A/N: I guess I'm expanding this! ;)
Disclaimer: I don't own the Avengers or any of the related rights.
...
This was almost too good to be true.
Loki watched in quiet glee as the Avengers paraded along in front of him—well, most of them, anyway. He could tell they weren't under any spell, that they were still themselves, so this had to be an elaborate prank of some kind.
And since this world knew him as a god of mischief, he felt he should do his godlike duty and approve their actions. Make them a little more permanent.
He did not see the monster or the self-proclaimed genius with them. Perhaps they were the intended target of the trick. Loki debated quietly waiting for the team to return to their precious Tower before he attacked, but his brother was without Mjolnir, and Loki did not know when another such chance would come.
They'd practically laid out a welcome mat for him.
He waited until they were all piled into one car before he threw one of his illusions onto the car's dashboard, perched with legs crossed and an interested expression.
And when his brother threw out his hand to call for Mjolnir, Loki knew his soul was still in the right body.
He didn't have much time to make the switch, so he hurriedly stopped the car and locked all exits. "And here I was debating how best to ruin my brother's day, and you have all so graciously given me exactly the tools I needed."
The woman reached right into a pocket in the outfit her partner wore and pulled out a gun, though she didn't seem all that surprised when the bullet passed right through Loki. Very little could rattle that woman.
"Brother!" Thor thundered. "What are you doing here?"
Loki waved his hand. "If I stopped to tell you that, your precious hammer would arrive before I finished my tale. So," he said, stretching his legs, "right to business."
…
Tony looked up in surprise when Mjolnir rocketed out of the window. The others had only been gone for twenty minutes to meet up with one of Thor's Asgardian friends (though Tony was starting to suspect that was just an excuse for them to get out of the Tower and away from Tony's monitoring systems—they'd all been suspiciously chummy).
Whoever they met must have switched their bodies back to normal, then, if Mjolnir was anything to go by.
But then one of his alarms was going off, the panic alarm he'd installed in every car in case they were attacked on the streets—which, surprisingly, seemed to happen to them a lot, when really, shouldn't the bad guys have learned by now that attacking one Avengers called down the wrath of the rest of them?
Tony called his armor to him and was only partly clad when the bits and pieces suddenly stopped in mid-flight. He could see them, but they weren't moving.
That's when Loki showed up, and Tony knew something had definitely gone wrong.
Loki looked disdainfully over at the half of Tony's armor that hadn't quite made it, then at Tony. "You mean to help your friends when they have been so dishonest to you?" he asked quietly, but in typical Loki fashion, he didn't bother to follow up that statement with anything that resembled rational explanation. Instead, he waved his hand, and Tony found himself somewhere else. Somewhere very different.
Crap.
…
Bruce had only closed his eyes for a second, but now that he opened them, he seemed to be in the Avengers' living room, and Tony's armor was headed right for him!
The faceplate smacked into place over his face, and Bruce sighed at the enclosed space. "Tony," he said, "I don't know what you're up to, but this . . . ." He trailed off.
"Oookay." He watched as the helmets internal systems lit up with life, showing him readouts and information and a playback function. Yep, that was what he wanted.
Bruce was almost too scared to look at anything that wasn't the internal systems, because he didn't much want to think about why he sounded like Tony Stark.
"JARVIS," he said, still sounding very much like Tony, "can you hook me into the Tower's security systems? Play back the last few minutes so I can see what happened?"
"Yes, sir," JARVIS replied, which was weird.
And as Bruce watched, he knew there was no getting around it. He saw Loki, he watched the transformation from the outside, but that still didn't make it any less weird.
He felt the Tower tremble and saw rubble falling. He threw up his hands instinctively and mentally clamped down on the Other Guy, waiting for his automatic defense system to kick in and turn him green . . . but it didn't happen.
"This isn't good," he said, and for the first time in a while, he let himself panic at the danger he knew he was in.
…
Natasha put her hands up in front of her face, shielding her body against the glass as she crashed through it. She'd been going a lot faster than she'd anticipated, and once she crashed through, she looked back down at a very embarrassed-looking Clint (in Thor's body). "Sorry!" he shouted up at her.
Well, she had asked for a boost.
Natasha brushed herself off, surprised by the soreness in her arm where she'd landed. Clint had fallen pretty hard on his side in their last mission, but he'd sworn he was okay. If the throbbing was anything to go by, he was a dirty liar, and she should have known better, but he'd been able to shoot his arrows no problem, and so she'd brushed it off and figured he could kid himself for a while longer as long as it wasn't serious. Besides, she'd had a prank to plan.
The Hulk was freaking out on the top floors, but so far, he hadn't left the Tower. And he and Hawkeye had come to an understanding forever ago, back when the Hulk first surfaced accidentally, just a few months after New York and the Chitauri, when some idiot terrorist thought it would be a good idea to bomb the still-under-construction Tower to delay the Avengers assembling for a little longer.
The Hulk came out, and Hawkeye had just strolled right up to him, stood in his path with his arms crossed, and told the Hulk to "Calm down, you moron."
Natasha wasn't sure she could do what Clint could do. The way he treated the Hulk like an annoying little brother or an old roommate who got mad when you left too many dishes in the sink. But she knew the Hulk recognized Hawkeye, and so maybe this was worth a shot.
Clint was coming in after her as Thor to cover her back—he always had her back—but she'd asked that she try flying solo first.
"Aren't you scared?" he'd asked.
She hadn't answered, because he should have known better than to ask. Of course she was scared. The Hulk was one of the few forces in this world that could actually terrify her, and she'd seen personally what he was capable of. She didn't know how Clint could antagonize and tease the Big Guy unless he had a death wish (which, thankfully, she knew he didn't—he was just a moron).
But Clint should have known better. He wasn't supposed to call her out on anything that resembled weakness.
She turned the next corner and found Iron Man splayed out on the floor. He looked like he might be unconscious, and his arm was bent at an angle that definitely couldn't be good for him. Half the armor was missing from that arm, too, and it looked like it might have been torn right off.
Natasha started towards Iron Man, but a deep rumbling just beyond Iron Man stopped her.
And then he was there. The Hulk. Angrier than she'd seen him since the time he thought the Wrecking Crew had killed Clint (to be fair, they'd very nearly succeeded, but Clint had more lives than a cat and also didn't seem to mind hiding in really tight places that he shouldn't have been physically able to squeeze into).
But the surprising thing was what the Hulk was shouting: "MY ARMOR! GIVE IT BACK."
….
Clint really wished he could fly. That might at least have made up for the fact that everything was way too soft and easily broken around him.
He heard the Hulk shouting and pushed Thor's body a little bit harder. Natasha's plan was sound, yeah, but half the secret of calming the Hulk down was throwing him off the rage by annoying him. It was counter-intuitive, but it worked. If the Hulk was distracted by the surprise of a "puny human" standing toe to toe with him, that moment of distraction was enough to let the thinking side kick in.
The Hulk wasn't a mindless beast, after all. He could take orders just as well as he could take a hit. He just needed a moment to remember that mind.
Clint was almost caught up with Natasha when he heard the crashing and paused long enough to catch part of the falling ceiling—yeah, that was weird—before he heard, "MY AMOR! GIVE IT BACK."
Oh.
Oh no.
Clint pushed himself even harder and crashed right through the wall (which only sort of hurt, sort of like crashing into a training dummy) into the path of the rampaging Hulk. He took the scene in with just a glance: Natasha standing there in his body, her jaw clenched in her "coming up with a new plan that better fits these circumstances" expression; Iron Man splayed out on the floor with one arm missing its armor; the Hulk standing there with pieces of that armor crushed in his fist.
"Cool it, Big Guy," Clint said, jumping in between the suit, Natasha, and the Hulk.
For a moment, the Hulk paused. Then, baring his teeth, he said, "LOKI."
"Yeah, yeah," Clint said, slowly making his way towards the Iron Man suit. "We saw him earlier. Made the body swap a permanent thing." Better not say anything about how the whole thing was a prank, or the Tony Stark version of Hulk might get even more angry.
"LOKI TOOK MY ARMOR AWAY."
"Almost right," Clint said. He knelt down beside Iron Man, but that got a big Hulk scream, so he stood back up quickly. No matter. He'd checked for a pulse in the exposed arm, and it was there. Faint, but there. "He put you in Banner's body, Stark."
"PUT ME BACK."
"Sure thing, Stark. But if you want out of there, you're going to have to calm down."
That was definitely the wrong thing to say. "NO CALM DOWN. FIX STARK," Stark-Hulk shouted, and then he punched Clint.
