"How was school?" Clint asked over a video call.
During their stay at the Barton farm, Thor and Loki had heard Clint ask his children that question many times, but now he directed the inquiry at Loki with a somewhat wry smile.
Thor needed to split his attention between watching his shield-brother on the video call and keeping an eye on his brother in the penthouse. Loki was, of course, taking most of the attention as he raided Steve's art supplies. Steve, who had been leaning to be in Clint's view, rushed over to prevent Loki from eating his pastels.
"Well, we rode in style," said Tony. "No smelly buses for us."
"Have you ever ridden a bus in your life?" Clint's tone was half sarcasm and half genuine curiosity.
Before Thor could elaborate about Xavier's Institute, Cooper and Lila crammed themselves next to Clint and barraged Thor and Loki with questions.
"What's magic school like? Are there moving stairs?"
"Did you pack your own lunch, Mr. Loki?"
"Did your lunchbox eat your lunch?"
Cooper pointed at Loki's suit. "Is it a private school?"
"With uniforms?" Lila added unnecessarily.
Before Thor could attempt to answer any of the questions, the children would throw another one at him. Clint chuckled, though he'd been on the receiving end of such ambushes many times.
Loki let out his battle cry as he attacked Steve's latest portrait with a blue oil paste. The noise made it almost impossible to hear the stream of questions, let alone answer any.
Thor hauled Loki away from Steve's ruined creation, apologizing profusely. Steve seemed torn between telling Loki off for sabotaging his art, and waving it aside.
He offered Loki some edible clay that Bruce had concocted after Loki had eaten the non-edible version. Rather than reaching for the green, as he was wont to do, Loki immediately grabbed the blue clay, and began to smashing and pounding against the floor. His grunting shouts only increased.
Lila switched to sign language, asking if Loki was scared because it was his first day.
"My brother was not scared," Thor boomed, and Clint's eyebrows shot up at the defensive tone.
Once Loki had quieted, Thor regaled the Bartons with the journey to the mansion of mutants. When he got to Loki changing his appearance, Lila exclaimed "You can be anyone next Halloween, Mr. Loki!"
She was awed at his ability to change his appearance, and completely convinced he would learn to control it by Halloween. She begged for a demonstration, but Loki seemed perfectly content in his new suit.
Loki hauled himself up, sat in his wheelchair, and shrieked, staring in the direction of Tony's room.
"You're far from the only person who wants to get in my room," Tony joked, not bothering to censor himself despite the children on the call. Clint gave him an unimpressed Loki, and Tony protested that Clint would have totally made that joke.
To Loki, he said "I thought you wanted to be the professor. You can drive."
"You're old enough to drive," Cooper pointed out.
Loki clumsily maneuvered his wheelchair, then crawled the rest of the way to Tony's closet.
"You're bigger than me, buddy," muttered Tony as Loki yanked suits off the racks. Tony reminded himself that things like physics didn't really apply to Loki, and he'd altered is clothes into his current suit. "I know I promised you one. I meant a new one, not hand-me-downs."
Tony had more suits than he could ever wear, and enough money to replace every insanely expensive one. Still, he protested the destruction and said "Good thing Fury's not seeing all your property damage. It really doesn't help our case that you won't destroy the world."
Loki's first lesson at the Xavier's School was with a redheaded woman named Jean Grey.
"Where were you during our tour?" Tony asked.
Jean rebuffed Tony's flirting, even threw a mention to her boyfriend in passing, though she seemed to know that wouldn't stop Tony Stark.
She showed Loki her technique for levitating objects, explaining how she reached out with her mind as she made hand gestures.
She claimed she had telepathic abilities like the Professor, but they weren't helping her reach Loki.
Loki didn't imitate her gestures. He was clearly bored and unimpressed with the levitation; he'd seen Clint juggle and made books fly, himself.
Loki entertained himself by knocking objects out of the air, and pulling down Tony's pants.
"You saved me a step there, buddy." Tony smirked.
"Watch me," Jean instructed, making a sharp motion. Tony's pants shot back up, and the belt firmly fastened itself around his waist.
Jean seemed to sense she needed to make the lesson more exciting. She made objects soar in loops.
"You're going to make Clint look lame in comparison," Tony grinned. "But then, we all do."
Loki gave a cry of outrage, seeming to defend Clint's honor.
Loki threw items rather than levitating them. Whether he was unable or unwilling to levitate items at the moment was anyone's guess. He was clearly able to make objects move without touching them, so perhaps he was driving home the point that he did what he wanted, not what he was told to do.
Throwing things didn't cause as much chaos in the mansion as it did at the tower or the farm. Jean could simply stop the trajectory with her own telekinetic powers.
Jean stayed patient and encouraging, sharing that she'd struggled to control her powers at first as well.
Loki's telekinesis tutoring dissolved into chaos as Loki made Jean's fiery red hair burst into actual flames.
Admittedly, it didn't cause as much pandemonium as it would have anywhere else. In a mansion full of teenage mutants learning to use their powers, fire was a more common occurrence than in Tony's lab.
Still, Loki seemed quite cheerful about the chaos he'd caused.
Once Jean's head had been extinguished, a young teenage girl wearing a yellow coat came to stand next to Tony.
"So, I know you're a playboy and-"
Tony interrupted with a cocky grin. "-and a genius, billionaire, philanthropist superhero."
"Yeah, but, um-" the girl hesitated. "There's this whole love triangle thing. It's a huge mess. And Dr. Grey, she's kind of off limits, unless you want to get fried by eye beams and then have your chunks skewered like a kebob."
Tony raised a brow at the graphic description.
"Oh, you haven't met Mr. Summers... Cyclops?" the kid asked, like that name would help. "The professor said Logan met you on the tour. He'd be doing the kebobs, by the way."
Tony huffed. Sure, Jean was gorgeous. He wasn't scared of Cyclops or Logan- he was Iron Man, he had lasers galore- but all the drama and feelings were enough to steer him away.
It turned out Beast wasn't the only blue man in the mansion. The second one Thor saw was slender, with raised lines over his dark blue skin. He could have been a runt from Jotunheim, like Loki, if it weren't for the long tail dancing around his body. His eyes gleamed yellow like Heimdall's, rather than red like a Jotun.
Tony looked like he'd received a most gracious gift. "Na'vi are real,"
The word had no translation, despite the All-Tongue.
Thor expected Loki to be more offended and offensive about this blue man's appearance than he had with Beast.
Loki reached out and pulled the man's tail taut.
The man yelped and disappeared with a loud BAMF sound, leaving only a puff of smoke. Loki tossed his head back with a roar of victory, pumping his arms as green smoke danced around his fingers.
Loki didn't seem to notice that the man had reappeared with the same effects further down the hallway.
The man spoke with a German accent. "If you want my tail, you'll have to catch me. I hear you can teleport, too."
He waved his tail to tempt Loki, even encouraging Loki to teleport and try to grab it. Loki threw himself out of his chair instead, crawling on all fours with his hair hanging around his face.
Loki kept trying to straighten the tail, and it dawned on Thor that the tail had an end like an arrowhead. It seemed that Loki was trying to make Clint a new arrow out of a defeated enemy. At the same time, he seemed to want the man out of his sight.
Thor told Loki to stop, and got a spiteful spit in response.
When Loki grabbed ahold of the tail, he wound up teleporting alongside the man, the tail still in his grasp.
Loki ended up teleporting once during the game, right alongside the blue man.
"So, Loki hates smurfs," Tony said on their ride back to the tower.
Thor did not know what a smurf was, but there were clear culture difference between the realms. Midgardians had not heard of Bilgesnipes.
"They're blue guys, like the Na'vi." Tony's explanation barely helped, since Thor hadn't heard of Na'vi before today. "Only the Na'vi are way cooler."
Back at the tower, Tony put on Smurfs for Loki, partly as a joke. Loki seemed to ignore it as he paged through a book, but suddenly threw a remote through the TV screen. As the TV sizzled, Loki hunkered down on the floor, satisfied that the show had stopped.
"You know there's an off button," Tony muttered. "Just scream for JARVIS if you have to,"
Still, a ruined TV didn't dissuade Tony from calling a team movie night and screening Avatar. He had JARVIS project it on a holographic screen. Loki always seemed more interested in holograms.
Thor was enraptured by the movie. The main character used a wheelchair like Loki, though he could walk in his blue Avatar body. The relationship between the humans and the Na'vi reminded Thor somewhat of the relations between Asgard and Jotunheim.
Thor expected Loki to scream at the screen or attempt to attack the Na'vi, but Loki spent the entire movie night stealing people's snacks and spilling their drinks to roll the glasses across the floor. He occasionally reached toward the screen as if attempting to grab the Na'vis' tails.
The movie wasn't as successful with Loki as Tony had obviously hoped. All the same, the fact that Loki hadn't yelled through the film led Thor to hope that they were making progress with Loki's prejudice.