4.
. . .
Phil Coulson was back to being nominally in charge of SHIELD day-to-day, under the eagle-eye and bad haircut close study of General Talbot, a man who was never inclined to be cheerful. Being that he was still recovering from multiple surgeries that had, to be fair to him, at least seemed to be SHIELD's fault.
Being also that no one was still rotting in jail, and they were now on the high-profile UN thing, and the public polls had them very slightly in the positive, hell, Phil was going to take it. If Talbot wanted to send nastygrams over procedure, Phil would handle it. If Talbot wanted to send someone down to nitpick uniforms and throw tables around, cool, he could ride it out. Phil understood stress. He got stress on a deep and spiritual level. He could write the Tao of Stress and work the motivational speaker circuit for the book tour.
He'd worked with Nick Fury for decades. He took a magic alien pokey stick in the chest. He came back from the dead. He could deal, is how Phil would put it, in short.
Which meant that the dead-aired aura of tension that filled the corner office where Loki was currently working meant it was just another Casual Friday for Phil.
Not only could Phil deal with stress, he could deal with Loki when he was on his high-wire streaks.
It was pretty much the same thing.
"Hey," said Phil, letting himself into the danger room and leaving the door open. He glanced at a stack of file folders stuffed with uncharacteristic messiness under a digital tablet, then took in the rest of the space. Dog-eared edges on the folders themselves. A stone-corked bottle half-hidden under a chair. The phone face down with its magical and protective case looking a little more squishy than usual. A small ding in the far wall where something had gotten chucked out of Loki's way - not really thrown, it would still be embedded in a load-bearing wall three rooms away if Loki had full-on hardballed something. Loki himself in a black cotton hoodie with a zipper that had been fidgeted up and down the zips so many times it was starting to wear smooth. Small clues. Phil already had the rest of the picture. He went all in, choosing to practically chirp like a songbird at dawn. "So, how's the family?"
The look he got was so worth it.
"That good, huh?"
"Coulson, is there any point in begging you to stop before you get started?"
"Probably not. He's still on four, slowly working his way towards the exit. If depression had a physical avatar, it would probably look a lot like a bodybuilder in a denim gym rat costume."
Something tweaked in Loki's face at the description. It cut a slice out of the tension trapped in the room, which was what Phil was going for. Then Loki looked away again, down to the paperwork cradled in his hands, where his expression went smooth and blank and, to Phil, still weirdly pretty readable.
This guy has been around us way too long, thought Phil, studying that face. Or I've been around him way too long. "How's the Wakandan thing you brought back tonight?"
The shift in topic eased Loki immediately. "I've already kicked the leads over to Field Research with a copy to the tag team we've got on site in Brussels." He licked his lips, thinking. "I can't shake the belief that there's nothing to this, and yet, if their people say they've got something…"
"This being the Latverian angle people keep rumoring at us?"
"Doom is not back." Loki set the papers down and rested his hip against one of the filing cabinets. "I would know."
Phil waited for an explanation, with his patented 'I'm waiting for an explanation' expression clear on his face.
Loki waved a hand at him. "When Agent May and I were in Norway for some idiot thing last year that turned out to be nothing. I took a couple of personal days, went down near to the Latverian border, and set up a passive etheric trap-net."
"I know some of those words."
"It does exactly one thing, which is wait for a precise magical energy signature to appear within a certain radius of it. Beyond that, it is so inert that it is functionally nonexistent. It is an automated doorbell that goes to me, Strange, that terminal down in Room 42 that I told anyone who isn't part of my division not to ever touch, and, if I put it in the system right, also pages you if Victor von Doom returns to this physical plane anywhere near Latveria. Full stop. He's not home."
"I also know some of those words, but I think I've got the gist now." Phil sighed. "So it's all just, what, people on edge?"
"Probably."
"Lot of that going around." His tone made it far from a subtle segue back to the original topic, but for the look Loki gave him this time, it was still absolutely worth it. "Why'd you pop off at Thor?"
"I- Gods, I don't know, all right? It's nothing." The hand flapped in the air again as Loki turned away to slam a now-unnecessary file into the cabinet.
Metal whanged through the room at his action, hollow and basso, pointing out the white lie with almost sonorous good cheer.
"That's a big, poundin' nothing." Phil watched the tall, broad shoulders tense. "Fitz was worried about you."
Loki tensed further, but didn't turn around. It was weird knowing how to push the buttons of a guy that used to command invading armies. Phil wouldn't change a bit of it. Especially when 'hey your friends give a rip' actually worked in a pinch. "I upset Thor, I trashed Odin's request, I'm sorry it happened, and I'm… I just don't feel like apologizing to Thor about it right now."
"Okay." Phil pushed his back against the closed door and chilled, waiting for it.
Took about half a minute for the boulder to start clanking downhill. "It's Odin. Again. It's always gods-damned Odin. I told him that. It's absolutely ridiculous, do you know? We're at peace. I'm not the worst thing about the family any longer, I'm not on the verge of execution for something else awful I did. Most of the horrible bits we've gone through are smoothed out. Jotunheim is at peace with us. And yet one thing, small or large, can go awry and everyone starts screaming at each other again."
"Yeah, that's a family."
"Ours takes it to operatic levels of nonsense. The family crest should be golden dishes full of food smashing into marble walls. And that one thing - Odin's the flashpoint. Always something else he did and everyone else gets cut to bone. For gods' sakes."
Coulson shifted against the door. "What I overheard through the vine, you got called to Asgard just before this went down? That's when he made some request?"
"Yeah. He made an effort this time, I suppose. Gave warning family drama was afoot." Loki appeared to decide that the grey industrial wall wasn't the best view and gave up, heading for a chair. He dropped into it with the sort of stony exhaustion that reminded the bolts of it that he was rather heavier than most humans, and that he liked to carry grudges against inanimate objects. "It didn't actually help, in my opinion. I give him credit for trying, though, which makes it all the more aggravating how upset I've apparently decided to be about it. Gods damn it all."
"Why doesn't it help?"
Loki shook his head silently, now staring at a different wall. Then he glanced at the ceiling, licking at his lips. "It's complicated."
"Loki, just dump it. What the hell is going on?" Phil did know, mostly. The thing in the cafeteria had gotten really loud.
"It doesn't matter, really, not the details. Besides, you probably already heard. It's Thor's problem, and Odin's, apparently. And it might not even be true. He's upset over a maybe. A maybe that aligns his problems with my own long-standing ones. And he felt, not unreasonably, that I might be sympathetic. And Coulson, I am. That's not the issue. That's not what I'm upset about."
"Okay."
"Odin calls me in and asks me to be a kind ear to Thor. And someone should be, and I understand that, but do you know what my brain, my occasionally deeply resentful, grudging, furious brain is grinding itself apart on? That fabulous bit of me that's gotten me in trouble on the regular for centuries?" It was rhetorical. Loki kept barreling on. "It's stuck seething over the popular notion that I'm supposed to drop everything and nurse his wounded spirit when no one in the family ever did that for me when I needed it." The glance Phil got was hot and pissed off, and mostly at himself. "It's more complicated than that for them, too, but I-just—"
Phil shifted his weight, calmly waiting and letting Loki spill it all out.
"Someone leaves these idiotic self-help books around my corner of the library. All this rot about trauma recovery and whatlike. I even read a couple of them for a laugh. I get it, Coulson. I understand the human motive towards forgiveness and moving on. I can intellectually appreciate the concepts of being the better person, healing, growing up, blah blah blah."
Now the long, pale hands were animated, waving in the air with frantic irritation.
"Few of them like to discuss the truth. It is not easy to just toss aside the feeling that you were hurt, that you were wronged, but they say that you're supposed to just wipe off the blood and get up from the floor and be stronger and that you're the one that's supposed to heal when others did as much or as more to cause these problems, and you're the one supposed to slap a healer's rag on your face and call it closure when it's very, terribly, horrifically easy to remember that there are things that still hurt. And why. And what you did to get through it. What you did to others, and damn right you get to carry that part by yourself. And it doesn't just go away. It's so easy for others to tell you to just get over it. And none of it is easy.
"I'm sorry Odin's done stupid things. Is it so damned awful and selfish of me that I'm not up to tearing myself open on someone else's behalf because of it?"
Okay. Wow. Phil knew whatever it was, it was going to be dramatic and rough. It was the Odinson clan, it was a given. Several years ago, as eldritch entities tore through time and space, Loki had gone through a near nervous breakdown as Coulson not only tore him free from demonic influence, but also got an eyeful of The Big Blue Family Secret. He'd talked Loki down by offering to get drunk and discuss crappy dads at a better time.
Really, there had been a lot of that since.
He hadn't, however, been prepared for the amount of wounded bitterness and still-youthful self-resentment Loki just dropped onto the table with his latest rant.
But that he had, well, it was something. "If it's a little selfish, I think it probably is in the way we're supposed to be." Coulson shrugged at the look he got. "I didn't pick up a degree in therapeutics or anything, and I promise I'm not the one leaving the books. You gotta watch out for yourself a little, and yeah. I know that people like to say 'get over it.' It's a limited use statement, in my opinion. It's a short term bandage, gets you through a tough spot, then you deal with it in better depth later. But I tend to have to patch people up in the field. It's not a family pack deal."
"But you're also going to think I was harsh on him."
"Well, yeah, but I do get where you're coming from." Coulson grabbed a chair that had been sitting, ignored, by the door and swung it over by the desk to sit down. "Here's the thing, though. Okay. With full acknowledgment that I'm one of those people that's gonna say something that's easier said than done from your perspective, yeah, I think you were harsh. I think it's not so much that you're supposed to be magically healed from being goaded into becoming a crazy asshole within a decade and get over everyone else's part in that, but that I can tell you're mad at yourself because you know you don't want someone else to go through that. Especially your brother, who you've been pissed at for thinking he's a big shot for like six hundred years. But deep down he's still your brother and nobody gets to stab him in the back but you." Loki stared at him. "Gods, you tire me."
Phil smirked.
"I'm still not going to drop everything and run off with him on some idiot vision quest or whatever he thinks he needs this time. I am needed here." Loki gestured at the piles of work in front of him. "It matters, as idiotic as all this is. It matters to you. It matters to me. This is a particularly important circumstance for SHIELD. It is an active reminder as to why your species has such short average lifespans, because the sheer fiddly bullshit nonsense of this task has already taken a good thirty years off mine." Loki stopped to laugh, high and suddenly, genuinely, amused. "Although, to be fair, I think I'm already beating my own life expectancy based on lifestyle and behavior."
"Yeah, probably." Phil plucked the digital tablet off the desk, glancing at it. "You know, you keep forgetting one really important thing about how you can deal with all of this."
"How's that?"
"You're not doing this alone." Phil turned the tablet on with a flick of his artificial thumb. "Let's come up with some dumb ideas, here. Push the stress around a bit."
"Coulson. It's my task. I've got Mack and-"
"And you guys are understaffed because Talbot's up our asses like it's some sort of final exam and now you've got one of those crazy family emergencies. They happen. We deal with 'em." Phil grinned. "That's what I do every day, Loki. I deal with other people's BS, and I've gotten pretty good at it. Let's work out a rough new plan here. See what you're willing to move around for your brother's sake. Come up with a day trip style plan. Vision quests are important too, all right?"
"Gods." Buried deep under the single acerbic word, Coulson could tell he was slightly touched. Loki looked away before coming up with one last protest. "You know the proper Asgardian tradition is that we let arguments simmer for a good decade before bringing them back up. Not try to deal with it same day."
"And look how well that's worked out for everyone."
"…Fair point."
. . .
Daisy snuck around a corner of the underground facility, watching Thor as he stared at a vending machine everyone else called The Sadness. Installed in 1992, it was the sole provider of SHIELD-logo'd bags of 100 calorie unsalted peanuts, generic seltzer water in various horrific flavors, black licorice, plain pretzels, a rack of bubblegum that had been in there so long they had to have gone flavorless, and, for variety, a darkened alley of discolored bags of Funyuns so sketchy that Engineering had a theory they had actually been manufactured a hundred years in the future, sent back to the sixties, and then corralled into a cardboard box to one day be loaded into The Sadness, where they now waited to close their stable time-loop and save the rest of the Funyun People.
No one had ever bought anything from The Sadness.
The way Thor looked, Daisy felt pretty sure that streak wasn't going to break tonight. Especially since the God of Thunder, hot shit of who literally knew how many battles, seemed to have no clue she was standing there. The grapevine had her hooked up. She knew a good chunk of what went down with Loki. The rest… "Hey, uh. Dude."
Thor turned his head to look at her. "Miss Daisy."
Christ, he looked even more depressed. She managed to not wince, knowing it helped to be prepared. Coulson had asked her to come down, play it straight. "Loki handles stress like crap. Like, I'm not going to apologize for him. His attitude is his problem, and sometimes he goes off in ways that he's gotta deal with after. But yeah, things are… a little wild right now."
"So I am to understand." He looked at the vending machine again. "This is not food."
"Most definitely not. You snacky again?"
"Not really."
"Depression snacky."
Thor made a particularly scrunched kind of face. "Do I really look like the kind of person that does that?"
"Yeah. You look like you either eat, beat the crap outta something, or wander around and pout when things go bad. If not all of the above in order."
The scrunch again. "Far too observant around here."
"Told ya earlier." Daisy jerked a thumb over her shoulder. "You want to do something dumb, like answer phones for us for like an hour or three?"
"Why?"
"Because we always need warm bodies with decent security clearance who're willing to sit on their ass for a few hours and listen to someone trying to call in and tell us why their dog or whatever is trying to summon the aliens from Proxima Centauri." It was sort of true, in a 'hey, go vamp for time with the big guy before he wanders out the door' kind of way.
Thor stared at her. "Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf star. The habitable zone of it is about a fingernail slice, and the only planetoid there with any remarkable life, well, all it really has worth mentioning is blindacre moss."
Daisy absorbed that.
"Good for poultices. It's a minor cargo, requires specialized-"
Daisy grimaced, putting up a hand to get him to stop. "I was… just cracking a joke, dude. It's cool. Thanks for the Fodor's Guide to the Galaxy, there, though. Interesting in a pretty boring way. I'll grab my towel and we can hit up the flyover country of the local star cluster sometime."
It was Thor's turn to look nonplussed. "It's not very touristy."
"Yeah, I got that." Daisy looked at the vending machine, then at him. "So, phones? It's good for a laugh and you'll feel like you're doing something. Breakfast starts at five am. The eggs are good and there's a lot of them."
Thor peered at her, his face telling her he knew this was all very suspicious in some harmless way. "You're working to distract me. Buy time."
Daisy shrugged. "Whether I am or not, it's going on ten. The best kooks always call after midnight. I'll sit with you. And if you wanna depression snack, dude, I know where these guys hide the Costco supernacho bags. Do not eat the crap from those machines. No one in the galaxy is that desperate."
