Chapter 39 - Love is a Dagger

"Hey, who cut this already?" Tony scowled down at the vanilla sheet cake in front of him. "We haven't even lit the candles, yet."

Steve hovered across the kitchen island from him. His eyebrows furrowed together in concern. "Is it really a good idea to light all of those?"

"It does seem a little excessive. Did you actually get 1,051 candles on there?" Leonard looked to who sat on the kitchen counter behind them, drinking one of the cheap beers that Clint had brought in.

"Yep," said Nat.

"Won't the smoke alarms go off?"

Tony looked up at JARVIS's camera. "Hey, J? Disable the smoke alarms—"

He was cut off by the one person who, for safety purposes, was allowed to override any of his requests to the AI. "JARVIS, definitely do not disable the smoke alarms."

"Ah, come on, Pep. It's only for like, five minutes. What's the chance that the building's going to burn down in those five minutes?"

Pepper crossed her arms in front of her and gave him a withering look. "It's going to be lot higher if you light all those candles at once."

"It's just a few candles on a birthday cake," Tony protested. "We're not going to burn the building down."

Bruce had been hovering silently at the edge of the kitchen, but now he spoke up. "Tony, this really is a bad idea."

Now that Bruce said it, it probably was a bad idea, wasn't it? But now they had to light it, because otherwise he would never hear the end of it from Pepper about how he respected Bruce's opinions more than hers.

Also, he just really wanted to light it. He watched as Natasha hopped off the counter, pulled a match from behind her ear, and struck it across one of her widow's bites. He wasn't exactly sure why she was wearing them with her sweat suit, but that wasn't his main concern. "That's going to take a million years," Tony told her. "Hold on, I've got just the thing." He went to the sink, and from the cabinet underneath he pulled out a blow torch. When he turned back to the table, everyone was staring at him.

Pepper's lips thinned out into a straight line. "Tony, why was there a blow torch there?"

"For making crème brûlée, obviously."

"That's the kind of blow torch used for welding, not for making desserts. Not to mention, I've never seen you make crème brûlée in the entire time I've known you."

"I've been practicing. It was going to be a surprise for your birthday, but now you've ruined it."

Pepper's eyebrows flew upwards. "Sometimes, I really don't know if you're joking or not."

"That's okay, sometimes I don't know either."

"What does that even—"

Tony pressed the torch's automatic ignition button and it roared to life with the sound of a miniature jet engine. "Hey, Lokes," he shouted to the immortal adolescent still sulking on the couch twenty feet away. "Get your butt over here. This is your birthday cake."

Loki didn't move. "I agree with Pepper and Bruce. Were I foolish enough to go anywhere near such a safety hazard, I would never have made it to 1,051."

"Ah, come on. If you want your wish to come true, you have to blow out the candles—or at least try, anyway."

"Not that I believe in such idiotic mortal superstitions anyway, but if I truly must blow them out, I'm quite capable of doing it from here."

Tony was tempted to tell Loki that using magic would be cheating, but he remembered that one of Loki's sore points was how the other Asgardians had accused him of using magic to "cheat" instead of fighting like a real man. "If you want to use magic to blow them out that's fine, but you should still come over here and let us sing to you."

"This gets worse and worse," Loki grumped. "Why in all nine realms would I want anyone to sing at me?"

"Loki, stop being ungrateful and go over there," Thor grumped back, though he hadn't left the couch either.

"You're not my father, Thor. You can't tell me what to do."

"I am your All-Father, Loki,and you will obey me, or Norns help me—"

"Okay, everybody needs to calm down," Tony interrupted. "This is a birthday party. It's supposed to be fun." He fired up the blow torch again and aimed it at the candles.

.*･ﾟ ндрру вiятнDду

Loki hadn't planned for any of it to happen. When he had sensed the young mortal woman's distress and had realized that no one else seemed to be concerned, he had only planned to bring her a piece of cake and talk her through her panic attack if necessary. After all, it didn't cost him anything to be helpful once in a while. And it never hurt to have people who owed you.

He certainly hadn't expected to be repaid in quite this way, though. When he had leaned in to lick the frosting off the young woman's bottom lip, again, he was only trying to be helpful; according to his understanding of mortals, he would be remiss if he didn't participate in such grooming behaviors. (Or was that chimpanzees? They were practically the same species, after all, so surely it would be understandable if he had gotten them jumbled up.)

How could he possibly expect that she would open her mouth at just that moment, and that their tongues would dance together, as tongues tend to do when one is introduced to a foreign mouth? Though perhaps the possibility should have occurred to him. The young woman had been living underground like a mole woman for the past two years, and he doubted she had seen much "action" in that time. Come to think of it, he hadn't seen much either, aside from that one little kiss he and Sylvie had shared.

Right, Sylvie—she would understand, surely. After all, if she were in this situation, things would have likely turned out exactly the same way. Besides, it had long been held in Asgard that mortals didn't count. What happens in Midgard stays in Midgard, primarily because anyone who remembered what you did would be dead in less than a century.

It wasn't as if Sylvie was his girlfriend, anyway. So it was really no business of hers if he had then led the young woman to the room that was now his. And it wasn't as if he had asked her to take her blouse off, tantalizing him with the view of a lace bra which he was fairly certain had been borrowed from Lady Potts, as he had only rifled through the woman's lingerie drawer looking for something for himself the night before.

He hadn't been entirely sure of Midgardian protocol in such a situation, but he decided it would only be polite to reciprocate by taking his own shirt off. Maintaining eye contact with the dark haired vixen before him, he pulled his tie loose and fumbled a bit with his top button.

That was when he was caught in a torrential rainfall. At first, he thought someone had cast a spell to make it rain inside, but then he remembered that mortal buildings often had sprinklers in the ceilings in case of fire. Ingenious, really. He spat out a mouth full of water as the woman he'd been about to seduce screeched and ran into the bathroom.

｀、ヽ｀ヽ｀、ヽ(ノ＞＜)ノ ｀、ヽ｀ヽ｀、ヽ

Pepper stood over the sink as she attempted to ring the water out of her hair—not that it actually mattered where she rung it out, since everything was already soaked. "I told you, Tony."

"If you'd let JARVIS turn the smoke alarms off, this wouldn't have happened."

"I think the cake is ruined," said Doc, clearly feeling the need to state the obvious as he stared at the soggy burnt mess that used to be a vanilla sheet cake. Luckily, the leftovers from dinner had already been put away and the other three cakes JARVIS had ordered were still in the fridge.

"The floor is probably ruined too," Pepper pointed out. "We're going to have to renovate again."

"JARVIS, when the sprinklers went off, did they go off in all the rooms on this floor?"

"Yes, Tony."

"We'll have to move the kids up to the penthouse with us while we have everything cleaned up." Secretly, Tony was pleased with the idea, even though everyone seemed to be upset with him.

Loki scowled at him. "All my books will be ruined."

"No big deal, books can be replaced."

"Some of them were rare texts from Asgard."

Thor cleared his throat. "I suppose you'll just have to look for replacements for them when you return to Asgard with me."

Loki spun towards him and stabbed a finger into his chest. "I've told you Thor, I'm not going back to Asgard with you. You can't make me."

Thor scowled back at him, clenching his fists. Great, all they needed was for two Norse gods to get into a brawl in the middle of the already water logged common room.

Tony forced himself into the two-inch space between them. "Hey, take a step back, or I'm putting both of you in time out."

Thor rolled his eyes. "You cannot put the King of Asgard in time out."

"You're not king here, Point Break. This is my castle you're in."

Thor hesitated for a moment, but then backed up. "Very well. As you say, this is your domain. But Loki will return with me to Asgard for the funeral."

Loki blinked. "Funeral?"

Thor frowned. "Yes, Loki. I'm afraid I come bearing sad news. I didn't want to put a damper on your birthday celebration, so I wasn't going to mention it until later."

"Is Father dead?" asked Loki, completely forgetting to call the man "Odin," "your father," or "the old bastard."

Tony's own heart skipped a beat when he saw the kid's face. He could relate, of course; he and Howard had never gotten along, but that didn't mean that he hadn't felt anything when he'd heard he was dead. Tony reached out to squeeze Loki's shoulder, but he shrugged him off.

Thor's scowl softened. "It's alright Loki, Father is fine. Well, not fine. He still believes it's five hundred years ago on most days. Once, he thought he was back in the war and took out half a dozen Einherjar and a couple of mother's handmaidens who he had mistaken for Jotunn warriors."

For a brief moment, a look of relief flickered across the kid's face. Then he frowned. "If it isn't Odin's funeral, whose is it?"

Thor stepped forward and took his brother by the shoulders, and this time Loki let him. "It was an unspeakable tragedy, but I'm afraid that Lady Kelda is dead."

The kid's eyebrows drifted slowly upwards. "Kelda?"

"Kelda," echoed another voice filled with distaste. Tony turned his head to see Sif making a face as if she had accidentally drunk sour milk.

"She is too young and beautiful to be dead, I know," said Thor, failing to read his brother and his friend's reactions like a normal person would. "They say she died of a broken heart."

Loki furrowed his eyebrows at his brother. "That's nonsense, Thor. People don't die of broken hearts."

"Actually, it's rare, but there's something called 'broken heart syndrome,'" said Leonard. "An extremely emotional or traumatic event can trigger a surge of stress hormones, causing short-term heart failure."

"It seems she had taken a mortal lover," Thor told them.

"And let me guess," said Loki, "her mortal lover did that thing that mortals tend to do after eighty or ninety years if not sooner."

Thor nodded.

"Are you certain she wasn't poisoned?"

"Who would poison Lady Kelda? Everyone loved her."

Loki exchanged a look with Sif. Clearly, both of them were on the same page. "I think you'll find that many of the ladies of the court were jealous of her."

(◡‿◡✿) ( ｰ̀εｰ́ ) (눈_눈)(¬д¬。)

Loki stood in the entrance to the bathroom, watching the young woman who stood over the sink, appearing to hyperventilate. He was probably a bad person for trying to seduce someone so vulnerable, even if he hadn't intended to seduce her. Of course, he never intendedto do things that were wrong, they always seemed to just happen—wait, on second thought, was she actually laughing? "Find something amusing?" he asked.

She shook her head. "No, not really. Sorry."

Loki decided to chalk it up to the oddness of mortals. He walked up behind her, trapping her against the sink. "Should we continue, then? I have to say, the 'wet look' doesn't look terrible on you."

Betty began to laugh harder, making Loki wonder if his "silver tongue" had gone to rust after years of disuse. "Yeah, we should probably just stop. This was going a little too fast anyway. I'm not sure what's gotten into me."

Love is a knife, said a little voice in the back of his head.

But then the woman turned and smiled at him, and stood on her toes to give him a chaste kiss on the lips before ducking under one of his arms and walking out the door. Maybe he hadn't completely lost his touch after all.

Sylvie is going to kill you, said the little voice from before.

o=|::::: 💕

Thor's face scrunched in confusion. "But I can think of none who would do such a thing. Perhaps it is the kind of thing that Lorelei or Amora would do, but Lorelei is imprisoned, and Amora was banished from Asgard over a hundred years ago."

"Poison isn't either of their styles," said Loki, a little offended on their behalves. "I mean, it's more the kind of thing I would do, but I've been here—"

"I know that Amora was your friend, but if I am honest, Loki, I always thought she was a bad influence."

"She probably was," Loki agreed. "But it is neither here nor there, since no one has seen her in over a hundred years. I don't want to discuss it. Like you said, it couldn't have been Amora or her sister." But Thor was wrong—Amora and Lorelei weren't the only court ladies capable of killing. Both he and Sif had alibis, but he could think of a few others capable of having done the deed, with Sigyn at the top of the list. "Anyway, why should I go to Kelda's funeral? I was never close to her."

"She was a lady of the court and you are expected to attend her funeral as a crown prince of Asgard," Thor explained.

Tony reached out to put a hand on Loki's shoulder again, and this time he didn't pull away. "Kid, I think it would be best if you went. You know your brother's right. Eventually you're going to want to go back home for good, so until then, you need to stay in good standing with the court."

Loki knew what Tony was alluding to, but he wasn't sure he agreed that he would ever want to go back to Asgard. Maybe he wouldn't want to stay on Midgard once his mortal family all "did that thing that mortals tended to do" but there were seven other realms and an entire universe beyond them. And beyond that, there were other universes; maybe he could even convince his other self to take him somewhere entirely different. "I won't be 'in good standing' in Asgard if I go looking like this."

"The others will get used to it," said Thor. "I'm already getting used to it."

Loki knew Thor meant well, but there was only so much of his brother's thick-headedness he could take. His fingers itched for a dagger to bury somewhere between his scapula and his clavicle, but he still didn't have access to his dimensional storage. Without stopping to think about it, Loki lunged for him with his bare hands instead.

Someone caught him by the wrist and drug him back—someone too strong to be a regular mortal, but too tall to be Sif. At first he thought it could be Steve, but then he heard his other self's voice in his ear. "I think you'll find that isn't a good idea in your current form."

Loki looked at his wrist and saw that the hand Other Loki had grasped him with had turned blue as well. Loki's eyes fluttered shut, as if closing them could protect him from the unpleasant truth. His other self was right, had he touched Thor, he could have killed him. Thor might be used to being stabbed at this point, but a severely frostbitten torso or neck wouldn't be something he could walk off. The realization made him feel sick to his stomach. If his other self hadn't been holding him up, he would have fallen to his knees.

"Come now, there's no need to be dramatic," Other Loki told him, as Loki sagged in his arms. "You are as you are. The sooner you come to terms with that, the better."

Loki looked up at him critically. "If you're so at peace with this form, why haven't I seen you in it?"

His other self closed his eyes, and gradually, his skin tone shifted to a bright blue that matched Loki's own. When he opened his eyes, his irises were red. "Happy?"

Loki's breath caught as he looked up into the face of himself as a frost giant. He still hadn't really taken the time to look at himself in a mirror. "You're really comfortable like that?"

"I am as I am, and anyone who has a problem with it can go fornicate with one of their goats." He made a point of looking at Thor.

Thor seemed genuinely perplexed. "All I said was—"

"Thor, just stop talking now," Tony advised him. He shook his head. "You know, I'm really not sure I do want your brother going back to Asgard."

Suddenly, Loki got an idea. "You could go in my place," he told his other self. "It would be easy for you to make yourself look younger—"

"I could, but I'm not going to."

Loki scowled up at him. "Why are you so mean?"

Without warning his other self let go of him, then stepped over him as he lay on the still sopping wet floor. "I'm not going to enable you. It's time for you to grow up a little and face these people on your own."

Loki sat up. "Are you saying that you would be willing to walk into the middle of Asgard looking as you do now?"

"This isn't about me; this is about you. But if it meant I could go home—" His other self couldn't seem to finish the statement. He even seemed to be getting a little choked up. "That you're able to reenter Asgard free of chains is nothing short of a miracle. Don't you understand that you've been given the kind of second chance I would kill for? So don't throw it away. Walk into Asgard as you are with your head held high. Remember that you were born to be a king and don't let anyone question you."

Maybe his other self was right. Asgard had been his home for over a thousand years. Why should he fear the rejection of those who were so clearly beneath him? Loki pushed himself off the floor. "Fine, I'll go."

"You sure about this?" Tony asked him.

Loki nodded, even though the truth was, he wasn't too sure of himself at all.

Tony turned to Thor. "Hey, would it be out of the question for a few of us to come along? You know, for moral support."

"I see no reason why you couldn't," Thor told him.

"Cool, that's settled then. Pep and I will tag along."

Pepper nodded in agreement, as if there had never been any question about it, and Loki's confidence grew just a bit.

"I think I should come too," said Doctor Samson. Again, Loki felt a little better knowing that if he needed to talk through any of the complex feelings that were sure to come up once he was back on Asgardian soil, Samson would be there. "Bruce, do you feel up to it, or—"

Bruce smiled at him indulgently. "It's fine. I can come."

Loki noted that he hadn't said he was fine, but only that it was fine. Still, he felt better knowing Bruce would be coming along as well.

"If you two are going, could I come too?" asked the woman they had brought back with them from Virginia. Inexplicably, her clothes were dry, even though her hair was wet. Now that he thought about it, his other self's clothes were dry as well—had both of them gone to change after the sprinklers had gone off?

"I wish to be there to support Loki morally as well," Pietro announced.

"That's up to your older sibling," Tony told him. "Loki, you want Speedy and Littlest Witch there?"

Loki didn't really mind if the twins came, but he saw how conflicted Wanda looked. "Only if Wanda wants to go."

The girl chewed her bottom lip for a few moments before answering. "I do not like funerals much. If I go, can JARVIS come too?"

Before Tony could answer, JARVIS chimed in. "I would like to go if possible."

"I'll do what I can, but that's going to be a little difficult, since there isn't Internet service in Asgard," Tony told them.

"Sif, um—maybe, if you want, I could come along, for uh—you know, moral support," Steve floundered. "Just as a friend, obviously."

"I wasn't planning on going," Sif told him. "For one thing, Lord Stark informed me earlier that I was to be 'grounded' for 'throwing a party' and drinking all his liquor while he was away from the tower. Not that I really care to go. I am not of such importance in court that I would be missed, and neither was I close to Lady Kelda."

"That's an understatement," said Loki. "One time—"

"No one needs to hear that story, Loki."

"Oh, I think they do. You see, one time, Sif actually came to me for a spell—"

Sif scowled at him. "If I were you, Loki, I'd think over what you're about to say. You're about to incriminate yourself as well."

"Yes, but everyone expects this sort of thing from me. Besides, it was two hundred years ago. There's a statute of limitations on such things, surely—"

"That entirely depends on what you're about to say," Thor told him. "Is this childish mischief or an actual crime you're about to admit to?"

Loki grinned at him, suddenly feeling cheerier than he had felt in the past two days. "Is it a crime to replace Lady Kelda's face cream with a potion that would make her grow a beard?"

Thor winced. "In Lady Kelda's case, yes, it would have been. Is that why she had to go to Vanaheim to stay with relatives for an entire season?"

"You must have missed her to have remembered that two hundred years later." Loki wiggled his eyebrows at his brother provocatively. "I never knew you had a thing for Kelda."

"It hardly matters now," said Thor grimly. "Loki, just do me a favor and don't tell that story at her wake. She ought to be remembered as the beauty she was, not for being the bearded lady of Asgard. You said that it was Sif that asked you to—but Sif, why?"

Sif shrugged. "Girls can be mean to each other, Thor."

"Kelda was cruel to you?"

"No; but then, Kelda didn't have a mean bone in her body, did she? Little Miss Perfect."

"Sif!"

"Are you truly surprised, Thor, that I could be jealous and petty? A bully?"

Thor frowned. "But you should feel bad about it now, shouldn't you? You're supposed to feel sorry for not treating someone better when they die."

"I do."

"Do you?"

"If I'm honest? Not really, and I won't feel bad for skipping her funeral either."

"Well, at least you're honest."

"You know, maybe instead of grounding you I should make you go to this thing instead," Tony told Sif.

Clint cleared his throat. "Any chance that if I come along, I could shoot the arrow?"

"Arrow?" asked Thor, plainly confused.

"We don't do that," Loki told Clint. "While our traditions are similar, we're not actually 'space vikings.'"

The man's face fell. "Damn, I always wanted to shoot the flaming arrow at a viking funeral."

Tony clapped him on the shoulder. "Tell you what. If I die before you do, you can give me a viking funeral. Tie Pep to the mast, the whole shebang." Pepper punched him in the arm harder than usual this time, and Tony smiled as he winced.

Loki realized that he felt sick again, and felt the need to lie down.

"Hey kid, where are you going?" Tony called after him.

Loki ignored him. He understood by now that gallows humor was just a normal part of the Avengers' repertoire, but they could at least be considerate enough not to mention their impending deaths around him. Tony really should have known better given their earlier conversation.

He opened the door to his room, and took in the flood damage. As he expected, water dripped from every surface, and his books had all been ruined. Though he hadn't turned around yet, he knew someone had followed him and was standing in the doorway; he turned around, expecting either Tony or Thor, or perhaps even his other self, but it was none of them.

When Pepper reached for him, Loki couldn't help reaching back and burying himself in her chest. "I understand how you feel," she told him. "I don't like it when he makes those kinds of jokes either. It always makes me think of when he was lost in Afghanistan and everyone thought he was dead, or of how he might not come back from the next mission he goes on. But it will be okay; if something happens to Tony, I'm going to take care of you. You know that, right?"

"I'll still outlive you."

"I hope so. Kids are supposed to outlive their parents. But when Tony and I are gone, you'll still have your brother and Frigga. I think that Sif cares about you, too, even if she isn't good at expressing it. And someday, you'll find other people to care about you."

"What if I don't?"

"You will if you want to. You might have to look for them, but there are billions of people in this world, and now we know that there are other worlds, and even other universes, full of people. That has to mean that for everyone, somewhere there are people who will understand them and love them for who they are."