim, and the surrounding savage lands of Niflheim, he'd be my prince consort. If we were breaking frat regs."

"You give me a headache, Lokadóttir. You really do." Fury shook his head at her. "Coulson?"

"Eventually, you're going to have to go along with getting diplomatic immunity as the leader of a foreign nation," Coulson said. "Keep tossing around phrases like 'prince consort' and 'queen of the unrighteous dead' and we'll speed up the process."

"I won't be able to have fun as a field agent anymore if you do that," Hel objected immediately. "Would you really do that to me, Phil?"

"Stop creating paperwork for me to do, and I'll stop threatening to take away your fun," Coulson shot back.

Hel shrugged. "You can't really do anything, anyway. Until the Æsir show up again, Fen, Jör, and I are essentially in WitSec."

He gave her one of his tiny, mildly amused smiles. "And an excellent job you're doing of it, too."

"What's the timeline for departure?" Hel asked, changing the subject.

"I'll get the paperwork for your covers to you and Barton in a few hours," Coulson said, "And I'll reroute any other applicants for internship to Doctor Foster through our servers so that you're the only choice. We should have you out of New York and in New Mexico by the end of the month."

"Great," Hel said. She let her feet fall to the floor with a thud and bounced up. "I'll go tell Agent Undercover Boyfriend – sorry, Barton – what's up."

'I'll go download more books to your Kindle,' Fenrir chimed in. 'I have a feeling I'll be getting a lot of reading done while I'm cooped up.'

"I'll pack the – er, yeah," Hel said. "Never mind." She'd box up her home-brewed mead when she got back to the apartment.

"And Lokason," Fury called out to them as Fenrir trailed after Hel out the door.

'Yes, Nick?'

"No running."

'Boring.'

It's been quite a while since I've been active in fanfiction, and I'd love to know what you think. Feedback, after all, is love. :-)