Notes: In which everyone seems to be suffering from anxiety.

Relatively short chapter this time- it's partly transitional, and partly that I just realized a couple of days ago that I should sign up for NaNoWriMo, given that I was about to qualify to win. That was an unexpected bonus!

I expect there will actually be action in the next chapter, finally. Thanks to everyone out there who continues to hang in there with this story! I'm very grateful!

Chapter Nine

"Heimdall spoke of how matters stand with the Jotun. What did he mean?" Loki asked Thor, as soon as the Allfather's bodyguard had left them.

Thor shook his head. "I have no idea." At his brother's doubtful expression, Thor frowned. "Truly, Loki, I do not know. I have not spoken to Father about affairs of state in weeks. Anything could be happening, and I would not know of it."

Loki continued to look skeptical, not to say actually suspicious. "It is not like you and Father, not to be in one another's confidence."

Thor sighed, laid a hand on Loki's shoulder, and said quietly, "We had other matters to worry about. I was entirely absorbed in the search for you, and when I returned to Asgard it was only to bring our parents information about my progress. Father would not have cared to distract me with any of his other worries, and I confess matters of state were not foremost in any of our minds while you were missing."

Loki turned away, aware that to continue to argue would merely upset his brother, as well as make him appear ungrateful. And Thor was almost certainly telling the truth: for one thing, he was incurably honest. For another, one of the reasons he was still not quite ready to be king was that he could not always tell the difference between that which was important, and that which was merely personal.

For obvious reasons, Loki had no real complaints about this shortcoming. Indeed, he had come to realize that he shared it- practically all the trouble Loki had brought upon himself and others, before his fall from the Bifrost, was a result of a very similar flaw in his own thinking, and also, on a less sinister note, he suspected he would be quite unable to put a theoretical "greater good" before the safety of, say, Thor or his housemates- but he could not believe their father was prone to similar weakness. The Allfather would have been concerned about Loki, true, but not to the exclusion of issues of importance to the realm.

However, as he thought it over, Loki had to concede it would be like Father not to burden Thor with thoughts of these more urgent matters while Thor was focused on the smaller issue. It made sense, really, to assign someone else full responsibility for the search, leaving Odin free to concentrate upon whatever was going wrong concerning the Jotun. The fact it was Thor whose time and attention was diverted from the more important matter really did suggest Father was genuinely, deeply concerned about Loki, which was… warming.

But. Loki was safe, and whatever was wrong now, between Asgard and the Frost Giants, was surely at least partly his fault. Mostly his fault. Almost certainly entirely his fault. And as much as he appreciated the kindness that motivated his father's efforts to conceal the truth from him, the Allfather should probably have remembered that concealing important truths from Loki had not, in the past, worked out to anyone's advantage.

A hand fell on Loki's shoulder again, and Loki found himself turned firmly around to face his brother.

"Whatever you are thinking," Thor warned, his eyes searching Loki's face, "stop. I did not bring you here so you could trade one peril for another. Please, just… don't."

Loki felt his mouth curve into a reassuring smile. "Of course not, brother. Aside from everything else, there is little enough I could do that would not simply make matters worse."

Thor looked suspicious, but made a show of accepting Loki's words at face value. That was sufficient, for now. Loki had no desire to worry his brother more than was necessary.

However, he also had no intention of walking away from a muddle of his own making, without making any effort to clean it up. Loki was perhaps not naturally suited to his Midgardian role of custodian, but he did have his professional pride.

~oOo~

Well, at least it was warm here, Tony reflected, as he raised his aching eyes from the screen of his laptop and focused on a seagull bobbing in the blue Caribbean water. The Scottish house was more comfortable for large groups, but as Willy Wonka said, their little group was getting smaller by the minute: Clint and Natasha had gone underground, Bruce was remarkably adept at hiding out- as long as nothing made him angry- and Tony, Steve, and Pepper had retreated to another of Tony's little hideaways, all white sand and blue ocean water.

It would have been very romantic, except there were three of them- which, okay, that wasn't necessarily automatically a problem for Tony- and one of them spent all her time running Stark Industries by remote control while the other two spent all their time trying to find a crack in SHIELD where they could put a wedge. Or a lever, so to speak. Who was the guy who said that given a lever, he could move the world? Well, Steve and Tony just wanted to move a single damn agency.

Tony knew it was too early to be so worried, they'd been in the new hideout for less than forty-eight hours, he'd spent nearly all of that time ransacking SHIELD's computer system and reviewing the results of what he'd found with Steve. He knew he had to sleep sometime. He just…

A plate landed at his elbow, with a sandwich on it cut into four neat triangles. Tony glanced up, startled, at the concerned face leaning over him.

"You know, Tony, none of this is your fault," Steve said firmly.

"What? No- I mean, of course. Of course it's not. What are you talking about?"

Steve reached over and took the laptop away, set it gently on the other side of the table, and pushed the plate with the sandwich on it in front of Tony.

"I'm talking about your obsessive need to fix this problem right this minute. I'm talking about you not eating or sleeping or showering- and Tony, it's hot here. You need to shower. And eat. And sleep. Pepper and I are both worried about you. What SHIELD is up to, whatever it is, is bad. We get that. And what they did to Loki was really bad. And yes, they used one of your designs to do it- "

"And I just let them," Tony, or perhaps the cockroach in the fedora, replied flatly. It was an unexpectedly huge relief, to say it out loud. Steve pulled out a chair and sat down, not quite in Tony's line of vision but where Tony just had to turn his head to see him. "Sure, I kicked up a fuss on behalf of my company, but I should have done more. I should have raised hell. I should have known that SHIELD would use a device like that. They've probably already made a dozen knockoffs. Those other prisoners with the shaky IDs, the ones we found out about when we were looking for Coulson? There could be half a dozen other perfectly harmless magic users locked up, being tortured and hoping to die, right now. Some of them might already be dead, there's no guarantee they're as tough as Loki, or as lucky as he is. I made that device. I designed it. And then I just let them take it, I tried to convince myself they were just keeping it under wraps when I knew, I knew, an agency like SHIELD would always have a use for a thing like that. And I mean, I like Loki. I would never have done a thing like that to him, not deliberately. Not that he'll probably ever believe it."

"You're afraid he blames you," Steve said, and he had to have been talking to Pepper, because he sounded like something out of one of her reflective management manuals. "Active listening," or whatever the hell it was called. Tony had always thought it sounded like consultants making way too much money, but of course Steve, being Steve, had hit the nail on the head, had heard exactly what Tony was saying without Tony having to say it. And, to mix his metaphors a little more, Steve had just stepped right over the fence, picked up the one thing Tony really didn't want to look at, and was holding it out to him.

"Yeah," Tony mumbled, because as much as he didn't want to look directly at the idea, he knew he was going to have to, eventually, and part of him was grateful to Steve for making sure he didn't end up doing it when he was alone.

Steve just waited until Tony blurted out,

"Of course he blames me. I designed the thing. I let SHIELD take it and use it on him, and then I brought Dr. Strange along with us and tricked Loki into thinking he wasn't a threat to him, and… of course he blames me."

"You're sure it's him doing the blaming?"

"He threw a knife at me, Steve. I think he made himself pretty clear about his feelings on the matter."

Steve shrugged. "As I recall, he wasn't clear about very much at all right then, except that he was mixed-up and angry and very scared."

"Oh, gee, I wonder why he'd feel like that?"

Steve sighed. "All I mean is, when he's recovered, when he's actually himself again, his perspective might change. By all means, be sorry he was in such a state. There'd be something wrong with you if you didn't feel bad for him. But the fact he panicked and lashed out at you doesn't mean he was right."

Tony waited for Steve to say it- that Loki had a bit of a history, of panicking and lashing out and then being sorry about it later anyway- but he didn't, which was just as well. Whatever Loki had done before, why-ever he had done it, had nothing at all to do with this.

Instead, what Steve said was,

"I don't know whether Loki actually blames you, or whether he will when he can think straight again, but you are another matter. Tony, what exactly were you trying to do, when you designed that device?"

Tony glared at Steve, willing him to turn into something small and fluffy. Steve just sat there, waiting. Tony, as he knew from the beginning he would, broke first:

"I was trying… I was trying to improve on the helicarrier restraints."

"They seem to work fine. What needed improvement?"

Tony glared at Steve out of bloodshot eyes. "I know what you're doing."

"Just answer the question, Iron Man. What's wrong with the restraints they've got already?"

Tony sighed. "They're attached to a chair, for one thing. You've got to strap the prisoner down so he can't move. Can't hardly even wiggle, if you use all of them. It's… demeaning, and it's frightening, and there's no reason to treat someone like that unless you think there's a serious risk of his going Hannibal Lecter on you."

Steve didn't ask who Hannibal Lecter was- he had developed enough tech-savviness to be able to look the reference up for himself later, if he was interested. Quite calmly, he said,

"Okay. So you thought it was cruel to the prisoners, to tie them up like that. What else?"

Tony picked up a quarter of the sandwich. Roast beef. He bit into it, chewed and swallowed, and then answered:

"The way they drain the magic carrier's strength- that's how they contain the magic, they make the prisoner too weak to call on it, more than actually controlling the magic itself. So even when you take them off, the... the guy... is too weak to stand up, or leave, or… or defend himself, for quite a while."

"And that's not right?" Steve asked, as if Steve would have any doubts.

"Of course it's not right. If you've just brought someone in for questioning- or hell, even if he's been found guilty of something… you can't treat people, or whatever, like that. It's like locking someone in an iron maiden. We're not the Spanish Inquisition, and we're not supposed to behave like that."

"Okay," Steve said. "So you were trying to come up with a design that didn't have those flaws: made sure the prisoner was able to move around, as long as it was safe; didn't make them so vulnerable- didn't resort to the kind of intimidation the existing restraints did."

"Yeah," Tony muttered. That was it, in a nutshell: the existing helicarrier restraints, like so much of the technology SHIELD used, worked at least partly by emphasizing just how helpless the prisoner was. You could argue that most of the people SHIELD arrested were asking to be treated that way, but you could also argue that there was a distinct minority who were justly released, and who went away with a very bad feeling about SHIELD. Tony himself had been in a situation, once upon a time in a cave, in which someone had tried to intimidate him, and the result had been the opposite of what his captors expected. He'd probably had that in the back of his mind, when he tried to create a restraint device that wouldn't act as a provocation in and of itself. However:

"It didn't work," Tony reminded Steve.

"No, but you couldn't know that until you tested it. Which you didn't get a chance to do. The point here, Tony, is that you weren't designing a torture device. You were trying to create something that was more humane than the device SHIELD was already using."

"Yes. My intentions were good. And we both know what the road to hell is paved with," Tony snapped, and ate the rest of his sandwich triangle. Swallowing, he said, "It turns out you probably can't block someone's magic without really hurting him. Or her."

"Okay, so now you know that," Steve said, still infuriatingly calm.

Or… okay, maybe not infuriatingly. Whatever else Tony was right now, he was definitely not infuriated.

"Yeah," Tony argued anyway, "but I found it out the hard way, and somebody else had to suffer for my mistake. Just like I found out the hard way that it wasn't just our military, that was getting its hands on Stark Industries weapons. And I bet if I knew everything even our military was doing with my weapons, I probably wouldn't feel good about that, either." Tony rubbed his aching eyes. "I keep doing this: I keep trying to do the right thing, and trusting the wrong person to help me. Obadiah Stane, SHIELD, myself. I try, and whatever I do, someone else keeps getting hurt. I stop manufacturing weapons, and I try to do good as Iron Man- and what have I done as Iron Man, for SHIELD, that will turn out to have been the wrong thing, that hurt someone who didn't really deserve it?"

"Like Loki," Steve prompted. Tony shook his head.

"It's not just Loki. I even kind of feel bad that I feel so bad about him, because I know I only went looking for him because I like him, and I like his brother. If it hadn't been for that, if I hadn't known them personally, I might have just shrugged it off, just gone through legal channels, and...and Harry Potter, or someone, might still be locked up in that cell." Tony scrubbed a hand back through his scruffy hair. "I can't... I can't just do the right thing for people I like, just because I feel like it."

"No," Steve agreed. "You can't." He stood, looking down at Tony for a moment. Then he patted him on the shoulder. "Eat your sandwich." He smiled. "And for the love of God, Tony, take a shower."

~oOo~

Loki was not able to begin thinking about the problem of Jotunheim right away: first, as promised, the queen paid a visit to the little group of adventurers. It was not perhaps a terribly coherent visit, Mother showing a frankly heartwarming tendency to burst into tears, but there were times when even Loki had to admit that coherence was vastly overrated.

It was not, he hastened to remind himself, that Loki took any pleasure at all in seeing his mother unhappy. It was just that she was so clearly the farthest thing possible from unhappy, and that was what was causing the tears. They were not, perhaps, all being shed by the queen, either. Or Annie, although she too was responsible for a considerable proportion of them.

The queen was unable to stay very long, since to do so would have drawn unnecessary attention to the inmates of the envoys' quarters. During Loki's previous, unintentional visit to Asgard, it had been made clear to the court that Odin had no desire to see harm come to his banished son, but Loki knew the palace and its inhabitants well enough to suspect it would be unwise to put too much faith in their good will. Odin had claimed one of the reasons he had maintained secrecy about Loki's antecedents in the first place was because he feared a "tragic accident" might result, if the court found out there was a Frost Giant whelp in the palace.

On sober reflection, Loki had to admit his father had a point. And there was reason enough to believe a similarly "tragic" "accident" might still be in the cards, if it ever became known the despised former prince was back, and powerless to boot. Even Thor, whose nature was far too trusting, seemed to have a sense of the reality of the situation, for which Loki was grateful.

Or rather, Loki was grateful until he realized how Thor intended to deal with the problem of ensuring his powerless brother's safety, and that of their friends, after Thor himself returned to assist the Avengers on Midgard.

"Sif!" Annie exclaimed, as the warrior maiden entered the hall.

"Hello, Annie. It's so good to see you again," Sif replied, embracing Annie, and then George and Mitchell in quick succession, before turning her attention to Loki. "You do have a talent for getting yourself into situations, my friend," she greeted him, throwing an arm about his shoulders. Once, the last two words would have been spoken with a twist in her voice. Now any twist was entirely absent.

"It really is remarkable," Loki replied, smiling at her in genuine pleasure, before it crossed his mind that she might not have come alone.

And she had not.

"Well, well, Loki! It has been… far too long," Fandral exclaimed, in a tone that suggested what he really meant was, it had not been anything like long enough. Loki stepped away from Sif and smiled back, or at any rate made an unthreatening display of teeth. Fandral walked into the living quarters, closely followed by an anxious-looking Volstagg and a silent Hogun. Fandral glanced around. "I don't believe we have ever been properly introduced to your friends."

Sif looked from one Warrior to the next, brows knit in a frown of concern. It was not that she was more intelligent than Thor, not exactly. She was simply more of a realist: Thor had always, for example, believed the best of his brother, even when any idiot could have told him jealousy and loneliness were wearing away any chains of decency or even sanity that restrained Loki's hand.

Thor had also believed the best of his friends, when any idiot could have told him they suffered his brother's company only as long as Thor was there to see. Loki glanced around the room and realized Annie, George, and Mitchell were looking at the Warriors Three with apprehension as well. Loki had not told his housemates very much of his past relations with the friends of his brother, but it was quite clear they were aware of the atmosphere in the room.

Much had changed in Loki's mind, concerning his perceptions of his past life in Asgard. He had come to realize that nearly all of the pain he had grown up with, so far as his relationship with his parents was concerned, had been self-inflicted. It was not that they did not love him. They did, and they always had. He understood that now, inside his head at least, and gestures like his father's embrace, and his mother's tears, were beginning to make him really believe it in his heart. It was not lack of love that was the problem, it was Loki's inability to recognize the love, except under circumstances in which it practically seized him by the shoulders and declared itself to his face.

Loki's perceptions were not always to be trusted, and he knew that now. And he might have questioned whether the powerful feelings of isolation and rejection he remembered, from his years of tagging along after Thor and Thor's friends, might have also been constructed within his own mind, had it not been for the look on Sif's face right now, and the distinct uneasiness of his own friends, and even his brother, as the Warriors Three looked around.

Sif had once been chief among Loki's tormenters, and in honesty he had at times given nearly as good to her as he got. The reason for their mutual hostility was simple: as chief among Thor's friends, Sif had represented the most serious threat to Loki's craving to be Thor's closest companion. And, as Thor's brother, Loki had seemed to represent exactly the same sort of threat to Sif.

Sif had been victorious in the battle for supremacy, or rather in the battle to be at the right hand of supremacy. Indeed, Loki had lost out altogether, had always been more or less an afterthought except on the rare occasions when diplomacy or sorcery was the only way out of trouble. Loki, after a few sincere early efforts to be friends had been rebuffed, had ended in hating his brother's friends, Sif most of all. The feeling was warmly reciprocated on her part.

Things had changed, however, after the first visit Thor paid to Loki at his new home in Bristol. Thor had come, he had explained, to have it out with his brother, to find out once and for all what was behind the lies and the violence and the insanity. Sif had come, Loki supposed, in case Thor needed either her arm or her shoulder as support.

The confrontation could easily have ended in disaster, except that Loki, no longer entirely alone, had allowed some of the protective edifice he had constructed around himself to come down as a consequence. The visit had ended with all three of them actually seeing one another, for the first time in more years than Loki wished to think about. And Sif, it turned out, was much like Thor: both more intelligent and more sensitive than Loki had believed for all that time.

With a generosity that still astonished him to think about, Thor had forgiven Loki his transgressions. Sif had given every sign of doing so as well, in their brief encounters since, to the point that Loki now allowed himself to tentatively consider the possibility that she might actually, in truth, become his friend. She had, certainly, extended reassurance and hospitality to his own friends, on the occasion when they had all found themselves in Asgard. Loki no longer dreaded what Sif might think to do to him, should she find herself in a position of power over him.

He still harboured doubts about the Warriors Three, and Sif's air of unease made him quite sure these doubts, at least, were founded in reality. What had possessed Thor to involve them?

The answer presented itself immediately: in the first place, of course, Thor continued to assume those he trusted were entirely trustworthy. It was more than hypocritical for Loki to complain about that. And in the second place, who else was he to ask for assistance? Thor's closest companions were the mightiest of Asgard's mighty warriors, and if they despised Loki no less than the rest of the court, they certainly honoured Thor far more.

It was not going to be pleasant, spending his time in exile with the friends of his brother. But surely, regard for Thor's feelings, as well as the sharp eye of Sif, would prevent the occurrence of any "tragic accidents."

Loki schooled the muscles in his face to relax, the skin around his eyes to crinkle, until only someone who knew him very well indeed would have realized his smile was not genuine. Fortunately, the Warriors Three were not members of that small assemblage.

"Welcome, Fandral. Volstagg, Hogun," he nodded to the other Warriors. "May I present my housemates?"