"Ah, that's the stuff," Agent Romanoff exclaimed and stretched on one of the low chairs with reclined backrests that Loki was almost certain had no proper name in the Æsir tongue, like many items exclusive to Midgard. She took a sip of her drink. "It's delicious, by the way, you should totally regret shooting it down."
She offered to make an "iced coffee" for him as well, but he refused. He'd had coffee on Midgard once, long years ago, and hated it. The beverage Romanoff was having had very little to do with the black, bitter drink he had tried though, at least visually, and he was indeed regretting not accepting the offer. Just a bit.
"Are you going to stand over me the whole time?" she asked, looking up at him, hooding her eyes with her hand against the sun.
He sat down on the edge of the chair, on the opposite side of the table from her, deciding it's not worth having an argument over.
The "patio" was a sun deck on the lower section of the roof, with a pool that cut into part of the floor below, copious amount of greenery growing out of huge ceramic pots, and an assortment of furniture, all arranged to create a place for relaxation. The area was high above the street level and shielded by the glass panes that surrounded it, and very little noise from the life going on below reached this high up. If it weren't for occasional passing aircraft, Loki would be almost able to fool himself it was a private garden somewhere on Asgard.
It took a while, but the realization had finally sunk in, sometime during the last day. Asgard was his home for fifteen centuries and he would never set his foot there again. He would live the remnants of his life in exile, without ever seeing his…
He ran his hand through his hair – just like with shaving, he didn't want to waste any energy to keep it in check and now it was in his face all the time – and sat back on the chair. It was done and there was no going back. And there was a positive side to it. He would never have to hear Odin's lies, or Thor's friends' mockery, he would never have a chance to fail in his role as the second-best prince or suffer any more of the All-Father's sentences.
"What are you thinking about?" Romanoff asked, raising an eyebrow. It was weird, seeing her like this, relaxed, wearing loose, civilian clothing. Almost like she was just some person he met on the street and not his overseer, holding his fate in her hands.
"Nothing."
"Mhm, I can tell. Want to talk about this 'nothing' of yours?"
"Why would I?"
"I don't know," she said with a slim smile. "That's what people do sometimes."
He looked away, to buy time, considering what to tell her to stop the line of questioning. Because it was an interrogation. She needed to know more about him to do her job more effectively. She admitted it herself, and even without that it was obvious. He was just another task to her, another objective to crack open and spill the secrets of.
"Whatever, suit yourself. This is for you, by the way," she said, pushing one of the plastic cups she grabbed from the fridge when they were downstairs to him. It had a colorful picture of something that might be fruit on it and a layer of frost that was slowly melting away in the sun.
"What is it?"
"Ice cream. Don't worry, it's vegan, organic, free-range, and other fancy hipster words. And tasty as all hell. I don't know where Bruce orders those but they sure know what they are doing."
"What's an 'ice cream'?" he asked, trying out the unfamiliar word. The equivalent that the All-Speak provided was an amalgam of frost and a dairy product that was too descriptive and a lot harder to say quickly than the English version.
"Why don't you try for yourself? I even brought you a spoon!"
He yielded, picked the container, pulled off the lid and only then realized what it was. A frozen dessert the people of Midgard would sometimes consume. It wasn't usually served like that for all he knew.
"Are you supposed to eat it like this?"
She shrugged, sticking a spoon into her container. "It doesn't matter if you're going to eat the whole thing, right?"
He nicked the smooth surface with his spoon and allowed the portion to melt on his tongue. It was cold, freezing even, and that should've denied the purpose of it being proper food, but somehow it didn't. It was rather tasty. Delicious, in fact. The coldness and the sweetness with a tang of sour fruity flavor at the end went surprisingly well together.
She smiled knowingly. "I'm taking that you like it."
"Yes," he admitted begrudgingly and shoved another spoonful into his mouth.
They stayed on the roof for a while, eating their ice cream. Romanoff had no more questions for him and he didn't really feel like talking, so they sat there, in silence, basking in the sunlight. Loki was never fond of staying in the sun for too long if he didn't have to, but after the days of darkness it felt good and he wasn't going to complain.
It was, in fact, rather enjoyable. The sun was high in the sky, but it wasn't yet full-on summer in the Midgardian cycle and the breeze whistling past ensured it didn't get uncomfortably hot. Loki found himself dozing off in the pool chair (as Romanoff said they were called) when the summon came, in the form of Romanoff's phone beeping a new message.
"Tony calls us down," she reported. "They found something in the scans and they want to talk this through with you."
Loki sighed, immediately reminded of his role here, then pulled himself up. "Let's go."
The men were waiting for them in the lounge. There were machine noises and muffled shouts coming from the level below – sounds of an ongoing reconstruction, meant to undo the damage Thor had done to Stark's home, if Loki was to wager a guess.
Stark carried one of his portable computers under his arm, Bruce – a stack of papers.
Stark beckoned them to a new room, off the side and down the hallway from the common area. Loki's heart skipped a bit at how official it looked – with a big desk and rows of shelves in the background it must've been some kind of office, perhaps Stark's personal one. The panic lessened when the door closed behind them though. The room was better insulated against the sounds and the construction noises were not as pronounced here. It might be the only reason why Stark decided to use it.
The notion got even more credible when Stark passed the big desk and led them to a circular table at the side.
Loki sat down and eyed the men questioningly. An unstated worry brewed at the back of his mind already, dreading what they might have found and how aggravating it was that they decided it needed discussion right away.
Stark tapped away at his keyboard then turned the device around, so Loki could see the display. It showed graphs and tables with letters and numbers. It said absolutely nothing to Loki.
"We know what keeps on sucking up your energy," Stark announced. "Well, not technically, as we don't know what it is, but there's something that does."
Loki raised an eyebrow.
"I did a partial DNA sequencing of your genotype… The DNA is..." Bruce started.
"The life code," Loki said, repeating the translation the All-Speak provided.
"Uhm, yes, you can put it like that. So, I did the sequencing, based on your blood sample, and there are some truly interesting patterns in there."
"Interesting?"
"Yes. While most of it is eerily similar to human DNA – which makes sense, as we must be kin species in some way – there are sequences of the type I've seen only once in my life."
Loki raised an eyebrow.
"In myself," Bruce added, a lot more quietly. "They are a part of the mutation that makes me… turn into the Hulk. Or the rage monster, as most would call him."
Oh, Loki didn't like where this was going, not at all.
"There's also a cluster of cells along your spinal column," Bruce continued and waved at Stark, who changed the image on his monitor to show the model of Loki's body, now with a line of his spine highlighted in red. "They show similar structure to the ones in my brain, which are also a result of my mutation."
"It's also where most of the energy goes when you draw it," Stark added. A few percent of it gets absorbed by the cells of your body and is turned into energy molecules. The rest? All in there."
Loki nodded, slowly, while trying to wrap his mind around the findings. He had a rather well-developed, even if somewhat general, idea about the Æsir biology and it wasn't anything he had ever seen. It wasn't anything he had ever sensed in himself or was told by a healer either.
The last one, of course, had an explanation. Odin would have forbidden any healer to inform Loki about abnormalities in his flesh, or else he could figure out the secret of his heritage before the time was ripe for Odin to gather the fruits of his labors.
"You think it's what makes me sick. Drains my energy."
"Yes. Do you have an idea what it might be?" Bruce said.
Loki's heart did a flip in his chest. He could lie. He should lie, because the other alternative was too unthinkable to even consider. He couldn't possibly count on the stream of help and care they provided to continue once the humans knew the truth.
But that would also mean throwing away all the goodwill he had already been offered.
"Yes," he said, looking away. "It's… it's the remains of my true form." He paused and took a long breath, gathering the remnants of his mettle. "I'm a Jötunn."
There was a beat of silence.
"Mhm," Stark hummed.
Loki looked up and then around, his gaze drifting from Stark, to Bruce and then to Romanoff. Their stares were completely blank.
"Uhm, and what's that?" Bruce asked.
"The Jötnar?"
Nothing.
Loki stared back incredulously. Did the humans not know the name? Perhaps Midgardians used a different label for the race? "The Frost Giants?"
"Mhm," Stark hummed again.
"Wait, the Frost Giants like the Frost Giants Odin allegedly chased away from Earth thousands of years ago, according to legends?" Bruce asked carefully. "What? Am I the only one who did any reading on the whole Norse Mythology thing?" he added, when the others turned to him.
Allegedly? "Yes, exactly those," Loki snarled.
"That was real?" Stark asked with a dubious expression.
"Yes?"
Stark laughed nervously and Bruce scratched his forehead. Romanoff was watching him through slanted eyes and her expression was completely unreadable.
"Mhm." It was Stark, yet again. "I think I need to do some catch-up reading tonight," he added with a smirk.
Loki just told them his deepest, darkest secret. Uncovered his vile, heinous nature. And this is what he was getting?
"This is not my true appearance, either."
"You mentioned that part before," Bruce said, matter-of-factly. "That's why I made the connection. That the cluster might be something that's responsible for your transformation and it's malfunctioning."
Loki nodded. His nature found one more way to make his life miserable, as if he needed any more of those.
"I think the first you should try is to return to your original form."
Loki blinked, confused. "Why would I?"
"That's troubleshooting one-oh-one," Stark said with a shrug, turned the computer back to himself and started tapping away at the keyboard. "Remove all the unnecessary variables. Restore the factory settings, so to speak, and go on from there."
"Can you do it?" Bruce asked. "Like, are there special conditions you need to fulfill first or can you do it at will?"
"I… I'm not sure," Loki admitted. "I only did it three times and all were involuntary."
Bruce made a margin of one of his papers. "You didn't experiment with it further?"
"Why would I want to turn into a monster willingly?"
Bruce let out a drawn sigh. "Okay, so it's a mental change then," he said, and made another note. "We might want to take measures to contain…"
Loki's lips pursed, then he shook his head.
Bruce adjusted his glasses and looked at Loki with a frown.
"It's just… my body, that changes. Not my mind. As far as I know, I'm still myself, inside."
Stark stifled a laugh, then turned the computer to them again. The picture on the screen was an artistic and somewhat stylized, but still rather decent representation of two Jötnar warriors. "That's what popped up when I googled Frost Giants," he explained. "Is that what we're working with here?"
"More or less?" Loki tried, carefully. "I'm… rather small, compared to other… specimens for my species."
Romanoff's lips curled up in a feral grin. "I want to see it, sooo bad," she said and the grin widened.
"So, back to the primary question. Can you do it? Do you know what triggered the transformations previously?" Bruce insisted.
"It was a Jötunn's touch the first time and then the Casket of the Ancient Winters."
"Mhm," Stark said. "We're short on those, sadly."
"It's the cold," Loki sighed. "Or rather, extremely low temperatures, that make my body react that way."
Stark clapped his hands. "That I can work with!" He sprung up and headed for the elevator.
"Where are you going?" Bruce asked, voicing Loki's reservations before he himself could.
"I have a supply of dry ice in the workshop. And a few containers of liquid nitrogen if that doesn't work. That should do the trick, right?"
Loki was only vaguely aware of how Midgardians' interpretation of chemistry worked, but that name he was at least familiar with, even though the All-Speak completely misrepresented the concept. He nodded, curtly.
Stark left, Bruce returned to his notes, and Romanoff pulled Stark's computer to herself and studied the image on the screen with a mischievous smirk.
And Loki sat there, wondering how the Hel he had allowed the conversation to go from where it started to this.