"Shit, this is a hell of a workshop." Tony commented. "Don't worry, I'm not touching anything. But fuck, he's got a lot of chemicals."
Bruce peered at the labels from a safe distance. "Nasty stuff. Loki, any way of keeping this from getting in the air when we burn it?"
"I'll see what I can do. Think you can mix up something explosive down there without hurting yourselves?"
"To make sure the lab gets completely destroyed. I like it." Tony turned to the shelf of chemicals gleefully.
"Radio silence. I think I heard something." Steve ordered from inside a wardrobe in the living room. Through the crack of the door, he saw Loki press himself flatter against the wall behind the door. Soft clicks from behind the couches, almost inaudible over the scraping of a key down the hall in the front door, told him that every gun was poised to shoot.
Footsteps came down the hall, and then Hodge entered the room, making a beeline for the door to his basement laboratory. Loki braced himself and counted three steps, almost enough to put his would-be killer in the middle of the room, then summoned the ice lurking inside him. The transition to his Jotun form was faster each time he did it voluntarily, and by the time the man had taken another step, rapier-sharp icicles as thick as broomhandles and hard as diamond were flying from Loki's hands at him.
Steve suppressed a gasp as his boyfriend suddenly turned blue and peppered the man with a stream of gigantic icicles, like a strange living ice machine gun. They were sharp, and apparently strong, because they pierced his skin as easily as any blade. Bleeding, staggering, Hodge turned to face the shooter, fumbling for his gun, but the damage was done. Some of the icicles had gone straight through him. He was finished. Natasha leaned around the edge of the couch, well out of the way of stray icicles, and hurled a knife into his wrist, causing him to drop the gun. He scrambled to retrieve it, struggling to keep his footing, and Loki bounded across the room to kick him to the ground, a sword made of glittering ice forming around one blue hand. Steve, Clint, and Natasha emerged from their hiding places and approached, guns trained on Hodge.
"You do realize that vigilantism is the opposite of what your idols fought for." Loki pressed his sword to the man's jugular. Steve could hear the faintest tremor in Loki's voice. Whether it was the proximity to the man who had made multiple attempts on his life or the knowledge that he was killing someone in a situation that wasn't direct combat he wasn't sure, but it was there.
Hodge made one last swing at Loki, poison ring uncapped and undoubtedly loaded with something at least as nasty as the last time, and Loki dodged it, slashing the man's throat in the same move.
"Set down there guys? He's dead." Clint asked over the com with the professionalism of the trained assassin that he was.
"Yeah, set. Should we ignite it?"
"No." Loki dragged his eyes away from his foe's body and shook himself hard, sword disappearing. "I'm teleporting you all back to the tower so you'll be there to take Fury's call and then I'm coming back to do cleanup. Alone."
"Are you certain?" Thor asked.
"Yeah, trust me." The world twisted and squeezed and dropped them in the living room at the tower. "Just make yourselves look as busy as possible and don't go near that part of town until Fury calls." With that he was gone. The Avengers looked at one another.
"What's he going to do?" Steve tried to quash the note of hysteria in his voice. "Is he going to try and take the blame for it?"
"I wish to go fetch him." Thor declared.
"No!" The spies said together.
"He has a plan," Natasha pointed out, "Don't interfere."
"We don't know what he's doing. We don't want to mess it up, and if any of us just happen to already be near there when we get the call it looks sketchy." Clint added. "Sometimes you gotta just have faith in the people you're working with."
"I don't like it." Thor and Steve said together.
Thor looked at Steve strangely. "You seem to care more about him than the others do." Tony snickered. Steve turned red. "What am I missing?"
"I, ah, we're…um."
"They're dating." Tony blurted out. "Or whatever you call it over the rainbow. Oh, fuck. I wasn't supposed to say that."
Steve turned even redder. "I, uh, yeah. Yeah, me and Loki are kind of…in a relationship." Thor eyed him critically. Steve gulped. "Please don't hurt me?"
"Okaay then. Come on guys, go do stuff and look busy, remember?" Bruce tried to break the tension. "Oh, and Steve go prop your leg up and put some ice on it. Who knows what walking around today did to it."
I'm not totally happy with this one. I felt like I was struggling for the right words in a few places, but hopefully you know what I'm saying and I'm just being a perfectionist. I was going to wait a few more days to post another chapter, but life is about to get crazy so I wanted to give you something (complete with a cliffhanger or two) to tide you over before potentially disappearing for a while. The research on which I'm a collaborator needs to be ready to present at a thing that's coming up, and I'm pushing to run one of the experiments a couple more times to improve the sample size even though we're cutting it really really close already, so I get to be the one working weekends to make that happen. Yay. At least the end is in sight, as is my vacation.