8.
. . .
"I'm not going to go over this again. For the last time. It's not Doom." Loki didn't pace so much as whip with feral agitation back and forth through the conference room. "Listen to me. He fell from Sanctuary. Yes, I do think he survived. Further, the reason I believe he's not gone forever is that he stunk of sulfur and void as he fell. Yes, void magic has a smell, don't give me that look, Coulson. Nothingness leaves the traces of bitter cold, empty as nothing else is. It scars reality, leaves that trail. Imagine an old ice pack sitting in a freezer too long - like that. He fell, and I believe he survived because he made some sort of pact with things I do not recommend, and further, he is not in Latveria making our lives difficult in these subtle but building ways because nothing with that specific stench is currently on Earth."
He stopped moving and snapped around to glower at his teammates. "And don't even try to tell me he's going to get cellular reception in Hell. I enchanted my own phone and I can't get more than two bars of 4G in fucking Asgard."
Coulson folded his hands atop each other, shifted behind the old plywood table where he was sitting with Mack, a handful of assigned agents, and Daisy as a matter of assistant management, raised a single eyebrow halfway up his forehead, and said, "Okay."
Loki tried to shove his hands in the pockets of his usual hoodie, realized he was still wearing the smoothly layered tunic he'd been wearing when he got the emergency call that morning in Alfheim, sneered, snapped his fingers, and then put his hands in the pockets of his usual hoodie. His expression dared the rest of the room to say something about it.
No one did. He looked like he hadn't slept much. Loki took a breath, tried to sound more calm. "So, all right. I respect Wakanda's intelligence. Highly. They got wind of something, I've absolutely no arguments there. I would submit rather than focus on the Latverian-suggestive elements in play that we look around the matter and see who would have the ability to portray their interference convincingly - and why anyone would bother."
"Chaos is its own benefit." Daisy piped up from her end of the table. "I hear you say that like twice a month. Chaos on the political stage can be like money, especially in a region that's already off-balance. If you know who you're poking and what sorts of crap will happen 'cause of it, you're already winning the game." She looked at the rest of the table. "Half of the EU is dealing with Brexit fallout, and the rest is dealing with right wing nationalism on the rise. It's a hot crock pot of trouble. Throw in an ice cube and crap starts spitting all over."
"She pays attention." Loki glanced at Coulson. "Also, I'm still an awful influence."
Coulson saw his shot and took it with a grin. "I respect your intelligence, and I don't have any arguments there."
Loki rolled his eyes. "Very well. So. We have a UN meeting centered on both the Baltic and Balkan regions and their destabilized role in the union post-Doom. It is now in a high state of panic because someone is continually pulling the alarm and trying to tell us that deadly interference in this summit is likely to happen. We've got multiple lines of inquiry that say that someone is most definitely planning an attack either on the summit itself or is content to disrupt matters until it simply never happens. We are getting valid information about that interference that needs constant attention and resources. That in itself isn't useful or strange."
"But someone's wearing us down with it." Mack piped up. "That hit me after I mailed you this morning. None of this is really unusual - but the sheer volume of the interference we're getting is. It's a stress test now, and not just because Talbot got a bug up his ass. It's definitely the latter thing you said. At this rate, the summit's just not gonna happen."
"Talbot's attitude does not help us avoid that outcome, no."
Coulson put up a hand before Loki could elucidate his latest reason to hate authority any further. "Don't worry about Talbot. We're going to move stuff around to match the problem, because we have to. Maybe we can find a way to start tamping it down, get the spigot under control. Loki, can we keep you on deck for a couple more hours?"
"I left Thor with some research. I doubt he'll find trouble." Loki frowned. There had been a thing that morning before he hurried off. Some matter with a blue stone Thor had taken from a local watchman, with some vague warning about exactly what Loki had told Thor would be a problem with the local politics. The stone seemed fine, and despite certain very real issues mortals could have with fae, Loki hadn't noticed anything cursed or untoward misting around Thor. Much less lingering around the breakfast buffet. Only the smell of a good mead.
Loki hadn't studied that stone long as he'd needed to run back to Earth, but it was a basic watchman's enchantment. Inert. Harmless. Seen dozens like it. He hadn't given it a lot of thought since. And yet, it still nagged at the back of his mind. Like a splinter. He put it aside. "He's an adult, I think he'll be fine a few more hours. But I would like to return before nightfall there, if possible." The guilt was still a vague, thrumming, but ever-present thing.
"Think we can do that." Coulson stood up. "Come on, we're gonna go trade with the higher up for resources first. You're the muscle. Stand around and look scary, you're good at it."
Loki wasn't fooled by the tone. "But don't talk."
"Yeah, honestly, I'm looking for help, not open war."
. . .
There was something mostly like a staircase spilling out from the mouth of the old, overgrown library buried in the depths of the town. Moss covered smooth stones, and here and there were a few old wooden footsteps grown into the earth, but mostly it was a calm, peaceful space. Nothing like the city, which Thor had decided yes, overall, he was pretty much in total agreement with Loki on Alfheim in general. But this was a nice place. It had turned out to be pretty useless to him, the little old library, but it was gentle and pleasant and after the last few years he'd had, he could do with a bit of gentle pleasantry.
Thor shifted his bum on the soft loam, not out of discomfort but the tickle of some mental agitation. His hands dangled loosely between his knees, and he'd left the underground depths of the archive with nothing to show for hours of work.
It pestered at him, the idea that maybe he could have looked harder. That he missed something, some detail in that thick sea of old and musty paper that Loki surely would have caught first pass. That maybe he should go for a drink and a bite of something - it's all Alfheim seemed to offer, a bite of something, not a proper meal anywhere, breakfast had been a disaster - and dive back in.
But Thor didn't move.
He couldn't pinpoint his own thoughts, or maybe didn't quite want to. Loki was in them for certain, and he hadn't wanted to look too close at that. Some restlessness, something he didn't want to confront. It was going to come up anyway. His mind wandered back to explosions - asking for help there at SHIELD, the approach in the prison cells after their mother's death, the way Loki had blown up when Thor returned to Asgard, lies revealed. Is it madness? Well, yes, it had been, then. Somewhat understandably, even. Not what Loki had done, of course, but the motivations. The realizations. The secrets.
And Thor hadn't spent much time thinking about it.
He'd grieved, of course. Loki was his brother. That had meant more than the nine realms to him for most of their lives. He had cared. And he'd grieved deeply when Loki fell. Still grieved, when Loki had been found again - and found even more broken and dangerous. That his brother was now alive, in a new way that mattered, that was a precious thing.
But Thor hadn't thought deeply on why it had all happened. What had gone wrong with Loki, what place he himself might have held in it. Why not? And why think about it now? Well, Thor thought he knew the answer to that now. Because the answers had wounded Loki once, and now all that hurt had come back around onto him.
Thor was not an idiot, and he didn't lack empathy. He could be angry and brash and forward, and he liked being all of that better, because caginess wasn't his thing. There was an honesty to how he chose to be, and for the most part he thought that raw honesty was the honorable choice. And now that honesty crawled up and kicked him solid in the arse, because it struck him from within that morass of thoughts that he hadn't wanted to deal with that it was, really, not all that great to finally, truly see all those old matters from his brother's point of view. Not because Thor had needed to then, but because it was personal now.
Thor winced, and recognized why he didn't want to deal with these realizations.
Putting it baldly, his thoughts sucked.
"I'm sorry, brother," Thor said to thin air, because Loki didn't particularly care for apologies. Loki knew perfectly well how empty words could be, and how sharp that emptiness was. What Loki always liked better was people actually doing something with useful knowledge, and Thor hadn't sussed how to do that out yet.
It was tricky shit.
He flexed his hands and looked down the arbor lane, seeing Elves flit into the treetops as if vanishing, and he recognized none of them, all slim and ephemeral in the late afternoon glow, and he knew he was deep in a place where he didn't belong.
. . .
Loki hurried into the same inn he'd left that morning, looking around for Thor and not immediately seeing him at the tavern-style row of stools at the far end of the common room. He ignored the startled looks he got. It was possible Thor was up in his own rented room, but that wasn't his style. It also wasn't his style to still be in a small-town library for hours on end, much less alone, which meant that Loki was already at a loss as to where he could be.
He whipped back out of the inn and down the visitor's ladder to the loamy earth beneath the trees, looked around, listened for yells, heard nothing, and said, quietly, "Uh oh."
It was never a good thing to misplace a Thor. Things broke, or people's skulls broke, or sometimes it was just a good old fashioned good natured bar brawl happening somewhere, but a bored Thor was usually a good way to get kicked out of, well, a planet.
It's not as if the man needed tending, exactly. It's just that Alfheim could bore the ass off a tree sloth if they weren't on some sort of dedicated action plan, and Loki had left him alone in an extra-boring section of the realm for about two hours longer than he'd wanted.
Fucking Talbot. The man made up for the ugly shortness of his hair with the length of his needless rambling. Oh, Loki did his part and bit his tongue and looked stress-inducingly frightening through Coulson's video call. Near half-off, he'd bitten it. He could still taste copper at the back of his teeth, though the bit he'd chewed open had already healed by the time the call ended. And Coulson got what he needed, after a lot of patient explanation and trying to not grin every time Talbot snuck a glance at Loki shadowing the back of the vidcall frame.
But by gods, it had taken far too long.
He turned on the thoroughfare, soft dirt kicked up by his boots, and he wondered if there was an Elvish lost and found somewhere around the tourism hut.
"Loki." Behind him.
Loki whirled again, saw Thor, felt relief, showed none of it - can't break character, muttered that old, wry bit of himself that still didn't like to give up what he felt for any reason but the most necessary, and tried to identify the building Thor had left. He couldn't, it was just a generic little hut. "What happened?"
Thor shook his head. "Stepped into a woodkeeper's shed to contact Leamhan."
It took a moment before Loki placed the name. From the morning's conversation. "The Elf. The watchman warning of some drama."
"May have found it." Thor's look turned worried. "I was sitting outside the library, having not found much. Was approached by a fae, a young looking fellow. Mooar was his name, a glashtyn, he said? I don't know what that means." Thor shrugged. "Deeply pleasant man. Asked me about the library, offered help since apparently he knows the place well. A clerk, he said he was. I turned him down, though he gave me a little useful information."
"All right?"
"Struck me odd, is all. After talking to the other man yesterday, something about this one struck me." Thor still looked concerned, one hand fussing with a gauntlet. "Leamhan already knew about him, as it happens. Said he was under watch. Troubling, really. I hope we haven't started something, coming here. Would be on me if that were so."
I really don't have time for nonsense Elvish politics, thought Loki, and he immediately dumped it in favor of finding a more helpful way to say it. "Then I'm glad you said something to the man. It's his job, as you say. I'm not sure it's wise to get further involved, though." Loki looked down, realized he was still in human clothes. No wonder he'd gotten such a reaction in the inn. He fixed that, then pushed a hand through his hair. "Apologies, I didn't think it would take that long to return. I certainly didn't want to leave you in any trouble - or where trouble could find you."
Thor shrugged, affably enough. "You were needed," he said, and it was so calmly accepting that it nailed that low, thrumming sense of guilt deeper into Loki like a dagger. In defiance, a piece of him wondered if Thor had been enchanted or turned, despite his own limping watchfulness.
He focused himself, put the old parts away, looked for a way to be helpful instead. "I've time now for awhile. We can go back into the library, tomorrow even, see if-"
"No need." The interruption wasn't at all short. It came with a shrug. "There's nothing there."
"Well, maybe you missed something."
"Loki, there's nothing to miss. There were a handful of old buyer's scrips that funded some grand festival several months before I was born, and of the festival itself, nothing. According to Mooar, they would have been destroyed, redacted, or kept somewhere else if someone thought they were important and I don't think anyone would have thought so. This isn't like the city." Thor laughed. "They're more pragmatic here. They assume that after a point no one will come weeding through the junk we dumped on them to keep, so they begin to actually junk it. We're the first to ask in centuries. There's nothing here worth the time. Our nonsense has fed a tree now." Thor waved a hand at the forest behind him. "Good job, really."
The only hint Loki gave to what he felt was that he rocked slightly back on his heels. Gods, he didn't want to go in this direction, and it was hard to not sound aggressive. "Is there reason to assume this Mooar spoke true if he's being watched?"
"Didn't seem like a useful thing to lie about. Save me from some paperwork, what of it?" Thor looked at him, then shrugged again. "Don't worry about it, brother. Come, we'll sup, we'll rest, we'll figure out what to do next in the morning."
"You've more threads?"
"I'm running thin already, Loki, but I'm sure we can come up with something. I've faith in your mind, and in my stubbornness."
How can my mind help you when I'm barely here?
But again, Loki didn't say that aloud. Just that worry, screaming through the air like a viola, that he'd missed something important while he hadn't been looking. That he'd been too distant, or made too easy a mistake.
Like Odin might.
That fear, too, was buried down deep.
