Note: This was written before watching Avengers, and is therefore spoiler-free. Did I mention it's also wildly inaccurate?
Sam woke chained to a steel ring in the floor of a small concrete cell with a door and a one-way mirror. When he lifted his head to get his bearings, a fan whirred under the door and the air got staler and staler until he passed out again.
The second time Sam woke, he fought past his growing headache to discover he'd been fitted with a tight dog collar whose prongs dug into the back of his neck, his hands had been duck-taped into fists, and the god's clothes had been swapped for a set of powder-blue scrubs with the draw-string removed from the pants.
Whoever had him was scared. They had money, infrastructure, and resources, and they were still scared, cobbling restraints together, urgency driving them to forty-dollar fixes on a fifty-thousand-dollar budget. Probably government, by the mirror. Enlightened government, attacking a supernatural problem, so civilians didn't have to. Apparently the Men in Black were real.
Where had they been all Sam's life?
The door rattled. Sam gritted his teeth, rested his head on the foam mattress on the floor, and tried to look even more harmless than he felt.
A huge blond man in scale mail and a red cape burst into the cell, bouncing the door against the wall in his haste, skidded on his knees to Sam's side, and crushed him to his brawny chest. Sam wheezed.
"Brother!" the man cried. He held Sam at arm's length as though he weighed no more than a small child, and cast worried blue eyes over the shock collar and Sam's duck-taped fists. "What a sad reunion, this, that thou art bound—for the men of Shield still argue the need. My brother, why fledst thou so? Father and Mother mourned thee as the son of their very flesh, and shame on all the House of Odin, have we sown doubt that we thee cherish!" The man—god—pleaded with his eyes.
Sam did not relish this new god's reaction to the fact that he was not his errant brother. He licked his lips.
He was saved from some Shakespearean web of deceit when a second man swept into the room, this time, like Sam had been expecting of his captors, in a black Fed suit.
"I thought we'd agreed you were going to observe the interview," the Fed told the god.
The god rose in a swirl of red and armor. "Son of Coul, forgive my impatience. But to seek my brother so long, and to find him chained like a spy—"
"I understand," said 'Son of Coul.' "But you understand Loki is a serious threat."
"I do." The god slumped. The Fed gestured to the door, and the god left and locked it behind him.
Sam had been interviewed in front of one-way glass before, but he was used to sitting in a chair, cuffed to a table. He scooted back against the wall and sat cross-legged, watching the Fed tense at his every movement. The Fed remained standing. Sam folded his sweaty fists in his lap.
"I'm Agent Coulson, Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division, United States Department of Defense, United States of America, Earth, Midgard," the Fed announced. "I apologize for the accommodations," he continued, sounding about as far from sorry as professionalism could permit, "and I should warn you now that until we obtain a more appropriate restraint system, any time you attempt to escape, assault anyone, or work magic of any kind, you will receive a strong electrical shock. Do you understand?"
Sam nodded, and decided to treat the S.H.I.E.L.D. like a well-organized clan of demon hunters—they were working with a pagan god (and that said volumes about their ethics; he'd have to be extremely careful) so at least they had to be open-minded. "Before we get too far," Sam said cautiously, "I should tell you that I'm not actually . . . Loki."
"You'll forgive me for assuming otherwise," the agent replied. "Keep your hands and face visible from the mirror at all times. The mattress is on the floor; leave it on the floor. Don't fidget. Don't talk to yourself. Meals are provided three times daily. Bathroom breaks are after meals and just before lights out. We will continue to monitor you after lights out, so don't move. Do you understand?"
"What if I have an itch?"
"Warn us before you scratch it."
Sam grimaced. He was more concerned about what he could do to snap himself out of a hallucination if one happened—but he supposed a good taser to the back of the neck would work just fine. "I know I look like Loki," Sam said. "I met him in Lakeville. He grabbed me, and did some kind of—he changed my body so I look like him. And he switched our clothes."
"Again, you'll forgive S.H.I.E.L.D. for assuming otherwise."
"I'm an American citizen," Sam warned him.
"We don't do waterboarding," the agent said. He knelt, hands ever poised to draw some hidden weapon, and looked Sam in the eyes. "You seem to be taking this easily," he remarked.
Sam showed him a self-deprecating grin. "I'm panicking on the inside. Will your superiors understand that I don't know anything Loki knows?"
The agent's face soured. "We know better than to take any information from Loki at face value. You have nothing to worry about."
"Perfect." Sam sighed. He was trapped in the skin of a compulsive scheming liar and master of disguise. At least he hadn't been captured wearing his own face. "Can you explain to your pagan buddy that I'm not actually his brother?" He glanced at the door, then the mirror, and let his worry show.
The agent shrugged. "I'll try but he won't buy it from me. He's a good guy, though. Now because of the threat Loki poses and the difficulty we face in verifying your claims, you should expect to be detained indefinitely. Good behavior will not lower your security level. I understand this is unconstitutional and illegal, but in this case, S.H.I.E.L.D. is willing to shoulder that responsibility for the protection of the American People."
Sam's face twitched, and he looked around the bare room. "Could I get some reading material?"
"We'll consider it," the agent replied. "Probably not."
Sam grimaced. Pencil and paper, he could see being used in some kind of spell by an expert with considerable intrinsic power and a great memory. A book as a weapon or tool stretched the bounds of his considerable imagination.
"Dinner is in three hours," the agent told him, rising. "Don't ask the guards for anything. Don't give yourself a medical emergency. In fact, don't speak unless spoken to and don't look anyone in the eye. If the complex experiences anything unusual for the duration of your stay, you're getting shocked and sedated. Do you understand?"
Sam swallowed and nodded.
The agent turned to the mirror. "Thor, you can come back in if you like."
Thor. Once heavily worshiped as a fertility and weather god; prideful, honest, and impetuous, with a bit of a temper—according to the lore of the peoples who'd worshiped him. Sam narrowed his eyes and against his better judgment, addressed the agent. "You know what he is and you still work with him?"
The agent shot him a warning look. "We do."
"You know what he eats, right?"
The agent's brow wrinkled, but whatever reply he had was stoppered when the god in red and scale mail thundered back into the room. Sam pasted on an awkward smile. The agent patted Thor on the shoulder and left the cell.
Thor gazed down at Sam sadly. "Truly thou art not Loki?" he asked. "Or Loki in truth, lying and willingly captured. Oh my brother, why must thou hide in these games?"
"That thing with the kindergarteners, that killed two people and scarred the kids and teachers for life, that was a game?" Sam demanded, narrowing his eyes.
The god swallowed loudly and sat crosslegged, mirroring Sam. "A harsh game," he said. "My brother's mind is subtle. I confess I'd never troubled to divine the truth of him." He smiled apologetically and searched Sam's changed eyes.
"I'm not him," Sam told the god. "I don't even sound like him, except for the voice."
"My brother is very clever," the god replied wistfully.
Sam took a risk. If S.H.I.E.L.D. caught on to who Sam actually was, and then caught up to Dean, the best they could hope for was a psychiatric facility, otherwise death row. But Sam and Dean had had dealings with a being calling itself Loki before, each of which had ended in humiliation or tragedy or both, and while all the signs implied this Loki was a different person entirely, Sam suspected he would bring more of the same. He'd play with Dean a bit before playfully killing him.
Thor seemed straight-forward from what Sam had seen, and S.H.I.E.L.D.'s control over him seemed tenuous at best. If he was getting free, it would be through Thor. Sam leaned forward and met Thor's eyes, his voice low and urgent. "I have a brother, too," he confided. "When Loki gave me his body, he took mine, and I think he's out there somewhere wearing my face and playing a game with my brother. Now, all I know about Loki is what he did to those kids and me, but it makes me scared what he's doing now."
Thor scowled at him, and Sam had to stop himself from flinching. "My brother would never—" He cut himself off and subsided. "Since we were children—He was ever cunning, canny. His mind grew restless and he made strange amusements. But he was never cruel. He was always fair when we played—though at times it seemed not so." Confusion was raw in Thor's face, a shock still humming there like the thrum of a rung bell, from something recent.
"Could you tell me about your brother?" Sam asked. "Why's he missing? What happened?"
Thor gazed at the floor with anguish on his open face, sighed, and told Sam a story. Sam listened, snatching at every detail, and imagined what the god whose body he wore might be doing right now to Dean.
On returning from the day's excursion to the Astral Plane, Dr. Stephen Strange, Sorcerer Supreme of Earth, joined his wife Clea, Sorceress Supreme of the Dark Dimension, for a dinner of Spanish pork prepared by their talented chef Adelaide, perused the financial section of the New York Times, communed with a few departed souls, and returned the day's phone calls.
The third call, to an unfamiliar number, connected him to the most terrifying man ever entrusted with the security of the United States of America.
"Fury," snapped the man. "S.H.I.E.L.D. Talk."
"Colonel Fury, this is Dr. Stephen Strange, Sorcerer Supreme of Earth," Dr. Strange replied, unfazed. "You called me this afternoon. I believe you consider your problem urgent?"
"Damn right," Fury barked. "You hear of a jumped-up psycho god called Loki? 'Cause we've got him. Thought you might be interested, and you bet your ass it's urgent, 'cause we got no clue how long we'll be able to hold him in custody."
Dr. Strange sighed. "You haven't 'got' Loki."
"Well, my men cuffed someone who looks a hell of a lot like him," Fury shot back.
"I can count on one hand the means that would neutralize a being like Loki," Strange replied, "and they are all beyond your capability. Beyond mine, too, for the time being."
"What do you know about our capabilities?" Fury demanded.
"More than you know of mine." A tense silence cracked on the phone lines. "While I avoid publicity, I don't bury my head in the sand."
"That's fair," Fury replied, after another breath of silence. "So you're saying either Loki's playing us, or it's like the guy says and he's not Loki."
"Or the godling got into trouble and turned himself in to use you for sanctuary," Strange suggested. "Whatever the case, I would consent to see your prisoner."
"Good to hear. I'll send you a jet."
Strange smiled and curled his toes in his silk slippers. "No need. I prefer to transport myself. We couldn't want to endanger your men or your prisoner with your barbaric incompetence any longer than necessary."
He replaced the handset with a satisfying click, stood, and opened his closet. A visit to S.H.I.E.L.D. merited his full regalia. One virtue the government had never mastered was humility, and Fury was a prime example—but in Stephen Strange, any humility would just be false.
Thor's story was long, but Sam, faced with days of sitting on the floor of an empty cell trying not to twitch threateningly, was in no hurry for him to finish. Thor had a linear, factual way of remembering things that forced Sam to read between the lines for hints at Loki's character.
Loki was the younger of the pair—"Though now I think on it, I cannot be certain"—and the more secretive one. He seemed to have tagged along on many of Thor's adventures with his friends. Hunts—they were always killing something dangerous, whether a wolf or a dragon or a mystical boar. Sam didn't know what to do with the notion of gods as Hunters. Perhaps the troublesome gods he and Dean had killed had left gaps in the top of the monster ecosystem, and humans would be paying for their deaths down the road.
The murky picture of Thor and Loki's childhood—brothers? Where did the myths get their information?—cleared a bit when Thor recounted the day of his coronation. Apparently Loki was the second place brother as well as the second born; his quick mind and magical aptitude hadn't earned him any real place in the court. And Loki sounded like the type to let a grudge stew. Thor's story grew more jagged as he recalled more recent events and rawer wrongs—Thor, banished; Loki, thrust to his father's throne; the kind of fist fight that happened when two brothers had a communication breakdown and access to arcane super-weapons; and at last, in a coup de gras of untold schemes, Loki's assassination of an enemy king, near-genocide of an enemy people, strumming of the guy-wires of the entire multiverse, and willing drop into the void of space beneath Asgard's great bridge.
Sam had walked that road. Loki had apparently gotten farther along, what with fleeing his brother's overtures of reconciliation and choosing instead to inflict wanton havoc upon humanity, but Sam knew that road.
"I suspect my brother's mind is still troubled, ever since our father confessed that Loki is, in truth, a son of Jötunheim," Thor remarked in closing, cradling his broad head in his hands, and for Sam, that was the clincher.
"He discovered he's the same kind of monster he was raised to fight all his life?" Sam clarified.
Thor bristled. "My brother is no monster," he boomed. Sam flinched back. "And the people of Jötunheim—but, yes. Ere now, we would both have called them so."
Sam chewed on Thor's story. A revelation like that . . . once you got hit with that bombshell, you couldn't go on as yourself; you couldn't chase your dreams and desires just because they were yours; if you were a monster, you didn't deserve dreams. If you went on living at all, it was because you had a mission.
Sam looked up at Thor and prayed he'd be able to provide a useful answer. "If Loki had a mission," Sam asked, slowly, "what do you think it would be?"
"A mission," Thor echoed. He looked up. "Like a quest?"
Sam grimaced. "Like an obsession," he replied.
Thor's brow furrowed. "I must think on this."
"No, just off the top of your head," Sam protested, unwilling to lose Thor's company. "Whatever comes to mind is fine."
"This is a weighty matter deserving careful thought," Thor rebuked him, and Sam knew better than to argue. Thor rested a heavy callused hand on Sam's shoulder, and Sam tensed. "In case—if thou art Loki," Thor said thickly, "know that I forgive thee thy true and imagined crimes, and wish only that thou wouldst hie home."
Sam opened and closed his mouth, concerned, in spite of himself, for the sincere and affectionate god, who was likely to get his inhuman heart smashed to bits. "Sometimes when people know they've done something wrong," Sam suggested, watching Thor's eyes, "they don't want to go home until they think they've suffered enough."
"Then I shall drag him back by force," Thor declared, and left Sam alone in the cell.
Sam's fists itched. He glared at Loki's face in the mirror, still at a loss for what the god might want with Dean. The talk with Thor had been educational, but he wasn't going anywhere tonight.
Sam's hallucinations were always worse when he was bored and nervous, so after dinner (a hot dog and a sports bottle of water; no, they wouldn't un-tape his hands) and a bathroom break (a bed-pan and four guards, three armed and one with latex gloves) he spent an hour watching Satan's human vessel finger-painting on the walls with his blood. His nose itched. When he lifted his cuffed hands to scratch it against the duck tape, he got his first shock from the collar, which left him choking for air and snapped Lucifer back to the scarred crevices of Sam's brain.
It was good to know that the voltage on the collar wasn't lethal to humans, but he was in no hurry to get zapped again. Sam spent the rest of the hours until lights out rigid with nerves.
They really weren't taking any chances on him getting loose. Sam's best bet was still Thor, who seemed decent and ungovernable enough to help Sam escape, for a good enough reason. An alternative would be to promise S.H.I.E.L.D. a line on the real Loki—he could do it, as long as Loki stuck around with Dean—but that would put Dean and a being that looked like Sam Winchester in the clutches of a law enforcement agency, and things would be worse than when they'd started.
After lights out, Sam lay flat on his back on the mattress, wide awake, trying not to move. It took an hour before he started to relax. Then the lights turned back on.
Agent Coulson came in the door, then stood aside to admit yet another tall man in an elaborate costume complete with cape. This one's neatly cut salt and pepper hair could let him pass for a human corporate executive, but the flowing blue silk shirt, high-collared red cape with brocade trim, and large gold brooch made the conservative grooming moot. He was followed by an imposing black man in an eye-patch and a leather trench coat, bearing a Desert Eagle. Sam figured they meant serious business.
"More gods?" he demanded. He got shocked for startling the guy behind the mirror with the remote, and the visitors reacted: Coulson with a subtle wince, the man with the Desert Eagle by taking aim, and the man in the cape with a sneer of contempt.
"Crude," said the possible god, "and useless against any being of real power. If your organization has the intelligence of an average ten-year-old, you should free this man."
"I decide the level of risk my men live with," the man in the eyepatch retorted. He twitched his mouth and turned to the mirror. "Stand down for now. The expert's on site."
Sam cautiously pushed himself to a seat. "Who—and what—are you?" he grunted, when the movement didn't earn him another shock.
"Colonel Nick Fury," the black man boomed, "director of S.H.I.E.L.D., which takes down threats the rest of the D.O.D. isn't ready to know about. I'm a human. My friend, here, is Stephen Strange, some kind of wizard type. Despite his best efforts, he's still a human."
"And this prisoner," said Strange, waving two fingers through the air and making the duck tape on Sam's hands peel away into two neat rolls, "is either Loki in a severely disabled state, or a United States citizen unlawfully detained."
Fury glared. Sam winced and rubbed the backs of his hands where the hairs had been ripped out. Moving slowly, he unbuckled the dog collar and rubbed the dents the electrodes had left in the back of his neck.
"Do your thing," Fury ordered Strange.
Strange waved his hand and conjured a black velvet cushion onto the floor, then sat in half-lotus on it, facing Sam. Sam tightened his fists and looked sidelong at Fury. Magic did strange things to the brain, and he'd prefer facing the government agent with no oversight to the brusque "wizard type."
Strange's eyes glazed over, and Sam wondered what abnormalities he was seeing. The gold brooch at Strange's throat glowed unnaturally. Looking at it hurt Sam's head.
"There is no great power in this man," Strange murmured, clearly engaged in his unseen work. "Though there are . . . channels for it. Burns and stomata and fistulous tracts—" his brow wrinkled in disgust— "scars and healed breaks, islands and pockets in his psyche—by the Vishanti, I've never seen a live human in such a state."
Sam bared his teeth. "I find a positive attitude helps get me through the day."
Strange raised a bushy eyebrow. "None of which is relevant to the nation's security," he allowed. "This man is not and has never been Loki, and he has no active spellwork on him—"
"It's not a glamour?" Sam interrupted, drawing sharp looks from the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents.
"Not at all; it's a true transmogrification," Strange announced, fascinated. "Much more delicate and draining in the short term, but perpetually stable because the change is as real as matter."
Sam swallowed.
"A novice could glamour you into a fish," Strange continued, oblivious or perhaps dismissive of Sam's growing panic, "but you'd drown in water. Transmogrified, on the other hand, you could be a fish for the rest of your life."
Well, Sam thought hysterically, at least he didn't match his mugshot anymore.
Fury loomed over them. "We already know Loki's bad news. Can you track him?"
"The cords and wave-forms of Asgardian magic are refined and intricate, and Loki's workmanship is such that what few residues remain of his power are fully self-contained," Strange said. "So, no."
Fury growled.
"I can, of course, reverse the entire effect with access to an item the victim owned before the change," Strange added, snatching something out of the air. Sam had a half second to recognize a wad of blood-stained flannel that had been one of his shirts two months ago, before Strange clapped his entire free hand across Sam's face and intoned an incantation in a language Sam didn't recognize that made the room grow hot and blurred. Sam couldn't move away. He had a bad feeling about the whole thing, but the reason escaped him until the spell finished and Strange dropped his hand.
Fury and Coulson both sighted their pistols on Sam's head.
"Coulson," Fury demanded, "is that Sam motherfuckin' Winchester?"
Coulson nodded, his aim steady. "I believe so, sir."
Fury gestured with the muzzle of his Desert Eagle. "Put the shock collar back on."
Strange, securing his place on Sam's list of assholes powerful enough to save the world twice over but too self-absorbed to bother, had vanished quick as a demon after undoing Loki's work. Bored, apparently. Fury had wasted no time in pouncing on Sam.
"The Winchester boys," he gloated, pacing back and forth before the mirror. "Always suspected we'd run into you. You fake your death once or twice, we stop assuming decapitation is gonna take."
"Obviously you don't need the 'truth is out there' speech," Sam replied. "Those shootings weren't us."
"The shootings only fooled the rest of the world because we live on a planet of dumbasses," Fury agreed. "For the rest of your rap sheet—let me guess, you had a good reason."
Sam glared. "We take out the threats the rest of the world isn't ready to know about. Not human, but sometimes the corpses look that way. And we gotta eat."
"You're no good to me unless you start pointing fingers."
"Dick Roman, the Dick Roman of Richard Roman Enterprises, was replaced last year by one of a new species of shapeshifters that escaped to the living world when a gate to Purgatory was opened as part of an angelic civil war. They're called Leviathan. They can blend into society almost perfectly, but they'll go for long-pig whenever they can get away with it. Their skin burns under a weak solution of sodium borate. Decapitation slows them down, but we still don't know how to kill them. Two of them took our faces and did the shootings."
"So you're a vigilante," Fury summarized, "and you and your brother were both framed for mass murder by evil shapeshifters from another dimension."
Sam just glared. If Fury wanted the truth, he could choke on the truth.
Fury snapped his fingers, and Sam twitched, half expecting some elaborate weapon or savage animal to manifest from the force of his will. But Fury was only human, and he was only getting the attention of the personnel behind the mirror. "You got that?" he demanded to the air. "Leviathans. Put 'em on the threat wall."
There was no sound from beyond the cell, but from Fury's assured expression, there was no question his order was being carried out.
"So you believe me?" Sam asked, suspicious.
Fury snorted. "That's what I have fact checkers for. Now, I'm gonna level with you—whether or not you're some wanna-be supervillain who shoulda joined theater club when you had the chance, we don't do murder and torture here. Not even for fellas who are legally dead. Loki, on the other hand, once killed the Norse version of Jesus with a pointy stick for shits and giggles." Fury let himself out the door and paused at the threshold. "Let my men know when you're ready to help us track your brother down."
"Now's fine," Sam said. His blood pounded. Lucifer was laughing in his ear.
Fury raised his eyebrows, then nodded in approval. "Good answer." He left Sam and Coulson staring at each-other across Coulson's gun. Sam tried to control his racing heart.
"I'll need a list of your brother's hide-outs and aliases," Coulson said.
"We don't operate like that anymore," Sam replied. "I'll need a computer with Internet access. The trail's cold; you can't track him, but I might be able to figure out where he's going."
Coulson lowered his weapon. "Send in Voight from Analysis and an escort team," he commanded to whoever watched behind the mirror.
Sam forced himself to relax in the cuffs, ignored Lucifer, and told himself that he knew what he was doing. Four armed guards and a middle-aged woman in khakis arrived to lead him from the interview room five minutes later. Sam went quietly.
S.H.I.E.L.D. pretty much let Sam research whatever he could possibly think of, and what Sam couldn't access without the hacking scripts from his laptop, Agent Voight could retrieve through Patriot Act back-doors in seconds. Once Voight got over the idea of working with a notorious satanist serial killer and got a handle on the kinds of news Sam was looking for, the work went fast. Sam found five new hunts and checked up on several anomalies he'd had his sights on already. A series of unexpected deaths in Lexington looked less like a vengeful spirit than a cursed object, according to a map one of Voight's programs generated from victims' credit card purchases. Something was eating teenagers in Cascade State Park. Voight found a kid in New Mexico, either a warlock, a rogue psychic, or a mutant, who seemed to drive people around him violently insane.
Finding Dean was complicated by the fact that it wasn't just Dean he was looking for—it was Dean hunting with Loki, who they could only assume was still impersonating Sam. If Loki nixed the hunts or sucked Dean into his own games, Sam might never find his brother unless Loki wanted him to.
Assuming Sam would even follow through with leading S.H.I.E.L.D. to Dean. Loki might just be the lesser of the two evils.
S.H.I.E.L.D. was considerate enough, now they knew Sam as just a six-and-a-half-foot mass murderer with combat training instead of a trickster god, to bring him and Agent Voight coffee. They worked through the night, looking for hunts that might catch Dean's attention, and Sam pursuing rabbit trails to keep S.H.I.E.L.D. from zeroing in on him until Sam had made up his mind.
Murderers took years—decades, often—to make it to the chair or the needle, and he and Dean were shoe-ins for the insanity defense. Hell knew they'd both benefit from psychiatric care. They still had a mission out there, ghosts and monsters and curses and demons, but other hunters could do the same jobs. They knew more than anyone else alive about Leviathan, but that really wasn't much. Dean wanted revenge, but he'd most likely die in the attempt—and Sam might just be arrogant enough to take that from him, even if they spent the rest of their lives in separate cells.
Or Sam could find it in himself to let Dean die on his own terms. If he found a hunt he knew would draw Dean in, he honestly didn't know what he'd tell S.H.I.E.L.D.
At 6:00 am, Voight's shift ended, and the escort team dragged Sam away from the computers, through bland white hallways, into an elevator, and down a heavily monitored concrete corridor to leave him in an ordinary prison cell.
Sam meditated himself to sleep on the too-small bunk.
He woke panicked. He was trapped, there were bars all around, and he couldn't hear Dean breathing raggedly across the room. He was imprisoned by some kind of shadow-government and a pagan god with brother issues was playing house with Dean.
Thor was back, looming outside the cell. He was wearing the same red cape and scale mail from yesterday, looking more like the clothes were a natural part of his skin than like he'd rolled out of bed in them. He was frowning.
Sam rolled to his feet and stretched his shoulders. He couldn't kid himself—for all that he could push-start a Dodge Ram, in a fight, he was barely on a par with a demon-possessed fifth-grade girl. Most of Sam's heavily trained muscle served only to protect his spine when he got flung into walls and tombstones, and to spring him to his feet fast enough to retrieve his weapon. Thor could probably smash his skull in by flicking him in the forehead. Looking him in the eye still made Sam feel a little better.
"Hi," Sam said warily.
Thor squinted at him, shifting from foot to foot.
"We talked yesterday," Sam reminded him when the silence got too long.
"Indeed," Thor boomed, as though startled at being caught hesitating. He puffed himself up, and Sam felt himself standing even straighter to match him and shifting his weight onto his toes. There was nowhere to escape in the small cell, but if Thor came in after him, he'd have to get the door open first—Sam assumed. "I shared my brother's woes with thee," Thor announced, "and I see I did so in error."
"I told you I wasn't him," Sam protested, struggling to keep his tone level and calm.
"I took a risk," Thor replied. "And as I hear tell, thou art held outlaw—thou lackst the honor to bind thee to thy word, and may well spread my brother's troubles to the four winds."
Sam blinked and ran Thor's words over in his head. He sat on the small cot and looked up at Thor. "Just because I've broken . . . some laws, doesn't mean I don't have personal honor."
"Fah!" Thor scoffed. "Thou defyest thy sworn liege and ask me to spare thy neck on thy weak word, dog?"
Sam stiffened and checked that the light on the cell's surveillance camera was still blinking. "Your allies wouldn't be happy if you killed me without their permission. And we don't have—I've never sworn 'fealty' to any 'liege'; we don't do that in this country."
Thor blanched. "A nation without oath or lordship?"
"It works on penalties and remuneration," Sam explained. "I mean—me and my brother, we have honor. We can keep secrets," though that depended on whose. "I'd be shocked if these people ever let me go, and if I did get out, the odds of us running into anyone who has a chance against your brother are—" pretty good actually— "negligible." Sam dug deep and pulled out his sincerest face.
Thor looked less thunderous, more stymied. He scratched the back of his neck a gesture that reminded Sam startlingly of Dean caught on the horns of a dilemma.
"You know S.H.I.E.L.D. wants me to lead them to my brother," Sam threw out. "I don't know how much luck I'll have with that."
"Loki is likely still with him," Thor said. "If he caught his fancy enough for him to concoct such an elaborate ruse."
Sam winced. "Yeah."
"If he were finished with this game, he would make it known," Thor mused, pacing in front of Sam's cell. "He always finds an audience when he wants one."
"I've got to ask you about that," Sam cut in. "You've seen him...play games, you've gotta know how they tend to play out."
Thor's eyebrows furled doubtfully.
"I mean, if S.H.I.E.L.D. walked in on him and did their government spook strike force thing—would that make things better or worse? Why's he doing this? What's he want?"
"My brother's motives—" Thor cut himself off and drummed his thumb against the bars. "I think—he is a riddle."
"I just want my brother to get out...okay," Sam said. "Free would be great, even though I doubt S.H.I.E.L.D. would just let him walk. But he's gotta be okay."
Thor bowed his head. "I say this as between lone travelers, without bonds or history—if thou wishest thy brother to be well—though it pains me mightily to say—my comrades had best confront my brother, ere his game begins to bore him."
Sam swallowed, fresh adrenaline flooding his system. "Thanks, Thor."
"You owe me nothing," Thor replied, and left the cell block.
Sam stood and looked the cell's camera in the eye, waving. "I'm ready to get back to work now."
Sleep deprivation set in by noon, when Sam got some funny looks when it turned out he'd been having a conversation with the day shift analyst assigned to him, an Agent Wills, that Agent Wills hadn't actually participated in. Sam hated when the crazy got subtle. Give him a knee-deep flood of blood and intestines, and he wouldn't miss a step, but when it got plausible—or, when gods got involved, when the implausible happened to be true—Sam would wonder for the hundredth time whether it was a net benefit to humanity for him to carry a gun.
Agent Wills had turned away from his computer terminal to stare at him and two of the escort team had drawn stun guns. "I'm sorry," Sam said, keeping his hands on his desk.
"Kieth, hit the vending machine and get the prisoner a Monster," Wills ordered a guard.
"No, no, that won't help," Sam interrupted. Stimulants were the opposite of helpful when this happened. "Let's just get back to the research, all right?"
Wills waved a hand for Kieth to stand down. Sam was positive he'd report his schizo moment. Let him.
He was starting to love working with the S.H.I.E.L.D. analysts. Voight had put out an APB last night reminding police departments to verify the credentials of any Federal agents showing up at crime scenes unannounced, in case Dean had been flashing his F.B.I. badge. S.H.I.E.L.D. data-mining programs easily adapted to search coroner's reports for unusual clusters of deaths. Both Wills and Voight had caught on to Sam's nebulous search criteria that sifted out what Dean called "our kind of crazy," as well as they could without the trivia bank Sam had accumulated from years of hitting dead end after dead end until he finally got a match for the latest supernatural threat. Get S.H.I.E.L.D. on board with ghost-busting, and humanity might be the safest it'd been since the Devil's Gate was first sealed. They even knew not to spill the beans to the public and cause mass panic.
Two hours after a fast-food lunch, they stopped—not because Sam had found Dean, but because breaking news from Reno, Nevada screamed trickster god so loud that S.H.I.E.L.D. didn't really need Sam's help after all. Loki had gotten bored.