.

As much as Loki would have liked to simply order Barton and his men to go after their delightful exchange vis a vis the eyeball, a little more discussion was needed. Logistics. Timing. How, exactly, the eyeball would be attained. A slight tangent to discuss why humans had felt the need to develop a device that would create a holographic model of an eyeball by slowly boring it out of someone's head. Casualty estimates. Follow up regarding what would come after.

But then they wound back to the main point and who would need to kill whom, and Loki's sense of the boy through the staff shifted.

"I can help," he said.

"Pardon?" said Loki with something of a sneer. This was the first time the boy had spoken to him of his own accord, the first time he was behaving as he should have, and yet—

(Perhaps the boy had seen, perhaps he had been enlightened, as Loki had, that there was no true freedom, no way out, that it was all falsehood upon falsehood, all life's great lie.)

And yet Loki couldn't help but feel as if this was all horribly wrong.

"I can help," repeated the boy, looking first at Loki, then Barton, eyes wide as if with curiosity. "I know a better way to get the stuff you need."

Barton folded his arms and leaned back on one foot. It was a more aggressive position than it immediately appeared. True, it made it harder for Barton to reach his bow, but that was far from the only weapon on him, and something with a shorter reach would serve him better at this range.

"Better?" asked Barton, skeptically.

"Yeah. I can just go get whatever you want," said the boy. "I can just phase through the walls. That way you don't have to stab some guy's eyeball or get caught by SHIELD."

"Hm," said Loki, interested but also cautious. "What do you mean by phase?"

The boy promptly waved his arm through a nearby wall.

"That's how you avoided all those bullets, isn't it?"

"Yeah," said the boy, with a shrug. "I figure, this way you can be sneaky."

"And what if I don't want to be sneaky?" asked Loki, circling the boy. "What if I want to be captured by SHIELD? If that is the thing that will bring me to glorious victory?"

"I mean, you do you. But a bloodless victory has always been more impressive to me." The boy shrugged in a way Loki could almost mistake a careless, if it wasn't an affectation he had often put on himself.

If there was one thing this affair could not be, it was bloodless. Even if the boy was a total innocent, he had to know it.

(Except the boy hadn't seen what he had seen, that madness in worship of death in the form of balance, half of everything in ruins in service of a lie—)

(But no lie was so great as freedom.)

Loki leaned down to the boy's level and smiled thinly. "You say that as if there was a choice. There is no conquest that is not birthed in blood."

"Sometimes choices are illusory," said the boy, "but usually that's either because you already chose, or someone else is choosing for you. Illusions aren't lies, anyway. Illusory is the right word, isn't it?"

Loki pursed his lips as he leaned back and revised his estimate of the boy's age downwards. He knew humans didn't live nearly as long as Asgardians – or Jotunn, for that matter. Only centuries. A small number of centuries, at that. Five hundred or something like that. He'd initially thought the boy was perhaps in his seventies or so, but really, even at that age Asgardians had a good grasp on the vocabulary of Asgardian, and they could barely walk. Also, English wasn't nearly as noble a tongue.

"Oh? And what would you choose?"

"Not to do this," said the boy.

"Back to those non-answers, I see. What would you do if you had to?"

The boy tilted his head, considering, green guttering behind the glittering blue characteristic of Loki's control, and once more—

He couldn't help but—

There was power within the boy. Power that Loki had barely been able to scratch the surface of. Power, a will strong enough not to bend—

(Not as Loki's had.)

"You're making a portal, aren't you? For your army? I would put it somewhere far away from where humans can easily get, so they can stop it easily and you can get as many of your forces through as possible. Portals are bottlenecks. That way, you can force a surrender."

-and a sharp mind as well. But, perhaps, not sharp enough.

"But what of the great weapons of your world, boy? Nuclear missiles, I believe?"

"A remote location would be too easy a target," said Barton.

"The portal would close just from that? Seems a bit flimsy."

Loki chuckled. "Perhaps not, but even my idiot brother would hesitate before testing his might against nuclear fission."

"Oh, yeah. I guess ground zero wouldn't be pleasant. Getting caught on purpose still seems like a big risk."

Loki scoffed. Of course it was a big risk! But risk and reward went hand in hand. The risk was the point—

But why was it the point? He…

The boy watched him with bright eyes.

"Why have you suddenly become so… cooperative?"

"Because I made a choice," said the boy, "to help people if I could. I can't just let innocent people die or be hurt if I can stop it."

"What is your name, boy?"

"Danny."

"Danny, then. Perhaps we should make a change in plans."

.

The Fentons' satellites (illegally launched from their Amity Park brownstone and wouldn't Tony love to get his hands on whatever let them do it) had pinpointed the blip (Tony would also like to know what caused the blip, exactly, scientifically speaking; GHOSTS was not a satisfactory answer) to a research building in Stuttgart, Germany.

Everything seemed peaceful.

"Any ideas about what Loki might want here?" asked Tony over the radio as he made another lap of the building. "Or, you know, any sign of Loki?"

They couldn't just break into the building to search it, and in a move Tony definitely sympathized with, the owners were denying the creepy, largely American intelligence organization access to their buildings and records.

Fun.

Natasha audibly sighed. "Not—"

Tony's speakers suddenly produced a loud blaat.

"What was that?" asked Rogers.

"The Fentons'… thing," said Romanoff. "Tony, if I'm reading this right, there's something coming past the wall just below you."

"Roger that," said Tony, scanning the area with every available sensor.

He needn't have bothered. The kid, Daniel Fenton, walked into plain sight, holding a briefcase, wearing Kevlar and combat boots over his pajamas, the works.

Tony was about to call down to him – sprout some quip about bedtimes – before jumping off the roof he was watching from, but the kid stopped and looked directly at him.

"I know I'm out past curfew," he said, "but can't you overlook it just this once?"

"No can do," said Tony, "where's Loki and what's in the case?"

"Around, and iridium."

"Huh. Didn't expect you to answer that, honestly. This going to turn into a fight?"

"That's up to you more than me."

"Stark," said Rogers over his earpiece, "I'm on my way. Keep him talking."

"So am I," said Romanoff. "Called in the rest of our backup."

Like Tony couldn't handle a teenager, no matter how many powers he had.

"Takes two to tango, kiddo. So why are you answering? Seems like the kind of thing Macbeth's understudy would want to avoid."

"I've got instructions. Right now, they're to retrieve the iridium and protect Loki."

"Nothing about talking, huh? Sticking it to your boss? I can respect that."

"More like taking a broad interpretation of my orders." Daniel Fenton twisted to look behind him, and there was something subtly off about the movement, but he didn't have time to process it before Fenton was looking straight at him again. "Sorry, time for me to go. I don't like crowds."

He vanished.

"Jarvis!"

"Tracking, sir," said the cool voice of his AI aide. "Slight temperature anomalies detected—"

Tony didn't bother listening to the rest, instead focusing on the targeting circle on his UI. "Stunners!"

The stunners deployed, the targeting circle disappeared, and Tony felt all the servos on right side of his suit freeze.

"Really? Not even a Spector Deflector to protect your important stuff?" said a voice – Fenton's voice – behind him. "You need to do better." Something dropped to the ground behind him. "I mean, my friend basically worships the ground you walk on. This is just embarrassing."

"Jarvis?"

"He seems to have pulled out several power relay nodes, sir, although I'm not sure how. All of the surrounding equipment seem to be undamaged."

"Backups?"

"As I said, sir, several."

.

Danny had not actually tried all that hard to be sneaky with his powers. The opposite, in fact. He could have gotten in and out with minor touches of invisibility and intangibility. He didn't need to push it and wind up on his parents' satellites.

Except, he wanted to. Needed to.

Giving in, even a little bit, to the staff's power had been… bad. Like ripping the scab off of a barely closed wound and pouring in some salt for good measure. But he couldn't just stand by and let people be killed when he could do something about it.

He'd also confirmed that Loki had no real desire to win this little war. Either that, or he was woefully uninformed about the willingness of humans to bomb population centers in pursuit of a 'greater good.'

Okay, probably both, actually. Mostly the former, though, which is what Danny needed.

Loki didn't want to win. He wanted to make SHIELD—No. He wanted to make Earth mad enough to come at him with everything they had. He wanted to lose spectacularly, to crash and burn so fiercely in defeat that he'd burn the hand of whoever was pulling his strings. He wanted to break their army in a charge against siege walls they wouldn't even know were there, damn the casualties on both sides.

But at the same time, he wasn't allowed to want anything but domination.

(Danny wondered if Loki's master was like Freakshow, forcing him to play act a shallow caricature of himself.)

(Ghosts don't have friends.)

(Life's great lie.)

Protection wasn't the core of what he was, wasn't his Obsession, but it was close enough that Danny had learned all sorts of different tricks for it. Maybe Loki expected that, with the orders he'd handed out. Maybe not. Danny couldn't exactly ask, any more than he could ask Dr. Selvig why he'd build a pretty obvious off button into the design of a portal that was never supposed to be closed.

The point was, Danny had gotten SHIELD's attention. And they'd sent two bona-fide superheroes and a small army after him.

It wouldn't be enough. Even if all of them had been armed with ghost tech. They weren't.

Really. Danny had expected better of Iron Man. Hopefully, he'd get his hint…

Danny tracked the tiny firefly ectosignatures of several blasters and a Fenton Finder as they approached him. No GIW or Dalv tech in his range. Danny would have thought they'd go for that first.

The problem with Fenton tech was, well…

Danny was the reason any of it worked in the first place.

Feeling surprisingly clear and confident, even though this was the first time he'd done anything of the sort, Danny reached out and removed the spark that made his parents' technology function. The ectosignatures died abruptly.

That left mundane weapons and—

Something sang as it flew through the air at his chest. He dodged on instinct, some part of him knowing that intangibility wouldn't work very well in this particular case.

(As traumatizing as mind control was, it did seem to have some fringe benefits.)

The shield bounced back into the hands of none other than Captain America.

So. That would be superhero number two.

"C'mon, son, we don't have to do this. Put the case down and come with us."

"Again, more up to you than me," said Danny. He was going to say more, but the prongs of a stun gun sailed through him. He looked up at the red-headed SHIELD agent that had just shot him. "Rude."

"He's under mind control," said the woman. "He's not going to listen to reason."

Captain America made a face, but charged Danny with his shield in front as the woman lined up another shot.

"I listened to reason last time." 'Reason' in this case being 'oh my gosh, one of my best friends is falling to her death,' but Danny thought it counted. An alien invasion was unlikely to be conducive to his friends' health, after all.

Captain America hit Danny, but Danny held his ground, his feet only sliding a little bit before he found purchase.

"Hey!" he shouted over Captain America's unreasonably loud shield. "You're enhanced, right? What's the highest fall you've ever survived?"

"What?"

Danny figured that was about as good an answer as he was going to get, so he picked up the captain by the shield and flung him in the direction of the river. It was a number of streets away, but Danny was sure he'd be fine. It was a water landing, anyway.

The woman had retreated to stand back with the other agents. Danny braced himself for what he knew was coming next. "Fire!"

Well. This was boring.

He could just run, but…

Honestly, they needed to be more scared of him. Not just for Loki's plan, or his plan, either. He was a ghost! Being feared was part of the package!

With a flick of his fingers, all the agents were knocked back with a wave of ectoplasm. Now it was time for him to disappear mysteriously.