10. An Illusive Man

. . .

There were ways to move fluidly on the street regardless of the time without the need for true invisibility. Loki knew his clothes were clean and plain underneath the simple illusion he wove, but what those better-off others saw forced their gaze to slide over him without really looking. The holes in the hoodie's elbows that showed a filthy and tattered undershirt, a pair of jeans dark with grime and unidentifiable old stains. Threads trailed from the bottom of the jacket, snarling and tangling and easily caught by walls as he scraped by, making soft wheedling noises as people dodged around him. The kind of shiftless, lost look that people believed they could smell.

And so, they forced themselves to not see the thin, pasty man with the dead eyes and the tangled hair. Just like they didn't see any of the others he'd passed when tracing trails up narrow alleys – but those survivors saw him. For them he wove the rest of the illusion and constantly adapted it to fit their patterns as he spared a couple of days hunting trails. No real stench came from him, not like many who still had homes would have assumed. There was the undertone of a chlorine smell from the public pools and showers that many tried to use. The bleachy spots on his clothes where he would have tried to keep them clean for any chance at getting free of the street's trap. The snarls didn't go all the way through his hair – there were the traces of a rough comb, and a recent cut to try to keep presentable. And that meant the others who struggled on the streets to survive overlooked him, too.

That let him listen without being marked as the outsider. Mostly they muttered to each other in neat packs; service hours of the nearest soup kitchen, what to do when the library card got lost, an opportunity coming up the next morning in front of the nearest hardware store if one of them were the least bit handy. And the faithful, and the broken in their tighter knots, clutching to what religion they had left. They looked at him and they looked away.

Until Loki found a few of the street people whispering together, miles away from where he'd begun his walks through the other side of Philadelphia life. Rumors led him in this direction – the weird ones, the ones who seemed to like the street now. The ones with a leader. These people had something new in their eyes – something almost like hope. Many of them had colored scraps and straps of cloth wrapped around their wrists, and a different kind of ordered society in the way they talked to each other. A rarity on a lot of the streets he'd been wandering down, and he idled by with a hunk of bread in his hands from a bakery that gave their almost stale loaves away. He offered it around as they murmured to each other, pretending to freeze when one of them looked up at him. "Hi!" he blurted at the shorter man, sounding as much as he could like someone slowly forgetting how to properly socialize.

The man studied him with raw curiosity, his eyes shiny and bright. "Are you looking for the way?"

His fingers knotted hard into the loaf of bread by way of trying to not drop it in startled fright at the abrupt question. His mouth worked to try and find the words, and he said nothing. It worked – the bright eyes began to match an honest, welcoming smile. "It's all right. You've been out here a long time."

The bread suffered in place of his frayed pretend nerves. He managed a weak nod and a hopeful voice that still came out in a mumble. "What way? Bus station? I tried. Can't afford it."

The shorter man laughed, but he did it in a way that was designed to not make someone feel insulted. Beginner's charisma. This one was the temporary leader of this small group. "No. Not at all." Without any disgust, he took Loki's elbow gently and pulled him closer to the group. "A different way to get free of the fear of the streets. Another door to walk through."

"...Suicide?" he all but squeaked, a tiny lost soul in a tall and starving form. Doors again. And me in search of a key. He noted that down while his question got a roaring laugh. He cringed a little, trying to not be frightened. And, of course, he wasn't.

And then they began to talk.

They talked of doors, of prophecies, of places to belong. They talked about the end of death itself, and the promise of a rebuilt utopia, there first for those who had the strength to behold what might come. Those honed by being lost for too long. They talked of guides and finders and jumbled their stories together about how each of them found their way to the Way. And Loki listened close and found all of it hollow, trimmed with charisma and illusion and the art of feeding on someone else's hungry need, those arts he knew all too well. But instead of arguing he only smiled and knotted his hands and nodded in the right places.

Almost two hours of misshapen philosophy later and murmuring around the name of some new God they wouldn't quite say, he had the address of a meeting hall. A ruined building several miles away, a place where the police wouldn't bother their gathering. They glad-handed with him and let him depart peacefully, with pleas to see him later. They were new, too. There was value in bringing more possible new acolytes to their gatherings; he could sense that in the way they urged him. They offered to give him a ride, but he shook his head and flexed his hands politely and said he would get there. A normal response. Many of the streetwise locals would never get into a car with strangers.

There was more than one way to get off the street, they knew. And Loki had plans to make meanwhile.

. . .

"I'd tell anyone in the team that this is an awful idea, infiltrating a barely understood cult at one of their homes." Fitz cleared his throat, nudging his tablet around on the plywood desktop with a single finger. "And, and you're like a thousand years old and occasionally still terrifying. So, bearing that in mind, you know what? This is still a rotten idea and I don't recommend you do it. They found us somehow, and we still don't know how. So you go to them?" He shook his curly head rapidly, his slight brogue sounding more gruff when loaded down with concern. "What if they sniff you out?"

"That may well be a risk." Loki shrugged, running a hand through his clean long hair and looking utterly untroubled. "But you're right. This isn't exactly my first spot of trouble even recently, and we're ages away from my first battlefield. I've little to fear, and most of all you are not coming." He smiled slightly, the effect softening his words. "You're the backup plan, the getaway car in case something does, in fact, go awry in line with your fears."

Fitz made a non-committal noise.

Loki studied the withdrawing young man. It was oddly touching to have another fret so openly at his possible fate. Once a rarity. He showed none of this on his face and instead leaned back comfortably in the hotel's relatively soft chair. He was enjoying the lack of stone stoops and cracking concrete underneath him. He felt still unthreatened by those dire possibilities Fitz seemed so concerned with. "Has there been more information from Skye?"

The noise became something firmly negative. "She's fairly certain she's been culling the sub-forum for this city. No mention of Drumm yet. No mention of anything that might be us, either, that she can suss out. All she's got is a lot of fawning over the local chapterhouse lead. Supposed to be a very charismatic sort, one of the favorites of whoever actually leads all this. Philadelphia is apparently quite dear to the founder."

He considered that, frowning. "A name there, for who I'll be seeing tonight?"

"No. Just 'The Guide.' They're all guides. Forum admins, house leaders in other cities, small knots. Guides. Keep very hush-hush like that. Even less for whoever the founder is." Fitz crossed his arms against himself with a bit more authority. "So there's that, too. You're going in with absolutely minimal information."

"And the goal is to come away with somewhat more. Drumm's request is not honored if I merely tell him that his lost want to stay lost, that they've found better kindness in some new perhaps-false god than in the street's old mercies. Bargains seldom work this way, and you do not short-shrift another master of the magic arts." He lifted both his eyebrows, recollecting a few tidbits from a long ago past. "Well, you can, to be sure, but it takes a little planning and practice and I never employed any of that with him."

"He seems the understanding type... if you make it seem like you're not trying to cheat him out of his favor, then-"

"I'm going." His voice was curt. "They chased you, called us out, and there's this insistent obsession with doors and seemingly bodiless eyeballs." He flicked his hand to underline his hostility with the circumstances. "To the first, we seek a key. To the second, Drumm informed me one of Strange's mystic sponsors is just such a being. A God oft incarnate in a single eye; this Agamotto, who once helped shape the Book of the Vishanti itself, apparently. I am not much fond of coincidence, where instead another's deliberate trap may be laid. These two details together?" He looked away with a deliberately annoyed sniff and a tch through his teeth.

Fitz studied him, his face wrinkling as he considered that. "You don't think they're worshipping Strange's benefactor behind his back?"

Loki shrugged again, vaguely irritated with his own lack of knowledge. "Truly can't answer that, Fitz. It's possible, I'd say. It's not beyond a deity to develop an inchoate, dual nature out of the sheer boredom of the infinite. It's also possible we're seeing something that was designed to mock that, a jape that was meant for Strange and comes to our laps instead." He rolled his eyes. "Or there's just a bunch of eyeball Gods floating around the multi-dimensional ether and we've found a coincidence - or perhaps someone in the hierarchy of this organization just truly likes stylized eyes and went with it for the official logo. I note in your marketing the better symbols are the clean and simple ones." He finished with another snappish noise under his breath.

"Well. While you try to not get yourself killed by a bunch of creepy cultists that like to scream outside hotels at innocent people, I'll keep pestering Skye." He shifted, clearly hoping what he said next would go over well. "I've another project in mind. For the key." He grinned a little at the immediate look of interest he got. "I can see what Stark did now; the tight mineral scan he designed on the fly. I might be able to get something deployed on a wider scale."

Loki leaned forward, pleased not only at some progress, but progress despite Stark's notions. "He indicated this was not much like the Tesseract's trace; no broad trail of gamma radiation to follow. Didn't seem to think a wide scan was feasible. Oh, do tell me he's wrong, it'll make my day."

Fitz couldn't help a faltering grin at his delight. "Well, not precisely wrong. Coming at it a bit differently, actually. He and Banner were looking for a steady emanation of something active, sure, but what he actually did this time while probably being weirded out about you was make a scanner so bloody sensitive it picks up a bloody tiny particle trail. That's why I kept fussing with it to keep it from bleeping about us. It'd scream at him, too, because you gave him the sample for a bit. Now, yes, you can't get it to magically sense where it is in the world right now from here or whatever, but if you replicate what he did and hijack some TSA and other observation centres and get it to maybe see where it's been..." He spread his hands in example.

"If it went through an airport or some such, left some physical trace of itself on a counter or a bag, you could find a trail to follow. That's what you're saying." He grinned at the set of ferocious nods he got. "That's excellent, Fitz." The scientist all but preened at the guileless praise. "I'm still going tonight."

So touching, the little arrgh of frustration.