Part 9
A/N: The scene is partially canonical, I change things up but it still happened, just years earlier. Also, the names from the last chapter. They were, in this order, Teddy Lupin (Here, officially, Edward Lupin-Black), the briefly mentioned Jade Lokidottir (very deep MCU nerds may recognize her earth name, hint, one of the Avengers knows her from their origin story and her mom's name is canonical, also in this fanon Loki's younger, second daughter of two), then Hermione Granger, Loki, Neville Longbottom, Luna Longbottom (nee Lovegood), their daughter Selene Longbottom, their adopted (previously orphaned) son Rolf Scamander, Andromeda Black-Tonks, Lilith Lokidottir AKA Rose Potter, and Tony Stark. Frigga is the same Frigga that is Thor's mom, Thor's dad was the one taken off, and Freyr Freyason (if you look at the last name, Frigga's brother, younger for alter plot point) was added on.
This chapter is posted the same day the last one was, congrats to the user Vukk for getting the record and guessing 11/14 correctly, honorable mention to the user BioHazard82 for getting 7 of them, not even guessing, just listing them, yay for the confidence. And thank you to any other users who will guess it. This chapter is a two-part chapter anyways, so since I got two guessers who got a majority right, I will post both parts if I have time to edit them both.
Mjolnir is not a cheap replaceable toy, no matter how much Thor treats it as such.
While Tony was enjoying the moment, Clint was on the job. The usual, acting like a normal, not spy at all human while noting everything and anything he saw, heard, or otherwise recognized.
So when Thor started bragging about his hammer, to the obvious sarcastic eye-roll of Rose Potter, who had somehow been convinced to come and bring both her friend Hermione Granger and her godson Teddy (no last name yet), he paid even closer attention.
But as long as he didn't slack off, he could still have fun on the job, so when Thor offered him to lift the hammer, he stood up to attempt something he insisted was a hoax.
"Clint, you've had a tough week, we won't hold it against you if you can't get it up." Tony quipped in his usual Tony Stark manner.
"You know I've seen this before, right?" Clint asked as he casually leaned on the hammer and then lifted it off the table like he would any other item of a similar mass. Except it wouldn't lift. "Eugh-huh-ugh" he grunted, as he continued what he now realized to be a futile attempt. But he was an A-list spy, and he was nothing if not a good actor. Mumbling to cover the grunts, which, to be fair, were getting pretty annoying, he just chuckled and told Thor. "Man, I just don't know how you do it."
"Silent judgment," Stark told him not very silently.
"Please," Clint motioned, "by all means."
"Uh-ooh" sounded across the room from its inhabitants, especially Tony's plus one Rhodey, since Pepper wouldn't come. To be fair, most, if not all of the Avengers considered Tony and Pepper's romantic relationship to be practically over, continued so that the press wouldn't eat pepper alive, since it was most likely she, who broke up with Toy and not vice versa.
"I'm never one to shrink from an honest challenge," Tony Stark said nonchalantly. "It's physics," he said confidently. "So if I lift this I get to rule Asgard"
"Yes," Thor stated in his usual bold, overly confident manner.
"Really? And here I thought you were only the lowly crown prince of Asgard." Rose Potter snarked at the Asgardian.
"Well, yes. So you rule Asgard when my father steps down." Thor corrected himself.
"Or kicks the bucket," Teddy added. The sixteen-year-old had yet to change his hair color, though Clint had been informed from one of Fury's sources, which he had stopped keeping track of (surprising for a professional spy), that he could do at least that, full spontaneous shapeshifting was unconfirmed.
"Teddy, what have I told you about crude language where it can get back to your grandmother?" Rose rebuked him, with mock seriousness.
"To lower my volume," he responded dutifully.
"Interesting take on parenting there," Clint noted.
"His mother was the same way, and his father would just be laughing along while pretending to be responsible. Teddy's dad and both my godfathers were THE pranksters, like, ever. It's still hard to believe Teddy's dad was a teacher for a year." Clint noticed that, yet again, it seemed like on the surface she was giving them as much information as possible, yet none of it was relevant or could be used in any way. The game was on.
"Well, if I end up ruling Asgard, I will be instituting Prima Nocta."
"Stark, if you do that I will permanently end the Stark patriline," Granger told him sharply, giving her leg a little kick in the air to show him exactly how she would do so. Stark didn't have any sisters or female cousins, Clint noted. There was something up, most likely the secret the recording mentioned Stark was going to keep of his own free will. Stark obviously was too eager to send them something real to crop it out. Either that or he was desperate for them to not think he was siding with Loki's spawn to send them an unedited copy.
Brushing off the comment, Stark told them, "be right back." Returning a few moments later with the gauntlet off his Iron man suit, he tried lifting the hammer again. Many different settings, and then with two hands, and then with three and four, adding in Rhodey to the mix. Nothing worked. The friendly bickering between them was entertaining but senseless.
When Steve Rogers, Captain America, failed to lift it, he joined the Avengers plus three in the lighthearted chuckling at his second failure of physical strength in two days.
Natasha Romanoff declined, taking a swig of alcohol Clint noticed, she, as usual, did not swallow. "What difference does it make if it's rigged? Like fingerprinting?" Stark asked.
"I wouldn't say rigged, it seems as if it's heavily enchanted. Can I test the enchantments?" Hermione asked Thor. She had so far been polite, or distant with him, knowing Rose's habit of holding grudges against those that had even vaguely insulted those close to her.
"Yes, go ahead." Thor obliged.
Hermione spun her finger around for a second as if creating a whirlpool of air. A purple, vaguely identifiable energy formed around her finger growing as she spun it. She closed her eyes for a second, and then they flew open.
"Rose, those enchantments are solid. Little boost?"
"Sure." Rose shrugged. Clint watched her carefully, and so did the micro camera on the contact lens in his eye. Her irises gained a small circle of emerald green around the edges, and a glowing orb of emerald energy appeared in her palm. She directed it at the hammer.
After a split second, she turned it off. "Odinson, what is the hammer made of?"
"Uru, made by the Dwarves of Nidavellir, forged from the heart of a dying star!"
"Uru, huh?"
"Are you familiar with it?"
"I've encountered a few items made of Uru, amazing material. Even my own secret Vibranium-Adamantium alloy stuff isn't that good. And it's fuckin expensive. Not even any of my goblin-forged shit is that expensive."
"How expensive? And goblins, really?"
"They're extinct. All lived under a bank that collapsed on their heads during a terrorist attack by the same megalomaniac I only managed to deal with a year after that. Surprisingly not even my fault. As for Uru, about, what's the current market price for an ounce of gold?"
She then tilted her neck, and asked in Tony Stark's voice, "JARVIS, what's the current market price for an ounce of gold?"
Tony stared bug-eyed. Clint realized what Coulson meant about how creepy that was.
Jarvis raised a hologram screen with all the statistics. "Alright. Around one and a half grand*." she said, back in her own voice. "Well, a raw ounce of Goblin-forged steel, the name isn't pronounceable with a human tongue, was a thousand galleons. A galleon," she took a gold coin out of her pocket, "is two ounces of pure solid gold. So thirty million dollars for an ounce of pure, goblin forged steel. And that was counting the fact that nobody but the goblins could ever figure out how to craft the stuff." Rose just realized that the Triwizard winnings were equivalent to thirty million muggle dollars. Never bothering to make the conversion before, or bothering to count her always plentiful money, she realized just why so many had been willing to risk their lives for it. "'Now Uru, I've never calculated how much it would cost in American dollars, but I know it's twenty times the price of goblin-forged steel. And that's considering the fact that I'm the only one who's ever attempted the trade, considering the number of people with access to goblin-crafted items can be counted on one hand. So the equivalent of about 6 billion United States dollars for an ounce of Uru. That hammer should be about 40 pounds, which makes it worth about 3 and a half-trillion dollars just for the materials. Not bad."
Tony Stark was gaping. "And you just leave something that expensive, just lying around?"
"It can't get stolen, remember? Unworthiness, enchantments, and all that?" Clint Barton noted, curious as to where this was going to go.
"Yes, well, I'm going to test that. My specialty is enchanting, so I am deeply curious as to how this works. There have got to be at least three interwoven layers of enchantments here" Hermione mused.
"Your specialty?" Steve Rogers asked.
"Oh yeah. I can do magic. Rose and I had just been living amongst muggles for years so we're used to specifying everything."
Tony Stark just had to open his mouth in order to have Rose answer the unasked question.
"Everything I've told you about my powers is technically true. It's just slightly more complicated than that. A muggle comes from a Germanic version of the phrase magic-less, although it's been in the form of the word muggle for centuries. And yes, Hermione had got her mastery in enchanting in the middle of a civil war while we were wanted by both sides, one as enemies the other as martyrs."
"Rose, boost. Now. Or I'm going to go into a MEC**."
Rose quickly summoned up her emerald green ball of energy and combined it with Hermione's. The violet and green swirling glowing mass shot towards Mjolnir and then seemed to transform into a liquid state as it encompassed the hammer. Out of it floated runic-looking symbols. But they were not like the Norse runes on Thor's hammer, but completely different.
*As of 2012
**Magical Exhaustion Coma, partially canonical
A/N: Yeah, I did have Hermione not be ok with the casual misogynistic meaning of that line from Tony. For those that don't get it, Prima Nocta means first night in Latin, and was a tradition at one point or another, somewhere (Latin-knowing) where the king or lord would get to sleep with a (lower ranking than the lord or king) man's new wife on their wedding night, and the man only got his bride on the second night, and her feelings and consent or lack of it, weren't taken into account whatsoever, it was all perfectly legal, not even borderline rape. Gives the line another meaning, doesn't it? Glad I looked that one up.