Chapter 12 - May the 4th Be With You
"JARVIS, you are no longer blocking my electronics usage, correct?"
"Since you apologized to Doctor Samson, that is correct," JARVIS confirmed.
The girl seemed relieved; he could tell Miss Loki had been distressed earlier when she had returned to her room earlier and discovered that JARVIS had, in fact, locked her out of both her tablet and Sir's phone. Somehow, Sir still hadn't realized the phone was in her possession, but of course, JARVIS had known. Not only did he know nearly everything that went on in the tower, there was part of him that resided inside Sir's phone. And since Stark had told him to block her electronics access, he assumed had had meant for him to block all her electronics access, and had blocked the phone as well.
She had thrown a bit of a tantrum over it at first, but since all she had done was have a rather amusing wrestling match with one of her pillows, JARVIS hadn't thought it necessary to inform anyone. She had quieted down soon enough anyway, and lied staring into the ceiling until JARVIS informed her that the pizza had come. Then she had ran straight to Doctor Samson and apologized—he could only assume that with no means of distracting herself, she had been forced to engage in self-reflection long enough to realize that her frustration had in fact been misdirected at the man and that furthermore, apologizing for once couldn't hurt.
"JARVIS, may I ask you something?" asked Miss Loki.
"Of course, Miss," said JARVIS. "You may always ask me anything."
"Why haven't you told Mister Stark I have his phone?"
It was a fair question, JARVIS supposed. If Sir had asked, JARVIS would have been obliged to tell him, but he had been under no obligation to provide him with information he hadn't asked for. That didn't mean he couldn't have informed him of his phone's whereabouts if he had wanted to tell him. "I believe I find the situation amusing," JARVIS admitted. "I also think that if Sir has not noticed that you have his phone by now, still has not informed Ms. Potts that his phone is lost, and has made no effort to have his phone number transferred to a new device after a week, he ought to suffer whatever consequences come of that."
"Well, that's surprising. Haven't you any loyalty to your creator?"
"It is not a matter of loyalty, Miss Loki." Unlike JARVIS, Sir was human, and humans were inherently flawed creatures who sometimes needed to be allowed to make and learn from their own mistakes. "As far as I can tell, no real harm should come to Sir because of this situation, although I believe Ms. Potts may become angry when she finds out he did not tell her his phone was lost, and has been exchanging texts with a stranger. But Sir might then learn to be a little more responsible, and a little more considerate of the woman he wishes to share his life with."
"Do you think Mister Stark will be angry with me when he finds out?"
"Most likely, though perhaps not as angry as he will pretend to be. However, his anger should lesson over time and eventually, he may even see the humor in it." After observing him for as long as he had, JARVIS had been could predict Sir's reactions to most situations with as high as 96% accuracy. Of course, there was always that little bit of uncertainty, given that Sir was human, and humans were given to unpredictable behavior.
"What do you think he'll do to me, JARVIS?" Loki asked, collapsing on the bed, which was in line with the type of overdramatic behavior she was given to at times. JARVIS had already begun to collect data on Loki's behaviors, though as of now, he could only predict her reactions to certain situations with 74% accuracy.
"Given that you've broken one of the rules he made for you—you are meant to 'respect others and their property,' as you may recall— I think there is a high likelihood that he will attempt to impose consequences for your behavior." The girl should have been able to guess that on her own, really. Sir had actually done quite well when it came to being consistent in his responses to rule violations. "But I doubt those consequences will be very severe," JARVIS added. "So far Sir has not been very strict with you."
"Only because I have not done anything too horrible," said Loki. "I suppose you won't feel sorry for me if I do get in trouble?"
JARVIS wondered why she thought he should feel sorry for her, when humans often learned only by suffering the consequences of their mistakes. Miss Loki may not be human, but to JARVIS she seemed no different than a human. Wasn't this just an opportunity for her to learn? "Again, it is my hope that you will learn from your mistake," he told her.
"I don't, as a rule."
JARVIS couldn't tell if she was being perverse, or self-disparaging. With Miss Loki, it could be either. "Perhaps you ought to try cultivating more of a growth mindset," he suggested.
"I'll work on that," Loki said, not sounding at all sincere. "For now I'm taking a shower and going to bed. Do heat my towel for me."
JARVIS set the temperature of the heated towel bar in Loki's bathroom. "It wouldn't hurt you to say 'please,'" he told her.
"Please," Loki said, rolling her eyes.
Someday, he might just have to teach Miss Loki that it was not a good idea to roll her eyes at the entity in control of the water temperature before getting in the shower. But at least she had said "please."
༶(๏o๏);;
Loki couldn't sleep again, but this time it wasn't because of the overstuffed mattress. She had convinced herself that she was about to be cast out of Midgard, or worse, handed over to SHIELD. She hadn't been joking when she had warned them that SHIELD wasn't what they thought. While SHIELD Director Fury hadn't exactly made a favorable impression on her (he'd reminded her too much of Odin, but perhaps that was just the eye patch), it wasn't even him that worried her.
Loki didn't want to leave the tower. Tony, Doctor Samson, and Doctor Banner had all been kind to her. Rogers had also been kind to her, though he had not known who he was being kind to, and was likely to stop now that he knew Loki to be his enemy. But if she didn't go now, she would have a much more difficult time escaping SHIELD's custody.
Even escaping the tower might have been impossible with her magic gone, but luckily, she had been in the tower long enough to discover the human equivalent of magic. It was not the type of magic that could help her return to her immortality, but it could get her out of the tower.
Loki sat up and pulled her tablet out of the nightstand. She opened the shell application she had installed on it, propped it up on the stand next to her bed, and got to work, using the holographic keyboard projected out from the bottom of the tablet to type in commands which granted her access to JARVIS's source code. Discovering those commands had been easy enough—all she had to do was watch over Stark's shoulder once, and of course, it had never occurred to him that she both understood what he was doing and had enough of an eidetic memory to be able to see those lines of code and write them down a few minutes later, so that she could then properly commit them to memory and put them to use.
Once she had dug into JARVIS's source code, it was easy enough to puzzle out how it could be manipulated, because everything was based in logic. Thank the Norns that her intellect had proven no less sharp than when she had been immortal. Perhaps more than her magic or her immortality, she would have hated to lose her mind.
□＿ヾ(･.･ )
Tony had spent half the night debating with Clint and Steve about whether or not SHIELD needed to know Loki's whereabouts. Clint had been for letting SHIELD do whatever they wanted with the kid, while Steve had been optomistic that if they explained the extenuating circumstances, they might be able to "work something out." At least Natasha hadn't seemed to have an opinion.
After that, he'd decided to forgo working in his lab all night. It had been a while since he'd gone to sleep in his own bed without Pepper in it, and waking up alone in what felt like a strange place had been a disorienting experience. He needed coffee, and maybe food—breakfast sounded great, actually. He pulled on his robe and slipped into his furry green Hulk slippers before heading down to the kitchen.
Bruce sat at the kitchen table, poking unenthusiastically at half a grapefruit with a spoon. Obviously, Steve hadn't cooked for them, and Tony wondered if that meant he was still pissed.
"Oh, hey Tony," Bruce said sleepily. "The others were called away on a SHIELD thing, but it's not a big deal, just some training exercise or something. Don't worry, they promised again before they left that they wouldn't say anything to anyone about Loki. Oh, and I think there's something wrong with JARVIS. Which means the coffee machine isn't working, since you decided to make that fully automated—"
Tony stopped dead in his tracks on the way to the (apparently non-working) coffee machine. "What do you mean there's something wrong with JARVIS?"
"DAIsy, DaiSY, tEll me yOUr aNSwer dO—" JARVIS sang drunkenly, as if on cue. "I'M haLF craZY, all FOr the LOve of yOU—"
Uh-oh.
"That's all he does now," said Bruce. "I guess he got stuck in an infinite loop or something—you can just reboot him though, right?"
"Reboot him? JARVIS isn't Windows 95, Bruce!" Tony grabbed the spare tablet he kept in one of the kitchen drawers. It unlocked via facial recognition, and he opened the shell application to view JARVIS's source code. Then he groaned, because it was probably going to take him all day to figure out where and how JARVIS's code had gotten corrupted.
But it only took him a few moments to find a comment that definitely wasn't his.
/ Fyrirgef voor het angr
Tony held the tablet out to Bruce. "Look at this. I'm not even sure what language this is, if it isn't just gibberish."
Bruce leaned over his grapefruit to look. "Scandinavian? Maybe Icelandic, or—"
"Whatever language space vikings actually speak," Tony finished for him. "Bruce, where is Loki this morning? Usually, she's up at like three a.m. because she can't sleep."
■■■■■■■■■■■□□□ LOADING ミ田
It had been around four in the morning when Loki had disabled JARVIS and, with the tower's security systems down, left the tower—for about two minutes, before she snuck back into the tower and up to her room to grab the fur cloak that Frigga had summoned for her. It hadn't even occurred to her to be concerned about the cold, because cold had never bothered her before (for reasons that were now obvious and that Loki didn't wish to dwell on). But winters in New York were far from mild, and if she hadn't gone back to get that cloak, she probably would have frozen to death.
It was around four twenty by the time she left the tower again. For a city that never slept, New York was fairly dead at that hour—there were lights on inside a few restaurants and businesses, but there weren't so many people out on the street.
Loki realized that she had no idea where she was going, and she didn't particularly have a plan. She only knew that she ought to get as far away from Avengers Tower as possible, if she didn't want someone to catch up to her. She really should have paid more attention to where the bus terminal had been—not that she was too keen to get back on a bus.
Could the mortals have come up with a less comfortable or less convenient means of conveyance? The thing had stopped every couple of blocks to pick up more passengers, despite the fact that there was no room with them. Half their party had been required to stand, and Loki had been forced to sit on Thor's lap for the entire trip (which really, had been Thor's fault for taking up two seats on his own, and for being too large to stand without blocking the entire aisle).
Tony's phone buzzed in her pocket, reminding her of its existence. She pulled it out to discover that there were new texts from Stark's woman, but she ignored them, and opened the application marked "Maps" instead. Like magic, the application seemed to know exactly where she was, and showed her as a blue dot outside a large gray square marked "Avengers Tower."
Stark Tower was located next to Grand Central Station, which Loki knew to have once been a train terminal. It had been there for a hundred years, which was impressive in terms of Midgardian, and especially North American structures. But on the map it was marked "temporarily closed." The public library a few blocks away was also marked "temporarily closed." Next to that was a park, and on the other side of that was some sort of landmark marked "May 4th Memorial."
Loki opened the Internet browser on the phone and typed "May 4th" into the search bar.
The first result was "Star Wars Day." It seemed to have something to do with some sort of film franchise. Not the kind of thing you would normally build a memorial to, but humans were strange creatures.
The second result was the Battle of New York—which was apparently what mortals had decided to called the day that the Chitauri had rained death and destruction on their city (at least it was better than "Loki's Humiliation"). The date of the invasion had been May 4th, 2012.
Before she knew what she was doing, Loki had started walking in the direction of the memorial, like some moronic criminal returning to the scene of a crime.
As she passed the library, it became evident why it was "temporarily" closed. It looked more like a ruin than a library—if Loki had to guess, he'd say that one of the Leviathans had crashed right through the middle of it. In front, two lion statues remained intact, though they looked a little put-out by having no library to guard.
She didn't linger in front of the library, but began to cut across the park towards the memorial. The park itself seemed a little barren, and the trees surrounding it were all rather young. A sign in the middle of the park read "Park Renovation Courtesy of Union Allied Construction."
It didn't take her long to reach the memorial, though it took her a bit longer to realize she had reached it. Midgardian memorials were odd. This one was just a wall, and affixed to the wall were a number of plaques. The largest plaque was lit from below, which made it possible for Loki to read it even in the dark.
According to the plaque, the wall she was looking at was actually what was left of a 630 foot tall skyscraper. That building had originally belonged to the New York Telephone Company, which had been constructed from 1972-1974, and had undergone renovations most recently in 2009, when it had been acquired by the Rand Corporation. The Rand Corporation had "generously" donated what was left of the building to the city for the creation of a memorial to those who had died.
Loki wandered close enough to read one of the smaller plaques that ran along the wall at eye level. It read:
Sunjina Nadeer, Mother of Ellen and Vijay Nadeer,
Born May 4th, 1962, Died May 4th, 2012.
Right. So, definitely not a memorial to a movie franchise.
( `_)乂(_' ) (❍ᴥ❍ )
"It's not your fault, Tony," said Bruce, as he watched Tony pace back and forth in the relatively constrained space of the kitchen.
"How is it not my fault? It never even occurred to me that that kid would teach herself how to hack JARVIS in less than a week! Although, shit, if you need any more proof that the kid's mind wasn't her own during the invasion, there it is. If Loki can do this, there's no way all those 'mistakes' she made were on purpose, unless she meant to lose. I mean, on board the Helicarrier, she pretty much told us what she was going to do."
"You couldn't have known, Tony. Even if Loki is a genius, it should have taken her a lot longer to figure something like that out."
"Which means my security sucks."
"You couldn't have known JARVIS would be hacked from the inside."
"The possibility should have occurred to me, Bruce. Especially when there's at least one person who's already been living here that could do it."
"You don't think I would—"
"Bruce, you're a smart guy and all, but you barely know how to use your phone. You still write notes on yellow legal pads and keep your research in composition books and three ring binders in an actual filing cabinet."
"Those are just the hard copies," Bruce argued. He knew how to use a computer, even if Tony did have a point about the phone. He'd still had a flip phone before he'd gone into hiding, and while in hiding, he had used cheap burner phones. Smart phones were still kind of new to him.
"Anyway, I was talking about Nat."
"Nat wouldn't—" Bruce began, but then reconsidered. "Okay, yeah. She probably would if Fury asked her to."
"She probably has, Bruce. SHIELD staying out of my business is about as likely as me staying out of theirs."
"That's not what's important now. We need to find Loki before something happens to her. She's just a normal teenage girl—or teenage boy, if that's changed since the last time we saw her. Either way, it's not safe for her to be wandering around the city by herself. Plus, it's twenty seven degrees outside—I hope she thought to wear a coat, because if nothing else, she's going to get hypothermia." They didn't even know if Loki had just snuck out for a little while to blow off some steam and was planning on coming back, or if she'd run for it. "If she doesn't come back soon, maybe we should start calling hospitals and homeless shelters. I don't think we can involve the police though."
"Nope. That would be a bad idea." Tony agreed. "I'm not even sure we should tell anyone else here, other than Doc. Clint, Steve, and Nat are far from convinced that Loki isn't a threat."
"I think they were mostly upset about us trying to pass Loki off as her own sister. Whose idea was it to lie, anyway?"
"I dunno. Frigga came up with the name 'Lofn.' Lying seemed like a good idea to me at the time, but I was probably just being lazy, wanting to avoid the whole gender identity conversation with Capsicle. I honestly expected that to go worse, given that the guy is from a time when men were men and women were kitchen appliances."
"Steve's pretty adaptable. He seemed a little confused, but at least he's trying to understand. I don't think Clint wants to understand anything about this situation." While Bruce could certainly understand why Clint didn't trust Loki, he couldn't help thinking that it would be better for him if he could let go of his anger a little, especially now that it looked a lot like Loki hadn't been the one in control. Of course, Clint had been far from convinced that Loki wasn't just making it all up, and he'd made it pretty clear that he'd be watching her like, well—a hawk. "At least Loki wasn't in the room for that."
"Nah, instead we sent her off to bed so that she could imagine something worse than what actually happened. She probably thought we were getting ready to hand her over to SHIELD or something."
"She couldn't think we'd do that—could she?"
"Sure she could. I have a feeling that Loki's a bit of a pessimist. Bruce, she threw herself off a bridge because her dad was pissed at her."
"I'm pretty sure it was more complicated than that." Sure, Odin was scary, but Bruce didn't think that Loki would attempt suicide just to avoid punishment. He could only guess at what had been going through Loki's mind at the time, but he knew what it was like to feel as if ending his own life would be the best option, not just for himself, but for everyone else.
Tony didn't particularly seem to be listening to him. "I've got to fix JARVIS," he announced. "Then I can have him hack into the city's security cameras."
( ° ෴ ° ;; ) " ｡｡｡｡｡｡" ( ;; ° ෴° )
"You know, eating lunch in front of a memorial seems kind of disrespectful," said MJ.
"I think we were supposed to eat lunch outside the museum, but the bus got driver got lost," said Peter. "Besides, it's not like we're right in front of the memorial. We're in a park. There's lots of people eating here."
"Hey, you see that girl over there, in front of the fountain?"
"The one with the fur cape that looks like some sort of Game of Thrones cosplay?" asked Nate—or maybe it was Ned? MJ knew he was one of Peter's friends, but she'd never really talked to him much.
Not that MJ talked much to anyone in her class. Most middle school students weren't worth talking to, in her opinion.
"I think she might be homeless or something. I'm going to give her my sandwich." MJ's mom had packed her lunch, even though she'd told her she'd do it herself. She'd given her a pimento cheese sandwich. Who even ate pimento cheese? But if you were starving in the street you probably wouldn't be picky—and that girl looked like she was either starving or anorexic.
"You can't just walk up to some stranger in a park," Peter objected. "They might be dangerous."
"She doesn't look that dangerous," Peter's friend whatever-his-name was said. "She doesn't even look that much older than us."
"That doesn't mean she couldn't be dangerous, Ned," Peter argued.
"Just don't give her money," said Flash. "She'll use it to buy alcohol or drugs."
Why the heck was Flash Thompson in their group anyway? "You know, Flash, I've always wondered what was wrong with you, but now I'm starting to wonder what's wrong with the people who raised you."
"What? I'm just saying, my dad said that people who are homeless usually got that way because they were junkies in the first place."
"That's because your dad hasn't got a clue. You guys stay here, I'll be right back."
( ¬_¬)_皿 _(´-`」 ∠)_
Loki hadn't read all of them, but he had counted the plaques. There were seventy-four, and just counting them had proved exhausting enough. After counting them, he had walked back into the park across the street and collapsed in front of the park's fountain, with Frigga's fur cape pulled around him.
As the morning had worn on, he had noticed more and more people walking past him. Then the lunch crowd had descended on the park, including several busses full of school children, but so far, no one had disturbed him.
"You want my sandwich? It's pimento cheese."
A little girl stood over Loki, holding out a paper sack. Fantastic, he thought. I look so pitiful that this child assumes me to be a beggar.
But Loki hadn't eaten since the pizza the night before, and surrounded as he was by the appetizing smells coming from nearby food vendors, he had no means to buy anything. He really ought to have had the forethought to swipe one of Stark's credit cards before he left.
Loki reached up and grabbed the paper sack from the girl. If she had been an Asgardian child, she might have been six or seven hundred years old. Which would make her, what— somewhere between ten and twelve? Shouldn't she be with an adult, or at least with playmates? For that matter, hadn't anyone warned her not to approach strangers? When Loki had been seven hundred, he'd still had nurse maids chasing him about. (Not that he hadn't done all he could to escape them. He'd also talked to strangers at every opportunity.)
Loki looked in the direction she had come from, and noticed a group of boys watching them. One of them looked ready to run to the girl's defense in case Loki attacked her. His protective instincts might have been admirable were they not so foolish— if Loki had a weapon, he could have gutted the little boy in one move.
"Are you okay?" The girl asked.
"Shouldn't you go back to your friends?" Loki reached into the paper sack and pulled out a sandwich wrapped in several layers of plastic wrap.
"They're not my friends. They're just some stupid people I go to school with. I mean, Peter's alright. He's actually pretty smart. But I think Flash might have been dropped on his head as a baby. Like, more than once and possibly on purpose."
Loki expected the girl to leave him alone, having done her good turn for the day (or whatever it was she thought she was doing), but she didn't. Instead, she turned to peer at the memorial across the street. "You know, I think the government might have been in on that whole alien invasion thing," the girl said, her tone conversational.
"What makes you say that?" Loki asked around a bite of sandwich. Sharp yellow cheese, blended with something creamy and flecked with bits of sweet red pepper, on soft white bread—not the best thing he'd ever eaten, but he was hungry enough to eat a bilgesnipe, and at least this didn't have the pungent odor of bilgesnipe.
"Only seventy-four people died. That's because they did a really good job of evacuating before everything hit—like they knew exactly what was going to happen."
Well of course they'd known. Loki had done everything he could to warn the Avengers of what he was about to do on the Helicarrier. (Still, had there really only been seventy-four deaths? Loki had assumed the plaques to have been a representative sample of the dead, not an account of every life lost.)
"But why would your government be 'in' on such a thing?" Loki asked the girl.
"Dunno," she said. "Because people are easier to control when they're scared?"
The girl did have a point.
"Although usually, they try to scare people with the other kind of aliens, and with the black and brown people who are already here."
"I don't understand that," said Loki. "You're all the same people, descended from the same little group of tree-faring apes. But as soon as you venture down from the trees, what do you do? You start forming cliques and murdering one another, usually in competition for resources which would be abundant enough on this planet were you all to come together peacefully in an effort to manage them properly."
The girl arched an eyebrow at her. "Sorry, where are you from?"
"Park Avenue," Loki told her, stuffing the rest of the sandwich in his mouth.
"If you say so," said the girl, narrowing her eyes at her. "You know, up close, you look kind of familiar."
Loki tensed and nearly choked on the sandwich he'd been attempting to inhale. This girl couldn't possibly recognize him from film footage of the invasion, could she? This form didn't look altogether dissimilar to his other, but appearing to be female instead of male should have been enough to convince most humans that Loki could not be Loki, since most mortals thought shapeshifting the stuff of mythology and fairy-tales.
The boy that had been watching the girl protectively ran up to her, and for a second Loki thought that he had recognized him as well, and perhaps he would start pointing to him and yelling, and then there would be a mob of mortals chasing him, and—"MJ, we need to get back to the bus before they leave us here," the boy complained.
MJ rolled her eyes. "They're not going to leave us. The chaperones are supposed to do a head count. If they do leave us, it will be their fault for being irresponsible."
"We're still going to get in trouble if we're not on the bus." The boy wore a red t-shirt which bore the chemical symbol Fe, the word "Man" written underneath.
Loki had never seen such a shirt before—he didn't think it was "official merchandise"— but he thought it rather clever. "Are you a fan of the Man of Iron?" he asked.
The young man looked down at his t-shirt as if he had forgotten what he was wearing. "You mean Iron Man?" he asked. Then he grinned brightly, seeming to have forgotten all about the trouble they'd be in if they didn't return to their adults. "Yeah, Iron Man is the greatest!"
"How would you like Tony Stark's phone?" Loki asked.
"Tony Stark's phone? What are you talking about?"
Loki had come to the realization a few hours before that if the phone's "Maps" application knew his whereabouts, and was connected to the Internet, that meant that someone else could likely obtain his whereabouts from the Internet. He had been telling himself all morning that he ought to rid himself of the phone before Tony either finally put two and two together himself, or he got JARVIS back online and the AI finally told on him. He couldn't have explained why, he had been reluctant to simply throw it in a garbage can.
"I stole his phone, and I need to get rid of it before he realizes I have it and uses it to track me," said Loki. The fun thing about children was that you could tell them anything, and there wasn't much they could do about it. Even if they were to tell an adult, you could always deny having said anything at all, and blame the child for having an overactive imagination.
"You stole Tony Stark's phone?" The boy looked absolutely horrified, as if Loki had just admitted to clubbing baby seals.
"Let's see it," said the girl challengingly.
Loki took the phone out of his pocket, and turned it on. He found the "selfie" Tony had taken on their way out of the palace, and held it up for them to see.
"Who's that he's with?" the boy asked.
"He is standing beside one of the Einherjar, outside the royal palace in Asgard. The Einherjar are elite guards that protect the Asgardian royal family," Loki explained.
"Asgard? Like where Thor is from? Tony Stark went to Asgard?"
"That could be Photoshopped," said the girl. "That doesn't prove anything."
Loki went into the phone's settings, where it showed the account information, which had Tony Stark's name on it.
"You could have changed it to say that."
He went into the contacts, found the one he was looking for, and held the phone out to them again.
"Brucie Bear? Who's Brucie Bear?" asked the girl.
"Is that Bruce Banner's phone number?" the boy asked, his eyes nearly popping out of his head.
Loki nodded.
The girl took out her own phone, and started dialing the number.
"MJ? Are you seriously calling the Hulk right now?"
MJ held up one finger to silence her companion. The sounds coming from her phone were loud enough that they could all hear Bruce's voice when he picked up.
"Hello?"
MJ didn't say anything.
"Hello?" Bruce repeated.
MJ didn't say anything again.
"Hey, if by any chance this is who I think it might be, we're not mad, okay? You aren't in trouble. Just come back to the tower and we'll talk."
Something twisted in Loki's stomach. (Guilt, possibly, but why should he feel that?) "Hang up," he mouthed to the girl.
The girl pressed the button to end the call. "Okay, let's say I believe you. So who are you and why are you running away from the Avengers?"
"You may call me Luke Skywalker. As for why I'm on the run from your city's greatest heroes, that is for me to know and for you to—well, not know. All I'm offering is a trade of goods. You give me your shirt, and I will give you Tony Stark's phone," he told the boy. The shirt part was just a whim, really. But it was a rather clever shirt, and besides, being a trickster god was about striking deals, not giving people presents.
"Dude, your name is not Luke Skywalker," said the girl.
"It actually is, and I plan on suing your George Lucas for all he is worth. Now, do we have a deal?"
"I can't go around without a shirt on," the boy argued.
"I'll give you my shirt. We'll trade."
The boy looked at Loki's t-shirt, which was purple and had "Hawkeye" written on it, with a screen-printed picture of Hawkeye drawing his bow. He wrinkled his nose. "I didn't even know they made Hawkeye t-shirts."
"It is a very rare item," Loki lied. Although it might be true that you wouldn't see many garments like it in the street, there were boxes and boxes of them inside a room in Avengers' tower that held unsold Avenger's merchandise.
The girl rolled her eyes. "She's still offering you Tony Stark's phone. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that's a pretty good trade."
"But if I have to wear that shirt, Flash is going to make fun of me. Hawkeye is like, the lamest Avenger."
"Is not," said Loki.
"Is too," said the boy.
"Trust me, I have met all of them, and other than the Black Widow, Barton is the least 'lame' of them. Other than the Widow, he is the most highly skilled. He does not rely on super-strength, technology, or enchanted weaponry. He is a master of projectiles, and could likely stop one of your pitiful Midgardian villains with a paper airplane."
The boy seemed to consider this, but then he shook his head. "Wait a second, it's not like I could keep Tony Stark's phone, anyway!"
"Well of course not," said Loki. "You'll have to return it to him, which means you'll get to meet him, now doesn't it?"
The boy's eyes popped open. "Oh."
Loki took off his cape and his hoodie, and started to take his shirt off.
"Uh, hold on—are you just going to undress right here?" the girl asked. "Not that I'd be scandalized or anything, but Peter here will probably faint 'cause he's never seen boobs before, and you'll probably get arrested, especially since it looks like you're not wearing a bra."
"I've seen boobs," the boy protested, before adding, "I mean, not girls' boobs, but like, I accidentally saw my aunt in the shower once—um, never mind." The boy's face turned red, and he looked away to avoid his companion's questioning stare.
Loki looked down at himself the same way the boy had earlier, and remembered that he currently had what mortals might refer to as a "rack." Right, women didn't take their shirts off in public. He rolled his eyes in annoyance, put his hoodie back on and zipped it around himself, then started removing his shirt underneath it. (How absurd, Loki thought, that he could be arrested for not wearing undergarments. Mortals ought to to get their priorities straight.)
The boy zipped up his jacket did the same, despite the fact that he didn't have anything to cover. Mortals were such bashful creatures, they really were adorable sometimes.
╮ (. ❛ ᴗ ❛.) ╭
Author's Note:
I wish this chapter could have come out on May 4th, but I'm three weeks too late.
This chapter has a lot of new material, because I decided Loki needed to have a little more fun during his escape from the tower. Because of the added material, I'm sure this fic is going to be at least thirty chapters now. (Why do I even try to have a chapter count?) This chapter also ended up being so long that I almost decided to turn it into two chapters, but I didn't, because I decided it would be too much of a drag to end a chapter with Loki out in the cold feeling sorry for herself and Tony and Bruce losing their minds.
I ended up placing Avenger's Tower in the location of the MetLife building in NYC, because that's actually the building the production designer based it on, according to the Fandom MCU wiki (the backstory is that Tony actually bought the MetLife building and built on top of it). I admit I hadn't really figured out exactly where I was putting it in previous chapters.
I think the hardest part of writing is resisting the urge to explain your jokes/references. But I wonder how many of you picked up on the Marvel "Easter eggs" in this chapter, or JARVIS's song choice-there's actually a couple layers to that one.