Chapter 2 - Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree

A/N: I feel like I need to start including a disclaimer at the beginning of all of the stories I write: This story is intended as comedy/entertainment and should not be taken in place of the advice of a trained psychiatrist/therapist. Please take the advice of any characters in this fic claiming to be psychiatrists with a rather large grain of salt.

Loki twirled in front of the three-way mirror in a forest green satin ball gown with lace sleeves and lace at the throat. "Do you think it's appropriate for a Latverian wedding, though?"

Pepper leaned forward to get a better look. "To be honest, I'm not sure what's in fashion in Latveria. Nat?"

"As long as it's got long sleeves and a high neckline, you should be good." Natasha sat on the other end of the sofa on which Pepper was perched, but she hadn't truly been watching the fashion show Loki had been putting on for them outside the dressing room of the high-end boutique the other woman had brought them to. Instead, she'd been looking at her phone the entire time, occasionally typing input into it with her thumbs.

"Shouldn't you be shopping for a dress as well?" Loki asked her.

Without looking away from her phone, Natasha shrugged. "I've already got something I can wear. There's no reason to buy something new every time I go on a mission."

Pepper arched an eyebrow at her. "You're sure you have something that isn't damaged?"

"You accidentally wear a ball gown with a few bullet holes to a charity gala once, and no one forgets it."

"There were blood stains on it, too."

"Which is why I've switched dry cleaners."

Pepper turned her attention back to Loki. "Well, is that the dress?"

"I'm not sure." Loki loved the color and the way the gown moved when she switched her hips back and forth, but she had been having too much fun trying things on to settle on something yet.

"You look a vision in that dress, Sister," said Thor. "I think you should get it."

Loki didn't understand why Thor had come if he was only going to complain the entire time. "You're just tired of watching me try things on."

"No, I just think that is the dress. The color suits you."

Tony leaned back against the cushions of the couch where the males of the group sat, and swirled the champagne around in his glass. "Might as well settle in and enjoy a complementary glass of bubbly, Point Break. There's no way we're getting out of here in the next hour. Also, I'll give you a tip ahead of time. If the question 'does this make me look fat' ever comes up, there's no right answer. You would think that either 'no' would be acceptable, but somehow it never is. The answer least likely to get you killed is, 'I love you, you're the most beautiful woman in the world, and you look fantastic in everything.'"

Like Natasha, Clint had been distracting himself with his phone the entire time, but he nodded in agreement. Natasha gave him a sidelong glance, then started typing something on her phone. Clint looked up from his own phone and shrugged.

"Loki is starting to look a little chubby, though," said Thor.

Loki spun towards him, her hands clutching the fabric of her skirt as it spun with her. "I can hear you, Thor, and I am not chubby. The next time you use my name and 'chubby,' in the same sentence, I shall turn you into a kookaburra."

"At least if I were an unusually large rodent, I wouldn't have to watch you try on dresses all afternoon. It isn't a bad thing, Loki. I would rather see you chubby than emaciated as you were before."

"Kookaburra are birds, not rodents. I believe you are thinking of a capybara. Tony, may I? I did give him ample warning."

"Just this once I'm tempted to say yes, but I'm going to have to say no, at least until we get home."

"Perhaps I will get this one," said Loki, suddenly having an incentive to get back to the tower. "Of course, I shall need shoes to go with it."

Natasha peered at her over the top of her phone, scanning her eyes over the dress Loki had chosen and giving her a small nod of approval. "Make sure you can run in them. Remember, we're going to get your mom out of this wedding. With any luck, we're not staying for the reception, because there won't be one."

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Loki had found a pair of satin flats that could be dyed to match her dress, and Pepper had promised to lend her some jewelry—nothing precious of course, in case something happened to it. She probably shouldn't have let Tony spend so much on the dress when it might suffer the same fate as most of Natasha's formal wear. The woman had been right, they were going on a mission, not to a social event. Still, Loki would take any opportunity to get dressed up; she had been stuck inside the tower too long wearing sweatpants and T-shirts out of the Avengers' unsold merchandise closet. Loki looked uncertainly from the puffy green dress laid out on her bed to her open suitcase. "JARVIS, how do you pack a ball gown into a suitcase?"

"I don't know, Miss Loki, how do you pack a ball gown into a suitcase?"

"It isn't a joke. I need to know." Loki had done plenty of traveling in her life, but she didn't have much experience packing. Whenever she had gone on journeys before, she had kept most of her things in dimensional storage; even before she'd learned to use dimensional storage, there had always been servants to do her packing for her.

The only "servants" Tony had were Dum-E and U, who she wouldn't be allowing near any possessions she didn't want ruined anytime soon, and JARVIS, who could do no more than advise her on how to pack on her own. "Miss Loki, surely you can tell that dress would not fit in—"

"Are you suggesting, JARVIS, that I have grown so large that one of my garments would not fit into this suitcase?"

"I am suggesting that ball gowns with tulle underskirts are not intended to be packed in suitcases. I would suggest packing it in a garment bag instead. I have already ordered an extra-wide garment bag for you, and it should be here by this evening."

"Extra-wide? You think you're funny, I suppose."

"I think I can be hilarious when I wish to be, but I hardly see what that has to do with anything. I only ordered the correct size to accommodate for the extra material in your gown's skirts. If you don't mind my saying so, it seems to me that you have become fixated on a small or imagined flaw in your appearance—perhaps you ought to speak to Doctor Samson about that."

Loki grit her teeth. Were it possible for her to turn him into something unpleasant or stabbed him, she might have. Then again, turning people into animals or stabbing them just for annoying her was not constructive behavior. When someone hurt her feelings she should use her words, shouldn't she? "I am not delusional, JARVIS, and if I ever need a machine to psychoanalyze me, I shall let you know."

"I apologize if I have overstepped, Miss Loki." Loki got the distinct impression that she'd offended JARVIS somehow, but she had little time to think about it. She stuck the tip of her tongue between her teeth to stop herself from grinding them and tried to focus on packing again. At least if the dress couldn't fit in her suitcase, she would have space to pack a few more books. With any luck, she wouldn't have much occasion to read them.

Since her powers had started returning, she had been itching to test them against something, but she knew better than to ask to come along on any of the Avenger's missions. Ever since she had been dead for two hours, Tony had been horribly overprotective. He hadn't let her leave the tower at all until the Wrecking Crew had been caught, and the first time she had left the tower after that, he had attempted to make her wear a bullet proof vest under her clothes. Luckily, Pepper and Doctor Samson had teamed up to convince him it wasn't necessary. Pepper had then taken Loki aside and told her that Tony kept trying to make her wear one too, and to just ignore it.

Bruce could be worse. She couldn't sneeze or cough around him without being dragged off to have her temperature taken. He had also insisted on immunizing her for anything and everything he could think of to immunize her for. Though she supposed that was fair; according to Bruce, her immunity to Earth diseases might be weaker than a normal human's. She wouldn't have inherited any of the right antibodies from her biological mother, whoever that had been.

She wondered why neither of them had protested her going to Latveria yet. Maybe they were starting to accept that it was impossible to keep her preserved indefinitely in a safe little bubble.

Loki jumped when she suddenly felt another presence in the room with her. The doors in the tower didn't creak like the doors in the palace did, so she never had any warning when people entered rooms without announcing themselves. She only just stopped herself from swearing; she didn't mind having to contribute to the swear jar—it was for a good cause, after all—but she'd still been raised to believe that young ladies didn't use foul language, and that kind of early programming was difficult to overcome. "You ought to knock, Stark. I might have been indecent, you know."

"JARVIS said you were packing. If you'd been packing naked, he would have told me that."

"Are you certain of that? If you haven't noticed, your little AI has developed a rather mischievous personality of late."

"Yeah, I wonder who's influence that was. Anyway, I brought you a present."

"You shouldn't have—" Loki looked down, saw what he held, and had to sick her tongue between her teeth to keep herself from gnashing them again. "I mean it, you shouldn't have."

"This time I'm not being over protective," Tony argued, holding out the familiar bullet proof vest with his good arm. "You're going into enemy territory here. Just try it on. I've redesigned it so that it will go under your dress without looking bulky."

Loki decided that if it would get Tony off her back, she would try it on. He couldn't force her to wear it once she got to Latveria. She held the garment up to examine it and realized that he had redesigned it so that now it was not only a vest, but a garment that would cover her legs halfway to her knees—it looked a bit like the "shapewear" some human women wore under their clothes. The thin material shimmered under the light and reminded her of uru when it was pounded thin, but of course that couldn't be what it was. "What material is this?"

Tony's proud grin gave Loki an uneasy feeling. "It's made of nanobots."

Loki made a face. "Tiny robots? Like a bunch of microscopic JARVIS's?"

"I didn't put JARVIS in them, although that would be awesome."

Loki disagreed. She wouldn't be putting anything against her skin that had the capability of making snotty comments about how difficult it was to wrap themselves around her trunk-like thighs. "So how do I put this on, anyway?" She couldn't see any seams in the material, or any buttons or zippers, for that matter.

"It's voice activated," Stark explained. "Go-go Stark Industries nano-mailcoat!"

Loki knit her eyebrows at that odd turn of phrase, but before she could ask Stark if he had taken leave of his senses, the material in her hands seemed to dissolve into a swarm of gnats. She attempted to jump away from them, but they were fast, and began flying up the leg of her loose-fitting sweatpants and up the arm of her t-shirt. A moment later, she realized that they had all settled against her skin underneath her clothes.

At first it felt as if a swarm of bugs were crawling over her, but a moment later, it felt only as if she were wearing a garment made from the mortals' "spandex." That didn't mean she was comfortable, however—in fact, it was too tight, and seemed like it might be getting tighter, though it might have been her anxiety telling her that. "How do I get it off?" Loki asked, managing to stay relatively calm.

Stark shrugged. "You don't get it off. It only responds to my voice."

Visions of murder danced behind her eyes. "Stark."

"What? I'm not stupid, Loki. I know you won't wear it if I don't make you wear it."

"If you don't take this off right now, I'm going to dislocate your other shoulder."

"Whoa, hey. Just calm down—"

"Don't tell me to calm down. How am I even supposed to use the facilities in this?"

"I did think of that, okay? You're not allowed to take the suit all the way off, but if you say 'go-go Stark Industries nano-mailcoat, activate potty break protocol'—"

"Those words are never, ever coming out of my mouth, Stark."

"I bet they will if you get desperate enough."

"Listen to my words right now, Stark: GET THIS OFF ME, OR I WILL END YOU."

"You can threaten me all you want, Loki, but I'm not letting you anywhere near Doom without adequate protection. I would have made it a full body suit, but I didn't have time to produce enough nanobots—"

Loki had gotten to the end of both her reason and her patience. She stood with her nose an inch away from Tony's. "Are you saying I have grown so large that it would take a thousand years to produce enough nanobots to stretch around my calves?"

"Whoa, no, that is not what I'm saying at all. Loki, you are not at all fat. Thor has to be nuts. But even if you were a little chubby, we'd love you just the way—"

Loki grabbed his good arm and pulled.

( *｀^´)/ヾ(༎ຶ ෴ ༎ຶ)

After Loki lost had her temper with Tony, things got a little blurry. She was fairly certain it had been Natasha who had pulled her off of him, but then someone else had been talking to her, telling her she was safe, as if she'd been the one who'd been attacked and not the one who had done the attacking. An empty glass sat on her bedside table, reminding her that whoever it was who'd been talking to her had also coaxed her into drinking a glass of water—Bruce, possibly? It seemed like Bruce always wanted her to drink water for one reason or another.

Loki lifted her head from her pillow and blinked at Doctor Samson, who was sitting in a chair by her bed. She wondered how long she'd been out, if he'd had the opportunity to move furniture from the kitchen into her room. "How are you feeling?"

"Tired," Loki told him. "Have I been asleep?"

"Only for a few minutes. Bruce gave you your medication. You know, the stuff I told you could take if you had another bad panic attack? Then you must have passed out from exhaustion, because the medicine itself shouldn't be strong enough to knock you out like that. Do you remember what happened before that, and do you want to talk about it? We don't have to talk about it now if you don't feel up to it."

Loki tried to remember. Had she been having a panic attack? "I tried to dislocate Tony's good shoulder."

Samson nodded. "You didn't dislocate his shoulder, but you did knock your head into his and give him a bloody nose. It doesn't seem to be broken, though. You also bit Natasha."

"I didn't mean to hurt Natasha. Is she going to need a rabies shot now?"

"We're pretty sure you don't have rabies, so no. Loki, can you tell me what was going on before all that happened?"

"Stark put me in an undergarment made of voice activated nanobots and refused to let me out of it. Then he called me fat." Loki shoved her bed linens aside and lifted her shirt to check. She wasn't wearing the suit anymore, which meant that someone must have taken it off her at some point. Either that, or it had never been there, and she had finally gone mad.

Samson's eyebrows knit together. "Are you certain—"

"Doctor Samson," interrupted JARVIS, "You should know that is what actually happened, though I do not believe Sir meant to call Miss Loki fat. He told her that she was not."

Samson's lips pursed together. "I see."

"I'm sorry, Doctor Samson. I know I'm supposed to slow down and think things through when I become upset, and let people know—"

"No, it's alright. Sometimes things happen. It sounds like Tony was being pretty obtuse, and that what he did triggered a panic attack."

"Am I not in trouble for attacking him, then?"

"When you have a panic attack, your body goes into flight or fight mode. In this case, you fought. Anyway, Tony and Natasha are both okay, and I'm sure they've already forgiven you for accidentally hurting them. No one here is going to punish you for having a panic attack."

Loki didn't know that hurting Tony had been an accident. It hadn't felt like an accident at the time; but then, she couldn't even remember hurting Natasha. At that point, she must have been completely out of control, the way she'd been when she had been when she'd attempted to use the Bifrost to destroy Jotunheim. She felt her heart beat a fraction of a second faster. "You're saying I shouldn't feel bad because I wasn't in control of myself. I don't like feeling out of control—"

"We can work on finding better ways for you to cope with these attacks when you have them, but in the meantime, I don't want you to beat yourself up about it. It won't help." The doctor smiled at her, a forced sort of smile that was probably meant to reassure her. "Do you know where your brother went, by the way? We've been looking for him."

"Odin's crappy beard—" Loki's hand flew up to cover her mouth. She had nearly forgotten about Thor and wondered if she still wouldn't be in trouble when she told him what she'd done. She blurted it out before she could change her mind. "If you're looking for Thor, I believe you'll find him in the atrium, in one of the Eucalyptus trees."

"What is he doing in a tree?"

"Laughing, I suspect." Turning her brother into a kookaburra hadn't been an accident, but Tony had given her permission to do it—more or less, anyway.

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Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree,

Merry merry king of the bush is he.

Laugh, Kookaburra, laugh, Kookaburra,

Gay your life must be!

— "Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree," Marion Sinclair (1932)

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Bruce had instructed Tony to lean forward, and now he pressed an icepack to the bridge of his nose for him. "Tony, what the hell were you thinking?"

Tony's nose had refused to stop bleeding for over fifteen minutes, so he'd packed it with gauze. This gave his voice a nasal quality, making it even more difficult for Bruce to take him seriously when he said, "I have a right as a father—"

"To put Loki in some sort of chastity device? No, you don't."

"It wasn't meant as a chastity device."

At a certain point, Bruce had resigned himself to the thought that he'd never have children. Now it was like he had two, if he counted the forty-three-year-old man-child in front of him. "And what was the thinking behind putting her in an impossible to remove nanobot suit that covered her to her knees?"

When Bruce had entered Loki's room, he'd found Loki hyperventilating on the floor. He'd first assumed it to be the result of her wrestling match with Natasha, but when he'd gotten a closer look at her, he'd been shocked to discover that her breathing had been constricted by some sort of restrictive undergarment. At first, he had thought it to be some kind of shapewear, but when he tried to cut her out of it with the scissors from the first aid kit he'd brought with him, the material had reformed itself around the blades.

JARVIS had been able to explain to him about the nanobots; otherwise, he would have thought he was going out of his mind, or that he'd accidentally dropped acid. Only the years of work he'd put into his "anger issues" allowed him to stay calm as he pulled his friend, who had been walking around the hallway in a daze with blood dripping down his face, back into the room. He had calmly instructed him to remove his nanobots before Loki suffocated, then he'd been quick to get Loki a dose of her emergency anxiety meds, which he carried in his wallet just in case she needed it. Leonard had arrived soon after, freeing him up to take care of Tony.

Tony took the icepack from him and held it in place himself for about ten seconds, but then put it down and started to lean back. Bruce grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him forward again. "Don't do that. If you lean back, it's just going to make the blood run down your throat."

"Huh, I always thought you were supposed to lean back—how'd I ever survive before I had you around to make sure I didn't choke on my own blood?"

Bruce couldn't tell if he was being sarcastic or not, but he didn't particularly care. "I wonder about that myself sometimes, but I'm guessing Pepper had a lot to do with it." He picked the icepack up again and shoved it back in Tony's face. "You need to keep that on for a few more minutes." Tony really could be worse than a kid; even Loki could follow simple directions. "And maybe stop talking."

"Will that help?"

"I don't know if it will help you, but I have a feeling it might help with the massive headache I feel coming on. You won't like me when I have a headache, Tony."

Tony took the icepack from him, and this time he held it there. He was quiet for about a minute, but Bruce should have known he wasn't capable of staying that way longer. "We have to be nuts for letting Loki go to Latveria at all. You know you agree with me, so don't tell me—"

"Tony, you can trust me to keep her safe. Hulk won't let anything happen to her either. Not again." And if Bruce just kept telling himself that, maybe he'd believe it too.

"You know I trust you. That isn't the problem, and it wasn't your fault Loki got killed that time. If anything, it was mine. I shouldn't have let her order those mimosas."

"That part was just as much my fault as yours. I was there too. But the decision to leave her in the restroom by herself? That was all on me."

"You thought she'd be safe there. You didn't know she'd wander out into the street."

"I should have made sure she didn't."

"Does it help if I point out that if you hadn't Hulked out, other people might have died that day? People who wouldn't have come back because they don't have a daughter who's queen of the Norse underworld?"

"In other words, it's the trolley problem. You know what? I hate the trolley problem. There's no good answer to it when it's just a thought exercise—"

"And when it's not, it really sucks. Except in this case, the person you didn't save happened to be a god that got resurrected two hours later."

"I had no idea that was going to happen."

"You also didn't choose to sacrifice Loki so you could save those other people, which means it isn't the trolley problem at all. You just trusted that she was going to be okay where she was, and it turned out to be a bad call. You've got to stop beating yourself up about it."

"I know." Leonard had told him the same thing, over and over. "But Tony, you need to stop beating yourself up about it too. Loki's fine now. No more going overboard with the 'safety measures.' We have to remember that she isn't defenseless. She's been training with both Clint and Natasha, and she can do magic."

"She's still a kid, though."

"She's a kid who almost broke your nose."

"She was trying to dislocate my arm."

"She's going to be fine, Tony. I won't let anything happen to her, and neither will Natasha or Thor."

( ;¬_¬) ( ¯།,།¯ )

When Leonard returned to their suite, Bruce had changed into a gray suit, and had a lavender silk tie draped around his neck. "Planning to take me out?" he asked, even though he knew better.

"I'm just checking to make sure this still fits, and that there aren't any stains—luckily, I'm not as hard on my formal wear as Natasha."

"That's an understatement." No one was as hard on their formal wear as Natasha, but Bruce hardly ever wore any of his. The only time he did was when Pepper insisted he attend one of her charity events with the other Avengers.

"How's Loki doing?" Bruce asked, as he fumbled with his tie.

Leonard took it from him and tied it into a Windsor knot with practiced ease. He wondered how Bruce had made it to his early forties without figuring out how to tie his own tie. "She'll be fine. She turned Thor back—Kookaburras have a pretty distinctive call, so it wasn't difficult to find the tree he was in. Pepper's going to help her finish packing now. How's your patient?"

"He'll live."

"You sound like you aren't happy with that outcome."

"I know he's worried about Loki, but what the hell was he thinking?" Bruce's hand went to the knot that Leonard had just tied for him and loosened it, setting it askew in the process.

Leonard battled the urge to fix Bruce's tie for him again. "I don't think he was." After so many losses in his life, Tony had a strong fear, bordering on a phobia, of losing the people closest to him. He had already lost Loki once—all of them had, even if it had only been for a couple of hours. Letting Loki go to Latveria while he stayed behind couldn't be easy. But given that Tony was his patient, he couldn't talk about his issues with Bruce, nor did he want to. He leaned in close enough to smell Bruce's aftershave, which had strong notes of sandalwood and cedar. His hands found their way back to Bruce's tie. "You look good, by the way."

Bruce leaned back and arched an eyebrow at him. "It's just the same suit I wore to the last charity gala for the Maria Stark Foundation. You've seen it before."

Leonard remembered. He'd spent the entire night watching women—most of them beautiful young women—flirt with Bruce. He didn't think he'd have minded so much if some of them would have flirted with him too, but apparently, being the Avengers' staff psychologist wasn't nearly as sexy as being the Hulk. At least Bruce had been fairly oblivious to their attentions.

For a while, he'd thought Natasha was flirting with Bruce too. Again, Bruce had been oblivious. But then Leonard had realized that there was no way that Natasha, who knew everything that went on in the tower, didn't know about their relationship. Now he was pretty sure she'd been teasing him, trying to make him jealous on purpose. Why she would do that he didn't know, but Natasha never did anything without a reason. Maybe she'd been trying to force them out into the open, or maybe she had been trying to find out what he would do. Natasha had once put together psych profiles for SHIELD, and she probably hadn't stopped obsessively analyzing everyone she knew just because SHIELD was defunct. That, of course, was a difficult habit to break.

"Leonard, are you okay?"

Leonard wondered if too much of what he'd just been thinking had shown in his expression. Jealousy wasn't an attractive emotion, and it had likely been his jealous tendencies that had driven Betty away from him. "Sorry, I was just worrying about this whole Latveria thing. Promise me you'll be safe."

That earned him another arched eyebrow, and Leonard wondered if Bruce knew that had been a cover. "I'll be fine. It's just another mission. You know I can't get hurt. I can't even hurt myself, because the other guy won't let me."

"I hate that you know that." Leonard said it without thinking, and when Bruce looked away from him, he felt something tighten in his stomach. The last thing he had wanted was to shame Bruce for something that was already painful to remember.

"Sorry," said Bruce, making him feel even worse. "Anyway, I'm more afraid of something happening to Loki. Maybe it's a bad idea to let her go."

"If you tell her she can't go, she'll probably try to go on her own," Leonard pointed out. "And there wouldn't be much we could do to stop her, since she's starting to get her magic back."

"You might be right. I just hope that she'll let the rest of us take the lead, and that she won't do anything too dangerous."

Who would have thought Bruce could be an optimist, thought Leonard. "I'm sure that if anything happens, you'll be able to handle it. Out of anyone here, you've been the one Loki's most likely to listen to."

...φ(ｰ￣*)

Author's Note:

If you're still wondering what the difference between a kookaburra and a capybara is, I've written a blog post about it, which I can't link to because this site doesn't allow web links. The blog still isn't showing up in Google search results either, but again, you can find a link to it from my Ao3 profile. Alternatively, you could probably guess the address. The blog is hosted by blogspot: Jackaloki...blogspot...