Chapter 32 - Always Take a Shield into Battle
AN: THERE WILL BE A CHAPTER 33. As I rewrote this chapter and tried to tie up all my loose ends, this chapter got to be over 8,000 words. At first I was going to post it as one super-long chapter, but then I ran out of time to edit and decided to cut it in half. So the last chapter, chapter 33, will now be posted on Friday.
"I don't need you to find a way for me to become immortal again. I know how to go back; I'm just choosing this for now."
"And I respect your choice, Loki." Frigga got on her knees to look under the bed in the room Stark had given her, presumably to see if she had left anything underneath it. "But I want you to respect that I'm still going. It isn't for you, and I won't pretend it is; there is something else I'm looking for."
"And what is that, Mother?"
Frigga didn't answer. Instead, she pointed to a small mountain of books at the foot of her bed. "Do me a favor and take those back to the library for me."
Loki frowned. "Those are all library books? Don't mortal libraries limit how many books you can borrow from them at a time?"
"Only if you have a library card. Otherwise, I believe you are free to take as many of them as you wish so long as no one notices you took them."
"That's stealing."
"Not if you return them."
Loki picked up a book from the top of the pile, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose by Ekhart Tolle, and tossed it to the side. She looked at a few more of the titles: Women Who Love too Much: When You Keep Hoping and Wishing He'll Change by Robin Norwood, Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, and Discovering Your Inner Goddess by Sersi. Had her mother taken the entire self-help section? If these had all come from the same library, there was no way they weren't missing them. "How did you even have the time to read all these when you've hardly been here?"
Frigga had disappeared into the bathroom, and when she came out, she held an armful of shampoo and other toiletries, which she made disappear one by one into her dimensional storage. "I want you to promise me you will behave for your brother and Lord Stark."
"Does that mean I don't have to behave for anyone else?"
Frigga patted her daughter on the cheek. "Never mind, Loki. I wouldn't want you to make a promise that you can't keep. To be honest, I would be disappointed if you made things too easy for them." She gave Loki a hug and a kiss on the forehead and took the sling ring out of her pocket.
"Are you going now?" asked Loki, knowing the answer to that and that nothing she could say would dissuade her.
"Yes. But do not worry, Loki. I shall know if you truly need me, and I shall come back, and I shall come back from time to time to visit. I also have the 'cell phone' Lord Stark gave me, and you may call me just to talk if you wish."
Frigga slid the sling ring onto her finger and held her ringed hand in front of her; she then made a circular motion with her other hand, and a circle of golden light formed in front of them. Loki could see into the portal; it had opened out into a field of green vegetation, with blue skies and snow-capped mountains in the background. Frigga gave Loki one last hug before stepping through. Loki thought about following her, but she knew she'd be happier staying behind. Besides, Stark planned to have Thai food delivered for dinner, and Loki was eager to try it.
(*´ ^(~。~*)
Empty Thai food containers littered the coffee table. Loki, Thor, Tony, Bruce, and Doctor Samson had just finished their breakfast of leftovers when the elevator dinged and one of Tony's robots wheeled out. Loki believed it to be the one named Dum-E. It dropped a package at its master's feet, then rolled backwards into the elevator, where it got stuck in the doors as they closed. "JARVIS," Tony implored.
"Got it, Sir." The elevator door opened again, and Dum-E rolled the rest of the way back into the elevator.
Tony picked up the package, examined it, and handed it to Loki. "I'm guessing this is for you. It's addressed to 'Luke Skywalker.'"
Loki opened the box and made a face as she pulled out the gaudy fur cape that Frigga had provided him with during their escape from Asgard. "I had hoped I had lost this for good." A note fluttered to the ground at his feet, and he draped the cloak over the end of the couch and scooped it up.
Luke:
You left this in my apartment, and I thought you might want it back. Guess what? I got that job at Union Allied! I won't be working at the diner anymore, but maybe we'll still see each other around the city. It's a smaller place than you'd think.
—Karen
Almost as soon as Loki had finished reading the note, a small portal opened above the table. Tony, Bruce, and Doctor Samson jumped out of their seats and began to back away from it. Thor and Loki, being more used to magic, stayed in their seats and watched as a card fell out of the portal and into a container that had once contained peanut noodles. The portal closed and Thor picked up the card, wiped the sauce off, and after taking a look at it, handed it to Loki. "I believe this is also for you, brother."
On the front, the postcard said "Greetings from Latveria" and featured a photo of a massive statue of a man in a cloak and some sort of mask. Loki turned the card over. "My Dearest Darlings, Who I Could Not Love More Had I Given Birth to," Loki read aloud. "I think it's for both of us, Thor."
Tony edged his way back to the table. "But wouldn't that overly long opener imply that she didn't give birth to Thor either?"
"I'm sure it's just mis-worded." It had to be. Frigga wouldn't attempt to break the news that Thor was Odin's bastard in a postcard, would she? "Guess where I am, darlings?" Loki read. "I am in Latveria. It is a beautiful country and in many ways reminds me of Asgard. Lord Doom is a most gracious host, and I am impressed by his knowledge of both mortal magic and science. Loki, I think you would like Victor. He says he would like to meet you— Funny, I've absolutely no desire to meet him."
"Whoa, whoa, whoa. Your mom is hanging out with Doctor Doom now? She knows he's an evil dictator, right?"
"Apparently she has a type." Loki tossed the postcard back across the table to Thor, watching it spin in the air before it reached him. "There is no way I'm calling someone who goes by the name 'Doctor Doom' Father, if that's what she's thinking."
"Do you suppose that is his real name?" asked Thor, looking at the picture on the front of the card again. "And is he truly a healer?"
"The name does sound totally fake, right? And if he is a doctor, he's probably not a medical doctor," said Tony. "I'll bet he's got a doctorate in theater arts or something."
Thor scowled into his empty coffee mug, then stood and headed in the direction of the kitchen.
"He went to school with Reed Richards," Bruce pointed out, as he and Doctor Samson took their places at the table again. "If he has a degree in anything it's probably in electrical engineering or something."
"I've got at least one degree in electrical engineering." Tony frowned, and his eyebrows furrowed together. "I think. College is kind of a blur now."
"Because you're old for a mortal and your memory is failing?" asked Loki.
"No, not because I'm old! Because I used to do a lot of—"
Bruce cleared his throat loudly.
"Uh, never mind. Drugs are bad, okay kid?"
Loki rolled his eyes. He had no interest in destroying his brain cells and walking around in a self-induced stupor.
"Come to think of it, alcohol is also bad, especially if you overdo it. I've been thinking about giving it up."
Something about the way Tony had spoken made Loki think he was leading up to something. "Are you going to forbid me from drinking?"
"No, no; I'm not forbidding you from doing anything, because I know that's just going to make you want to do it. But now that you mention it, it might be a good idea if you didn't make a habit of getting wasted, because it hasn't worked out too well for you the last couple of times."
"Tony, if you want to forbid me from drinking, it's fine. It might be easier that way."
"Wait, you want me to forbid you from drinking?"
"I don't actually enjoy it much, and I usually end up making a fool of myself. Most of the time I end up drinking because in Asgardian culture, if someone offers you a drink, there is no saying no without causing offense or being accused of being antisocial." Loki glanced at Thor, who was pushing random buttons on the coffee maker, attempting to persuade it to to brew more coffee. Thor was the one who had most often pressed him to drink with him and his friends; not because he wanted to make a fool of him, but because he thought he was "helping" him fit in, which he never would have anyway.
"I'm starting to get the sense that living in Asgard is kind of like being at a frat party all the time," said Tony. "Not that I was ever in a fraternity, I just used to crash the parties. But this isn't Asgard, you know. You're allowed to turn down alcohol. Bruce doesn't drink with us most of the time, and everyone's fine with it. Steve doesn't drink much because it doesn't do anything for him. But if it helps, you're forbidden from drinking from now on, and you can tell your brother, or Natasha, or whoever else who tries to pressure you into it that you can't because it's not worth getting grounded."
"Thank you."
"No problem. Damn, that was easier than I thought it was going to be. Why can't everything with you be this easy?"
"Well, I wouldn't want Mother to be disappointed."
Stark arched an eyebrow at him, but before he could ask what Loki meant, the elevator dinged again and their heads swiveled towards it in time to see Steve and Clint drag themselves out, looking as if they had clawed their way out of their own graves. Loki was tempted to ask after Hela. Natasha followed, dragging along someone who seemed vaguely familiar.
"You guys look like crap," said Tony. "Especially you—wait, what are you doing here?" he asked the person hanging off Natasha's arm. "What is he doing here?" he repeated to Natasha.
"He's been shot," she told him.
"That doesn't answer my question."
Bruce leapt up. He put his glasses on as he tried to get close enough to Director Fury to look at his bandaged shoulder. When he tried to touch it, Fury knocked his hand away. "It's been seen to, Banner. I don't need you poking at it." He looked to Loki, and then back to the others. "Would one of you like to explain what Thor's psychopathic little brother is doing here?"
"He isn't psychopathic," Doctor Samson corrected. "I've been treating him for post-traumatic stress disorder, primarily." So much for patient-doctor confidentiality, thought Loki, though he supposed he ought to be grateful to Samson for speaking in his defense.
Fury nodded. "Okay—and you are?"
Doctor Samson stuck out his hand. "Doctor Leonard Samson. Tony brought me on board as the Avenger's staff psychiatrist."
"Probably not the worst idea Stark's had." He looked at Tony again. "Why is Loki here?"
"Bruce and I adopted him."
Fury nodded. "Right. I'm dead after all, and this is Hell."
"Were this Hel, you would be seeing my daughter, not me," Loki told him, even though he knew Fury was referring to the Hell with two L's, which was a completely different place.
"Look, it's a long story," said Tony.
"You know what? I'm currently unemployed," said Fury. "I've got nothing but time."
Tony took a long breath, and then began to speak without stopping to take another. "Okay, well—Thor took Bruce and Doc Samson and me to Asgard. Then Loki turned himself—herself, actually—into a mortal, and she couldn't figure out how to turn herself back, so Odin threw her out of the house, and after a short stop on a dead planet we brought her and mom back with us to Earth. Then he ran off, but I hired Jessica Jones to find him and bring him back—I paid her in Jack Daniels, but I gave her Doc's card; still hoping she'll come back and let him help her with her anger issues. Then Loki was sick, and he screwed up my floor and licked Clint—it was a whole thing—then the Sorcerer Supremo or whoever turned her into a pangolin and Natasha gave her a concussion; then Point Break came back and we went to brunch and Loki got caught up in the Wrecking Crew's attack; you probably heard about it, it made the national news—she was dead for like two hours, but Loki's daughter is the Queen of the Underworld or whatever, so she sent him back, and that seemed to fix his shapeshifting problems, but he doesn't totally have his magic back and he's still mortal, sort of; apparently he's mortal, but he's not aging at the rate of a mortal. Do I have that right?" Tony asked Loki.
"That is essentially correct," Loki confirmed.
"So anyway, family counseling didn't go great, but Lenny promised Odin we'd take care of him, at least until we're all dead, and then maybe he gets passed down to our kids or something. Did I mention that Loki's still a kid in Asgardian years? He's like, the equivalent of a teenager. Oh, and he's not responsible for the invasion. That was totally some guy named Thanos; Loki had been psychologically tortured and was probably under the influence of his own scepter. By the way, you happen to know what happened to that?"
"Pretty sure Hydra has it." Fury didn't really seem to be too bothered about that, nor did he appear to have been phased by anything Tony had said. Maybe he hadn't been able to follow it.
"Well, that sucks." Tony narrowed his eyes at Fury. "I'm going to have some questions for you later, by the way, about some stuff I think you knew, but decided I didn't need to know."
"I'm sure you do, Stark." Again, Fury didn't seem to be too concerned. Loki wondered if he was on the good painkillers, like the ones Bruce had given him after he came back from the dead.
"May I call you Uncle Fury?" asked Loki, attempting to get a rise out of the man.
"You know, why not?" Fury collapsed into the empty chair where Bruce had been sitting earlier. "Go get your uncle a beer, kid."
"If you're on painkillers, you're not supposed to—"
Fury glared at him, and Loki got up to go to the kitchen. If Fury wanted to risk whatever ill effects came from mixing painkillers and alcohol, who was Loki to argue with him?
He served Fury his drink with a flash of a smile. "I find it encouraging that you trust me not to poison you."
Fury looked at his beer, as if considering the risks. Then he shrugged, notched the beer cap on the edge of the coffee table in front of him, and slammed down on the edge of the cap with his other hand to pop it off. All the while, Tony watched him do this and cringed, probably thinking of the potential damage to his table.
(;;´ー´)旦 (˃̶᷄=_▼)
Luckily, Fury hadn't stayed with them for long, and he'd sworn not to tell anyone that Loki was living with them so long as everyone in the tower kept mum about his own status among the living. The morning after he had left, Loki had curled up on the couch in Tony's workshop with his tablet. Tony didn't know if the kid had just been lonely or if he was hiding from someone, until Doc Samson came looking for him.
He seemed to have gotten himself into something of a tizzy. "Ha, you got me, Loki. You can change this back now."
"I don't know what you're talking about, Leonard."
"Call me Doctor Samson, please."
"Doctor Samson, please, I don't know what you're talking about."
"My hair is green."
"So it is."
"I think you know how it got that way."
"You don't?"
"You can't turn someone's hair this color with dye alone. I know that, because in high school, there was this girl I liked. She was into punk rockers, and I died my hair purple trying to impress her. It didn't work, but the moral to this story is that if you have dark hair, you normally have to bleach it first to get it to take on these kinds of unnatural shades."
"I didn't bleach your hair."
"No, I think you used magic."
"That's preposterous. Is that your only theory? There must be other more plausible explanations."
"Give me even one other plausible explanation for my hair turning green in the middle of the night."
"You could be a mutant."
"Nope. Not a mutant. I've been tested for the X-Gene. Don't have it."
"Why have you been tested for the X-Gene?" asked Tony.
"I was helping out with someone's research. That's all I can say," Samson told him.
Tony rolled his eyes; as if they wouldn't figure out that that someone had been Betty Ross, who had probably been working on another military project for her asshole dad. According to Loki, he'd stashed her in some underground bunker around the same time the shit had hit the fan in New York, but so far JARVIS hadn't had any luck trying to pinpoint her location.
"You might have a split personality, and your other personality got up in the middle of the night and died your hair," Loki suggested.
Samson shook his head. "Dissociative personality disorder is extremely rare. Even if I had it, I can't believe that my other self would be capable of dying my hair green without making a mess in the bathroom."
"Perhaps your other self found an all-night salon? This is New York."
Samson looked up at JARVIS's camera. "JARVIS, did I leave my room last night?"
"I couldn't say, Doctor Samson. It seems that all the security footage from the hall outside your bedroom between the hours of ten PM and seven AM is missing."
Tony furrowed his eyebrows at Loki, but didn't say anything. He could wait until Samson left for that discussion.
"You're getting your magic back, and that's a good thing," said Doctor Samson. "I'm proud of you, you know."
"Really?"
"Yes. Now turn my hair back."
"I can't."
"What do you mean, you can't?"
"Sif's hair was blonde before I cut it. I never could work out a way to turn it back, which is one of the reasons why Sif is still angry with me. But you're not going to be angry with me forever, are you Doctor Samson?"
"No, Loki, I'm not going to be angry with you forever. But is this really permanent?"
"I suspect so."
"You check with Bruce before you did this?" asked Tony.
Loki nodded.
"Right, I'm going to go have a little talk with Bruce."
"You'll find him in his lab, Doctor Samson," said JARVIS.
Once Samson had gone, Tony pinned Loki with what he hoped was a look. He doubted he was as good at it as Bruce or the kid's mother, though.
"Bruce really was fine with it. More than fine with it, I think. Maybe it has something to do with how they used to date the same woman? I mean, I doubt he's actually jealous anymore, and you know Bruce isn't the type to hold petty grudges, but—"
"No, I get it. If I went out of the country and I came back and Pepper was dating some other dude, I'd let you turn that dude's hair green, even if it was like ten years later and she'd dumped him too. I can't imagine that Bruce knew it would be permanent, though."
"It isn't. I mean, it is, but only as permanent as 'permanent hair dye.' When it grows out, his hair will be the color it was before. A shame really, I think he looks better with green hair."
"But Sif's hair never turned back, right?'
"Changing Sif's hair color was an accident. Actually, it was the end result of purchasing a substandard wig from some dwarfs in an effort to make things right after I'd cut it. That wasn't an accident, it was more of a lapse in judgment; but I couldn't have been even five hundred years old. I think I still had all my baby teeth—yes, I remember, because Sif knocked a few out for me when she realized what I had done. Eir wasn't concerned about it, because they'd come back in. Do you know, I don't think any of my baby teeth fell out naturally? People like to hit me in the mouth for some reason."
"I can't imagine why," Tony said, his voice full of dry humor, even though part of him was horrified at what Loki had just told him. "Now, Reindeer Games, I can believe that Brucie Bear let you dye Leo the lion's mane green, but he's not authorized to let you mess with JARVIS."
"Am I in trouble, then? I thought that if I was allowed to prank people, it meant I was allowed to cover my tracks."
"I told you not to mess with JARVIS anymore, Lokes. You shouldn't even have been able to do it with all the parental controls I put on your tablet. So how did you? Magic, or—"
Loki scoffed. "You assume I would have to use magic?"
"How else would you have done it?"
"Well, for starters, I—wait, you think you can trick me into telling you how I did it, don't you?"
"Kid, I'm going to find out how you did it. I'm just giving you the opportunity to tell me first."
"Is my punishment to be lighter if I tell you?"
"Maybe, because there are going to have to be consequences for this, even though I'm kind of proud of you for figuring out how to get around the child proofing."
"You are a strange man, Tony Stark."
"So I've been told. Now tell me, what did you do?"
"It was simple; I just used Steve's tablet. He left it in the common room. His password was 'password123.'"
"Sounds about right. Welp, I've got to go lecture a hundred-year-old man on cyber security. That ought to be fun. Hey, do me a favor, Loki—go around and see if you can break into anyone else's devices, alright?"
"You want me to?"
"Yup. Don't mess with their files or screw with JARVIS again, but see if you can get into them, maybe change their backgrounds to Grumpy Cat. Then let me know who else needs a lecture on choosing difficult to guess passwords."
"And what of my punishment? Are you going to ban me from electronics again afterward?"
"Oh, something much worse than that, kid. I'm going to make you watch all the PSAs Cap filmed for the public schools. Except for the one they filmed for the sex-ed classes about STDs." Tony pretended to shiver for dramatic effect. "Not that the part where Cap goes, 'remember, always take a shield into battle,' while holding up a condom wasn't kind of hilarious, but the B-roll footage of chlamydia outbreaks got disturbingly graphic."
╮ (. ❛ ᴗ ❛.) ╭
Author's Note:
Next chapter really is the last chapter, at least for part one of this series.
I usually try not to explain my jokes, but maybe do a Google image search for Doc Samson if you don't know what he looks like in the comics. Also, I have a feeling more people might pick up on a certain "Easter egg" after _Eternals_ comes out...
