Disclaimer: Nothing from Marvel or Thor or Avengers is mine.


Stark Tower, Midgard.


Syn did not think her first meeting with Bruce Banner, once he had arrived at Stark tower later that evening, was one of her better moments.

It could possibly end up on her list of Really Dumb Stuff You Did While In Midgard, which based on the amount of time she had spent here, was getting rather long. Thor had one of these lists too, but his was much shorter than hers. Although he made up for a lack of quantity with things like getting hit with a taser.

She was tempted to blame her current mistake on the deep intelligence in Banner's beautiful brown eyes. It was an almost gentle lure, beckoning, and so she couldn't resist a deeper peek.

She should have been more careful. Almost five years of living on Earth, stripped of her ability, had made her reckless.

She had forgotten how dangerous it could be to look deep into the heart of a person. She had forgotten how often she hadn't liked what she saw. Secrets. Things people kept hidden. Sometimes for a very good reason.

For Banner, what she saw, what she felt, was Rage, with the capital letter and everything.

Not the rage of a person angry or bitter with reason, but rage with no direction or outlet. It was just pure and acerbic fury, the simple essence of it, undiluted, galled and fermenting. She felt it as a pull, at first, drawing her in, but then it was an indescribable pressure under her skin. Like everything on the inside was struggling to get out, as if her skin was boiling and peeling away with heat and agony.

It was, when she thought about it later, how she imagined it might feel to get hit with a taser.

She pulled herself back so quickly that she bumped into the imposing figure standing too close behind her. A vicious snicker signified that Loki not only knew that she used her gift, but also what she had seen. Like some boss from hell, he had always had a knack for catching her in her worst moments.

And taunting her with it. His whisper soft voice danced across her ear, his breath hot against the back of her neck, his tone perfectly pitched to reach the doctor standing across from her.

"And you thought I was a monster. Have you ever felt such rage? Such power? There was a time when you used to fear me, little guardian. Do you remember it as well as I do? And yet this monster deemed me a puny god. You saw the remnants of what it did to me when I was returned to Asgard. Did you sate your curiosity with what you saw just now? Perhaps you wish to take a deeper look?"

The creep had the nerve to stick his finger in the small of her back, and he was not-so-gently trying to push her forward towards the man under discussion. She belatedly realized that she was digging her heels into the floor, and felt instantly foolish.

Dr. Banner looked concerned. And decidedly wary. His glasses still rested on the bridge of his nose with an almost innocent air, but his lips were parted and his brow furrowed.

Great. The other smartest man in the room now thought she was a weirdo. Well done, Syn.

She forced herself to swallow and relax her shoulders, before holding out her hand.

"Dr. Banner. It's a pleasure to meet you. My name is Syn, of…Asgard. I am here to aid in the guarding of Loki, and the protection of Earth."

His hand reached out to clasp her own, and she felt warm skin and a solid squeeze and not even a hint of the riotous and staggering emotion she now knew simmered just beneath the surface.

It was disconcerting. How did he keep all that in?

"A deeper look?" He was still holding on to her hand when he asked the question, his eyes flickering to Loki before returning to her own. And then it hit her again, the surge of emotion smoldering in his question. Violence and wrath and her skin was itching again.

Her gift didn't usually trigger like that, without her prompting it. Maybe Odin had made some sort of mistake, when he had restored her status and ability. Was that even possible?

It wasn't like she could just march up to the All-father and demand a refund.

She pulled her hand away, and found her voice to answer his question. "I am of the Vanir. Born of Vanaheim, before I was sent to train in Asgard. Sight is a talent of my people. Some see across time, and gift us with prophecy. Some see across space, such as Heimdall, who guards the gates to the Eternal Realm. And others see…inward rather than out. Like myself."

She judged it one of the lamest explanations she had ever given of her gift, but she was finding it difficult to concentrate. His eyes were so non-threatening. There was still a question in their depths, and a flicker of concern, but mostly they were soft and inviting and this must be exactly how the mouse felt, caught up in the cobra's hypnotic dance of death.

Mesmerized, right before the kill strike.

Loki's finger in her back had been replaced by his entire palm, still an insistent, needling pressure, and it was then that she noticed something else. It was the amulet, given to her by Odin himself, under very strict orders of protection. She'd been told it served to harness Loki's magic, and it was a creepy looking thing, like a piece of twisted root with veins of shimmering metal. Enchanted metal. Uru. Usually reserved for the big guns of Asgard, like the Thors and the...well pretty much just for Thor.

And now her, apparently. She wore the amulet tucked under her tunic where it rested against her skin. Except it was no longer resting, but pressing against her chest as if it were a magnet, trying to get to the figure standing too close behind her and still touching the small of her back.

This was not something Odin had mentioned. She knew enchantments could often give objects an animate quality, but at the moment it really wasn't helping her feeling of being trapped.

She glanced around the room. Tony was leaning against the bar that took up almost one wall of the high-level suite that they had all retired to, except for Captain Rogers and Thor. He had two drinks in his hand that he was passing to Romanoff and Barton, and what she wouldn't give to have a nice cocktail right about now. They were all three staring at her, in confusion she assumed, and she really couldn't blame them. But then her recent words came crashing against her knowledge of Earth culture in a very uncomfortable explosion of embarrassment.

Asgardians were accustomed to a certain degree of invasiveness. Heimdall could be watching. Odin could be listening. Freya could be flying above on the wings of a falcon. But humans were much more protective of their privacy. In their minds, she had pretty much just violated someone.

Without permission.

Their expressions weren't confused.

She was pretty sure they were horrified, and felt the rush of shame shiver down her spine. Yeah, this moment was definitely going on her list.

She glanced behind her to the doors leading out to the veranda. "Please excuse me for a moment," she whispered.


A crack between worlds. Dimension: Unknown.


The soul shard glowed in his hand, green light on purple skin.

He had not done much but stare at the shard since the moment his Chitauri had been defeated. Quite an expanse of time, for some.

But he had intimate experience with patience. And he didn't experience time the same way as other beings.

The shard had shimmered with a dull but unchanging emerald glow since their embarrassing failure. Until just now, when it flickered tenuously with another kind of light. One could easily mistake it for nothing but a trick of reflection, which in a certain sense, it was.

It just wasn't light that was being reflected.

It was a soul.

He had amassed quite a collection, over the centuries, with the help of the shard. He was obsessed with souls. He could, by some accounting, be considered the foremost expert in the universe on souls.

And their torment.

Most beings thought souls were something their bodies carried around inside like so much meaningless fluff. But this was all backwards. Existence works the other way around. A soul does not dwell inside who you are. A soul is who you are. A soul is a being. A being is a soul. It's the souls that carry around corporeal bodies like too much extra baggage.

A body with no soul at all is not a state of existence. If he so much as squeezed his hand, destroying the gem and destroying the souls within, then the bodies would cease to exist.

Simple. And tempting. But ultimately pointless. They would all cease to exist anyway, if his plans came to fruition. And then he would give the souls to her. The Black Mistress. And she would love him again, he was sure of it. She had to.

Souls and their torment. Oh yes, he knew all about that.

Because a body simply separated from its soul is different from a body with no soul at all. A body that is separated still lives on.

If one could call it living. A hollow, tormented existence. Empty. Barren. Forsaken.

The body yearns for the return of the soul, and cries out in unguarded moments.

And the soul responds.

There was one soul in particular whose body he was very much interested in seeing again, and it had finally made a brief appearance.

He'd had this soul for an agonizingly long time, and it was in so much pain.

Gasping.

Dying.

The trail was slight, and already disappearing, but he had what he needed.

He made a gesture with his free hand, and felt a figure approach from the side.

"I have found him. Prepare the cell."


Stark Tower, Midgard.


Tony had observed the meeting with barely concealed interest. He had originally intended to keep close tabs on Loki. But he had been so distracted by Golden-eyes and her reaction to Banner that he almost didn't notice the way she leaned into her prisoner as if she were drowning and he was the Good Ship Lollipop.

Almost didn't notice.

And now he was standing in the middle of his favorite bar, with Loki the War Criminal not two feet from the Hulk, albeit not in rage monster form at the moment, and while he would love to be a fly on the wall for that titillating conversation, he chose to focus on the woman now standing alone on the veranda.

He was itching for some answers, and Loki wasn't going anywhere.

It was a hot and humid evening, for autumn. "Damn, it's warm for this time of year."

She turned and gave him a small smile. "I've missed that. Midgardian conversation filler and ice-breaker. If nothing else, we can always talk about the weather."

"Of course. So, how's Jotunheim this time of year, you ever been? Timeshare, maybe?"

"Are you never serious?" She'd asked the question with a smile and without any malice. Usually people who asked made it seem more like an order.

"Would it help?" Really, would it? He was very serious about this question. People seemed to think that sticks up the ass made them do their jobs better. He was pretty sure it just made you look like you did your job with a stick up your ass. It's not like he'd ever failed to be successful. Well, okay, there was that drunken dark period where he seemed to think it would be really cool to pee in his suit in public, and then tell everyone, but in his defense he had been dying at the time.

Golden-eyes seemed to be mulling it over. He liked that about her. She rolled with his punches. And she took notice of his odd flashes of serious contemplation, which tended to pass everyone else by. Usually because they were moving so fast. Well, he'd heard from Thor that she'd dealt with Loki for hundreds of years, guess that gave her an advantage.

She finally answered. "Probably not, in the end. But people like to be re-assured."

"I'm not here to re-assure people. I'm just here to save the cosmos from Armageddon. And make it look cooler than Bruce Willis did. People may want you to hold their hands, but, sunshine, style is what gets remembered. Hey, would you mind if I took a look at your breastplate?"

What, she wasn't wearing it at the moment. After they had decided on a break from the tense conversations in the conference room, both she and Thor had reverted to a more casual look. Now she had on a form-fitting and elaborately embroidered Asgardian tunic, in shades of chocolate brown and shimmering gold, that extended to the tops of her thighs. But he was pretty sure the slim, dark trousers she was wearing were jeans.

"I suppose. It's not enchanted though, not like Thor's. You think you can pimp it out with some lights? And maybe a flying mechanism?"

"Wait, you can't fly?" She shook her head, and he continued. "Yeah, but you've got that X-ray truth vision thing. You're like, Superman meets Wonder Woman. When I was a teen, I thought the Lasso of Truth was pretty sexy, with that bad-ass dominatrix but don't lie to your hot teacher vibe. Actually, still do."

Her eyes were twinkling. Man, if he were able to feel shame, he'd definitely feel ashamed that he was so good at cheering people up, as this was a talent he was really letting go to waste.

He continued. "While we're on the topic of exposing the truth, that was quite a thing you did for that cop."

She seemed surprised that he knew about it, but she shouldn't have been. The story had been all over the news for months last year, during the heightened, sensationalized media storm that swept up the nation in the trial of the decade. A ruthlessly murdered family. A gritty, but ultimately innocent cop as the accused. And one up-and-coming lawyer stubbornly standing between him and the dogs.

"I guess I have a soft spot for the falsely accused."

He wasn't sure he wanted to dig deeper into that topic. He felt a twinge of hesitation.

In the messy closet of human interaction, being overly sensitive was like the ill-fitting, too long pair of pants that made a person trip instead of strut. And Tony only wore perfectly tailored suits. Not to mention his general attitude was that the world would be a much better place if everyone were to take off all the clothes of their principles and just enjoy the hot-tub of natural inclinations.

And so, as so often happened when Tony was presented with a window of opportunity, he took solace in his usual response of just chucking the biggest brick he could find at it.

"Thor mentioned that Loki committed some crime, stole some important artifact, and then set you up to take the fall. Total douche move. But hey, then Asgard made you his jailor, which is a pretty decent bit of karma. I feel safer, at least. Hell hath no fury and all."

She sent him a wan smile. "He stole Huthr. The Veil. It helped him hide from Heimdall's sight. I technically was supposed to be guarding it, but yeah, good ole 'Syn the Betrayer' has finally been vindicated." Her voice dripped sarcasm at the end.

"You guys have kick-ass titles for everything." He made a show of picking a piece of non-existent lint off his shoulder. "Thor also mentioned that it was you who had these visions of the end times. But he said it would be better to ask you about it, because you're like Nostradamus or something? Except with immortality and, you know, breasts."

She had the grace to blush. "It's a lot more different than that. They're not really my visions, they belong to Vanir from long ago. My people have collected prophecies for millennia, stored in a great book we call the Window to the Worlds. Except it's not a book in the traditional sense. It doesn't have words. It's just…a window. To all possible futures. And thus it is difficult to fully understand what lies within."

"Then how can we be so sure about this end times scenario? And Loki's primo seat, front and center. That seems a little too convenient, if you ask me."

She nodded. "I know, right? But when things are aligned in such a way as to make one future more probable, the window opens…differently. Certain visions are more accessible, especially if one is looking for something specific. I was…well I was under the influence of the sceptre when Loki forced me to look into the Window. This was awhile before he made his attacks on Earth. Did Thor mention that?"

He sucked in his breath. "No he did not." A woman twice scorned. Well, betrayed, anyway. Damn. He almost felt sorry for their old adversary.

"Only one of the Vanir can look through the Window and see anything of value. I saw the destruction of worlds. And Loki demanded I look for anything that could stop it. We're still not sure why he wanted such information. He may claim to not want Ragnarok, but I've grown used to him being ten steps ahead and just when you think you can trust him..."

She bit off her sudden bout of bitterness with a sigh, before she continued her story in a calmer tone. "I saw worlds exploding in bursts of light that expanded across the cosmos, and at the center there was…well, him. Somehow Thanos plus Loki's soul means Ragnarok, and Loki plus Loki's soul means not Ragnarok. And it's really hard to get any more specific than that. At least right now. Sometimes Vanir prophecy is not so much seeing the future, but figuring out what the future means. Does that answer all of your questions," she teased, as if she understood how frustrating her answers could be, "or give you some food for thought?"

Yeah right. Food for thought, if you wanted to spend the next day curled up next to a bottle of antacids. Some of the information she was revealing was starting to give him brainburn. "These explosions of light. Did they look like supernovae?"

"I suppose, yes. Something like that."

The numbers he had studied from previous reports on the Tesseract flashed through his brain. And then those numbers twisted around in some incredibly exciting but slightly uncomfortable way with the tests they had run on the sceptre. And then, as if his mind was the fruit roll-up factory of combining thought flavors, the numbers swirled around with information he had researched on the topic of explosive energy events.

The thought combo gave him a burst of excitement, as intellectual epiphanies usually did.

But it also gave him a very, very bad feeling.

"I imagine exploding stars would be an effective way to destroy worlds." He was muttering under his breath now, talking more to himself than her. "I need to talk to Banner."

He started to turn away and excuse himself when the lights suddenly flickered.

"Jarvis, has Pepper been playing with the ambiance settings again?" She'd overloaded the system last week, trying to get them ready for a party.

Jarvis indicated a response in the negative, but he was no longer listening. Golden-eyes had gone pale. Her eyes were wide, with shock or horror he could not tell, and she had reached up to clutch at something that hung around her neck. He could see the whites of her knuckles, she was griping the object under her tunic so tightly. She brushed past him and headed back inside, towards Loki. He followed her.

Loki had an expression that looked as uncomfortable as hers. Tony wondered if he had left him alone with Banner for too long. The doctor's glasses had slipped even further down his nose and he was now peering over the top of them. Yeah, real intimidating. If you didn't know his Other Half, you'd think the worst he could do is puppy-dog eye you to death.

Except Loki did know his Other Half, so he met Banner's eyes and mouthed Did you do that? as he gestured to Loki's panicked expression.

Banner emphatically shook his head. Golden-eyes was now standing directly in front of Loki, who had reached out to grab her wrist and pull her hand from whatever she was clutching.

And then there was someone else there with them. Sort of. A hulking shadow in the darkness. Except it wasn't dark. The lights were all still on.

The shadow seemed to expand for a moment.

Then the moment expanded.

Except it didn't. It was over in a heartbeat.

And then they were gone. Both of them. And there was a sound left in the room that was like the moment after a scream. Had he heard a scream? He thought he might have heard thousands of screams. It was like the memory of sound was in his head, but he wasn't sure he had physically heard actual sound at all.

He couldn't be certain of anything right now.

His eyes met Banner's again from across the empty space that had formerly been much less empty, and they looked as confused as he felt.

Tony was a proud man. People looked at Tony and saw a proud man. But people would probably be surprised at the actual things Tony was proud of. For example, Tony often preferred to be proud of the little things. Focusing on the small victories often enough helped him not get overwhelmed by the big things. And in this particular moment, he was very proud of the fact that his voice was calm and collected and didn't betray even a hint of the brief burst of panic he was feeling.

"Jarvis, get Thor up here right now. We just lost his posse."

So much for assuming Loki wasn't going anywhere.