Lima to Stockholm
Notes: Ahem… Apologizing for the cliffhanger ending in advance. Because I'm going to go back and spend at least 5-6 chapter on my take on IW before I resolve the cliffie. But this is where "Lima to Stockholm" was always intended to end and writing-wise it's easier for me to end this story before starting "Two Steps-Behind". So… If you're not a fan of cliffhangers you might want to wait until the timeline on Earth catches up.
Special Warning: Things turn gory about three-quarters of the way through this chapter. If that's not your cup of tea, skip from where Loki enters the fight to the following story break.
Chapter Eleven: Last Secret
After a while Tony stood up and started walking toward the door to Odin's study. "So," he said brightly. "I'm NOT going to drown if I step through this door, right?"
Loki stared at the floor and shook his head, becoming Loptr before Tony's eyes without the slightest change to his physical form.
Tony took a deep breath and opened the door. For a moment he stood just inside then, hesitantly, he stepped through. His hand, still holding to the door jam, tightened until his knuckles were white. For several minutes Tony stared at the new new room, the first new room he'd been in for years, just standing there, breathing.
Loki hovered slightly behind him, his gaze guiltily fixed to the floor at his feet.
Tony forced his fingers to open and took another step into the study. His mind was assaulted by a whirlwind of thoughts. 'We're going to need everyone. The Accords, gonna have to explain them not signing. Steve should have been involved in drafting the Accords from the beginning, not me, well not that I was involved from the beginning beginning, but from when King T'Chaka managed to talk the UN into treating the Avengers like a sovereign nation in our own right. It should have been Steve, he would have done a much better job. I mean, me? Represent the Avengers on a matter of principle? Someone like me has no principles you all know that.
'We need everyone. I'm going to have to get him off. It was all a misunderstanding. You see I was never really dead, Loki took me and left a clone in my place. Obviously Steve would never have hit me that hard, he's Captain America. He kept perfect control that whole time, didn't wrap a rope around my neck and try to hang me with it, didn't smash his shield into my head over and over until my helmet shattered, until my skull was cracked. He only hurt the suit, it's not like I've got a heart under all that metal anyway. You all know Tony Stark doesn't have a heart.'
Tony felt his breathing speeding up. "Tony?" Loki's voice was tiny and worried. Not magic, just a good old fashion panic attack. Tony stumbled back into his workshop and shut the door behind him.
"You don't have to go anywhere. Please don't leave me, I'm all alone. You don't have to go," Loki whispered as he crouched beside Tony to make himself less threatening. "I'll take care of everything. All you have to do is stay here and build. I'll bring you everything you need. Thor really did take your inventions to Earth, he'll be back with their feedback shortly. I swear, I swear to you, that you can do more to help your Earth from here. Let me keep you just a little longer. You don't have to play the villain again, I won't let you, not when I'm so much better at it."
Tony did get the feedback about his invention not long after. Passed from Earth's heroes to Thor to Loki-as-Odin to Tony, but Tony had no doubt at all that it originated from Rhodey. There had always been people who said Rhodes only got his position as the liaison between Stark Industries and the military because he was Tony's friend, which was just added evidence that people were idiots in Tony's opinion. Rhodey knew how to ask the right questions, knew how to get from: "It sucks, I can't use this piece of crap." to "I have to press three buttons and access a drop down menu to do what I need to do. It takes nearly ten seconds and I never use any of the other options on the menu anyway." Tony knew from experience that when he had to interpret customer feedback without Rhodey as a buffer it generally got translated into "I need your tech to read my mind and do my job for me because I have the IQ of a brain-damaged goldfish." Tony knew the difference between Rhodey-filtered feedback and the raw stuff. So he got back to work improving his designs, assured that Loki was right and he could do more good working from Asgard rather than returning to Earth. Tony knew that Rhodey would recognize him from his work soon enough and that would be one less person he'd have to convince that he was him, that he was alive when he did go back.
Loptr held a torque wrench out and Tony hesitated. He knew now that the child was actually Loki, then he noticed the wrench, Loki- Loptr's hand was shaking. Tony reached out and took the wrench. He didn't like being handed things because taking them was an act of trust. Trust that the thing in question wasn't going to hurt him. Trust that they wouldn't use his outstretched hand to grab him, wouldn't attack him when his attention was diverted and one hand was occupied with whatever they'd given him. Trust that trying to hand him something wasn't just a cover to make getting close enough to him to attack him look natural.
But Loptr didn't count because he was just a kid. Tony was an adult and the whole 'hand me tools' thing was a way to make the kid feel useful and keep their attention while the adult demonstrated proper technique in using the tools and in mechanics. The art of using tools to fix things wasn't something you learned studying engineering in college. It was something best learned hands on, mentor-apprentice, parent-child. It was something he did with Harley and that he'd done with the bots, even if they, bless their little mechanical souls, were probably going behind his back and assigning numerical values to every last thing he tried to teach them to do by feel. If his dreams could be believed, his family had found a way to let him teach mechanics to his daughter even while he was dead. It was one of the few things Howard had gotten right and Tony was going to be damned if he ever let himself not do as well by a kid as Howard had done.
Loptr was really Loki, but- but- but- Tony sighed, in the years that he'd been in Asgard Loptr had never once been other than a child. Lopr might argue that humans were ridiculously over-protective and he could definitely hand sharp tools, he'd training to fight with a sword for decades before he'd even met Tony but at the end of the day, he'd respected the lab rules Tony insisted on for someone who looked ten, if Tony was inclined to be generous, even if he really was over a hundred and not a baby. In the end Loptr always conceded to Tony the authority that went along with being the adult in their relationship. In return Tony did his best to be a good mentor to the boy, to give him an adult's attention and encouragement to develop his abilities. To give him an adult whom he was important to.
From what Tony had put together Loki desperately wanted, needed acceptance. He needed a friend and co-conspirator, a lover, a parent and Loki could and had broken himself into pieces trying to get all of those things from Tony. Co-conspirator was a given, with the stakes being the Earth and possibly the future of all life in the galaxy what other answer could he give? Lover was almost as assuredly 'No', even if he wanted to try to get over his trust issues there was Pepper and the simple fact that he couldn't really picture being with someone who wasn't Pepper anymore. Friend? Friendship was hard, it was the people he called friends who betrayed him over and over again. Rhodey, Happy and Pepper were the only real exceptions and even they weren't perfect but he'd be a hypocrite if he expected perfection from his friends in light of his screw-ups. What made the three of them different was they accepted his mistakes and didn't try to force him to apologize for theirs. Tony didn't know if he had enough resilience left after the Avengers to risk friendship again. He wasn't sure he hadn't already done just that and hadn't noticed. Parental figure? Well, Harley's long gone deadbeat of a dad didn't exact set a high bar to clear. Still, excluding Ultron, none of the bots or other AI's had gone through a 'Hate you Dad' phase but then Tony wasn't sure that they had much higher standards than Harley; there weren't exactly a passel of other AI's out there for them to compare their creators against and there was Ultron. On the other hand, Odin wasn't exactly winning any parenting awards himself and who else was there? Now that he knew, Tony's halfway thought through notion of getting Loki to parent Loptr ran into fairly obvious logistical issues right out of the gate.
So Tony set aside the knowledge that Loptr was Loki and just carried on as if Loptr were the same boy who'd been hanging out in his workshop for the last few years. When Tony stopped hesitating to take thing from the boy, Loptr spent the rest of the day grinning fit to split his face. Tony was pretty sure he didn't even know he was doing it.
Days turned into weeks and months. The war started. It wasn't sudden, it wasn't unexpected. Thanos' armada became apparent to Earth's telescopes several months before they reached the solar system. The alliance of Asgard, Vanaheim, Nidavellir and Alfheim sent units to aid in Midgard's defense. Jotunheim, after making it explicit that they were acting independently from Asgard, also sent units. Loki officially returned to life and followed Thor to Midgard so that he could relate a first person perspective to the planet's villains on why it was in their best interest to oppose Thanos. Earth's defenses strained and cracked under the weight of the first wave of the armada, but held.
The war came to Asgard in a moment. Heimdall frowned suspiciously at the battleworn unit returning from Midgard, his attention focused in particular on the dark haired sorcerer who had been supporting the unit. And maybe it was that focus that enabled one of the warriors in the band to turn as he walked past the guardian and slice off his head.
As Heimdall fell, Loki's skin sparked, like the others in the unit, a web of circuitry appeared and then they became the grey-skinned, vaguely insectoid, Chitauri. Taking control of the Observatory, one of the Chitauri reopened the portal and a tall, heavily cloaked figure stepped through along with a platoon of soldiers. "Secure the Tesseract. Failure will not be forgiven." He turned to the original invaders. "You will hold the Observatory until we enter the city, then destroy the Bifrost. It is the symbol of Yggdrasil's alliance against our great design, make its demise… fitting."
Several minutes later as a massive explosion rocked Asgard.
Tony summoned his armor to him. "Stay," he told Loptr. Tony frozen in the doorway to Odin's office, a moment later Lady Loki caught him around the waist and spun them both around. "You could stay as well," she said stealing a kiss.
"Hell with that!" Tony exclaimed and blasted off after her.
"They will come for the Tesseract," the Odin-Clone said as he fell in with them. "Aid us, but remember, Son of Stark, you are not a magical construct… Loki is injured, I believe they are behind it."
"Right," Tony said grimly.
They caught up with Lady several minutes later. A Chitauri unit clashed with a group of Einherjar while Lady danced through the shadows, racking up kills. Tony hit the external speakers on his armor, blasting AC/DC as he joined the fight. His entrance drew every eye and provided Lady with dozens of openings to take advantage of.
"For Asgard!" Odin thundered, rallying the guards around him. They formed a wedge behind him and in a few minutes the Chitauri were slain.
"This was only the rear guard," Lady warned.
"Get ahead of them," Odin ordered.
Tony caught Lady under the arms and zoomed through the halls over the Chitauri's heads, "Love the arched ceilings," he remarked.
"Left here!" Lady exclaimed. She used her magic to warp their image, shots fired at them missed the mark until the Chitauri's cloaked leader saw right through her illusions. His shot clipped Tony's shoulder and sent him spinning. Tony tossed Lady toward a safe perch as he fought to control his landing.
Instead of calling her illusions to confuse the battle Lady cringed away from the Other. "You're dead!" she cried.
"The doors between Life and Death weaken as my master approaches," the Other said with a sinister smile. "Under my hands you will die a thousand times and he will bring back to suffer again, little Jotun."
Seeing Lady frozen Tony landed in front of her, "So you two know each other?" he asked darkly as he opened fire on the Other. Tony stepping in to protect her was enough to get Lady moving again. Two throwing knives appeared in her hands for a second before finding a home in the throats of two of the Chitauri opposing them and the battle was on.
Mechanically, the new armor was the best Tony ever made. It was light and strong, it took and dealt damage like a dream. But there hadn't been time to even start bringing a new AI on line, not when Asgard had never heard of the concept of mass production and Tony had to build his computers from the raw materials up. Without a copilot Tony felt like he was fighting blind.
Once Lady broke free of the paralysis the Other's appearance had inspired, she fought like a cornered wolf, vicious and desperate. She mixed illusions and blades, leaving the Chitauri with too many attacks to defend against and no way of knowing which ones were real until the damage was done. Of their opponents only the Other could see through Lady's illusions, he sent a ball of fire at her. The backlash from the attack sent him flying across the hallway. Tony saw that Lady was wearing Loptr's paultron. As they were basically one and the same person it worked with her magic but, being fitted for a child's frame, it hindered the movement of her right arm. Handicapped as both Tony and Lady were, bodies still piled up at their feet.
Tony lost sight of the Other about the same time the Chitauri started using their dead as shields. The weight of numbers began pressing the pair back down a connecting hallway. Close quarters combat had never been Tony's forte and the side hall was likely a servant's passage as it didn't have the high arched ceilings that had given him room to maneuver earlier in the battle. Lady's, Loki's style of fighting revelled in close combat, in being in and among her enemies, turning their attacks against their allies and sowing confusion. But Lady was a clone, not Loki. As the fight drew on Tony saw green mist spilling from Lady's body as if she were unraveling before his eyes. "I can't draw more magic from Loki," she said sensing his concern.
"We just have to hold them until Odin's forces work their way up from the back," Tony said. Several minutes later he heard a clang as the pauldron hit the ground. Lady discorporated as the magic that sustained her was spent in the fight and Tony was alone. The only thing he could do was fight, hold on and fight and hope Odin reached him before he fell. For several long moments the only thing that existed was the whine of repulsors, the lower whop of the Chitauri energy weapons and the clang of clang of metal on metal.
Then Odin was there, cutting through the battle with a dozen Einherjar at his side. "What took you so long?" Tony asked.
"Impatient mortal," Odin huffed. "But hurry, the vault has been breached."
Tony nodded, he took to the air, blasting a path for Odin's forces. They found the vault's massive doors ripped open and the sound of fighting from within. Tony was the first one through the doors. There were a number of dead, Chitauri and Asir on the ground, parts of the Destroyer's replacement lay scattered among the corpses.
Loki and the three surviving Asir guards made their stand in front of the Tesseract. Loki's hands were dripping with blood, the skin torn where he'd ripped manacles off himself, and he was muzzled but he wielded Gungnir with deadly skill. Like Tony and Lady earlier, Loki and the guards were being overwhelmed by numbers, by the Chitauri's unfaltering willingness to spend their lives to accomplish their ends.
The Other had a gaudy golden glove tucked beneath his arm. He looked from Loki to Tony and Odin with a frown. "I wished to drag you before Thanos alive, traitor," he said and the muzzle still locked around Loki's mouth exploded. The arc reactor set in Tony's gorget flared brightly but was overwhelmed by the explosion. "It seems that I will have to retrieve you from the land of the dead instead."
A dozen Chitauri piled on the three Asir guards in the moment after the explosion. Tony knew he should have gone after the Tesseract and the Other but he ran to Loki's side instead. As he dropped knees he prayed that the jugular hadn't been compromised even if he couldn't see how. His gauntlets retracted. 'Head wounds always bleed a lot.' 'There's so much blood.' As he tried to stem the bleeding he closed his mind to how much of Loki's jaw was just gone. 'He's dead already, you have to- SHUT UP!'
Behind him Tony heard whoosh as the Other used the Tesseract to open a portal back to Thanos.
Loki's eyes were open, shock blocked the pain at least for the moment. 'It's gonna be okay,' Tony lied, hoping Loki would lose consciousness before his nerves caught up with the injury. Loki's skin was like ice. Tony's hands went numb from contact with his blood and it was getting colder every second. 'Burns like liquid nitrogen.' He ignored the cold, ignored the burn, as he tried to feel for the source of the blood. 'Please don't let it be the jugular.'
The fighting died down as Odin's forces managed to kill the last of the soldiers the Other had abandoned in his escape.
Tony withdrew his hands as Loki's blood froze. His blood red eyes fixed on Tony, full of terror and pain. Clumsily, his hands burning from frostbite, Tony smiled and brushed Loki's hair back out of his face before it was frozen there. "I think getting hair in your mouth right now could be a bad thing, might be there for a while," Tony said, trying to make his tone light. "But the bleeding's stopped, that's all good. You're going to be alright Elsa, just stay strong."
Afterwards, Tony found himself back in his empty workshop, his hands wrapped in warming clothes, being treated for the frostbite he suffered from contact with Loki's blood. Given Loki's condition Tony hadn't been surprised that Loptr was gone when he got back, he imagined Loki needed all his magic just to survive.
Several hours later a medical team transferred Loki back to Frigga's room. The lower half of his face appeared to have reformed from a bluish, translucent ice. Tony could see Loki's blood flowing beneath the ice, he could see darker shadows- Tony wasn't sure if it was Loki's jawbone regrowing or a difference in the ice that mimicked bone versus flesh, but it left the damaged area looking like an exposed skull. "I don't know how he's even alive," the woman who seemed to be in charge told Tony when he asked for a prognosis.
Odin followed the medical team in. "How are you still here?" Tony asked once they were alone.
"Thanos' attack cost him nearly a thousand men but he won," Odin said. "He has taken the Tesseract and the Infinity Gauntlet for himself. The Bifrost is destroyed. Thor is trapped on Midgard along with a company of Yggdrasil warriors. You may trust that Thor will continue the fight as long as he is able, none of the Nine Realms are defenseless this time, due to Loki's foresight, but with the Bifrost's destruction there will be no way for one Realm to reinforce another. Each of the Nine must stand or fall on it's own."
"How is Loki? And wouldn't he be better off if he wasn't supporting your existence?" Tony demanded.
"He is gravely injured but I believe he will survive and I am doing him no harm." Odin frowned at Tony, "Thanos has gained another Infinity Stone and the means to combine their powers. Loki is not ready to make use of his final resort. You will have to persuade him."
"You're not Loki." Tony powered up his armor.
"My son should have remembered that I see even from the depths of the sleep he bound me in."
"Odin," Tony accused. "But Loki would have noticed-"
"I still sleep," Odin stated. "Loki created this construct to be me and so it was vulnerable to my influence although it would go too far to claim that I was able to control it. It has been… educational to find myself constrained by my younger son's perception of me." Odin looked down at himself. "I lack the magic to create such a thing, but from within I was able to adjust it to draw the energy for its existence from myself rather than Loki. It saps the resources I need to free myself from the enchantment that binds me to sleep but doing allowed me some influence over events more quickly."
"You didn't have a problem with Loki's plan so you left him to do all the work while avoiding the necessity of admitting he's doing good, or that you spent most of his life fucking him over," Tony translated, bitter on Loki's behalf. "I found the spell on him, the one that makes Gungnir recognize him as an heir to your throne. I know he didn't cast it in spite of his yen for your throne, because it's old enough that he'd have been too busy teething at the time. Once, you wanted him to have all the privileges Thor had. What changed your mind? When did you decide 'his only birthright was to die'?"
Odin gave Tony a tired look. "When presented with new facts a king may change his mind but a king cannot simply take back his words. A king cannot say 'My son provoked me into speaking as an angry, disappointed parent when it was my duty to speak as king'."
"Loki made you lose your temper and so it's his fault you condemned him to thousands of years of isolation? But you'll let him think he's escaped since he's being useful and cleaning up your messes... and as long as he can't know that you're watching him do it, you don't even have to apologize," Tony sneered. "Hell with you. You'd stopped seeing Loki as your son long before he ever came to Earth. I can see-"
"You see Asgard in how it shaped Loptr," Odin interrupted calmly. "When I picked him up as an infant and he became Asir in my hands I believed it would be simple enough to forget where he came from but as he grew into himself it became increasingly difficult to ignore that he could not change his soul as easily as he changed his skin, that he did not belong here."
"There's nothing wrong with Loptr!" Tony snarled.
"I never said there was," Odin replied. "But I am king, Asgard's culture is under my protection as surely as her people. Loki could never represent the people of this realm as king."
"Except he is."
Odin bowed his head, "He is acting in the best interest of Asgard and the Nine Realms. Loki has instigated change, as I have long known he would. But the Realm Eternal was less brittle than I had supposed, watching as I have these last six years... " Odin trailed off. "When Loki was Loptr's age in truth I considered fostering him on Alfheim where he would fit in better but Frigga wouldn't see him sent so far from his home. I lacked the wisdom to see a path where I could fulfil my duties as king of Asgard and as Loki's father."
"He's my friend," Tony heard. "So was I."
"Today I must concern myself with Asgard and the whole of the Nine Realms over Loki once again."
Loki remembered his mother humming to herself as she worked at her loom, sometimes weaving tapestries that offered hints of the future, sometimes weaving protective spells into cloth. His, Thor and Odin's capes and underarmor were all the products of Frigga's loom and were stronger protection than plate mail they wore over them. When he or Thor had fallen ill as children Frigga had always set up a bed for them near the loom in her rooms where she could watch over them while she wove. No matter how awful he'd felt, the soft steady humming let him know he was safe and cared for, that he would be better soon.
Tony didn't hum while he worked, but he talked constant to himself. Sometimes he talked through the specs aloud, sometimes he rambled on about tangential thoughts that only connected in his unique brain. Somehow the cadence of his voice made Loki think of Frigga and being cared for and the pain was easier to bear.
When Tony noticed that Loki was conscious he set aside what he was working on. His hand was feverishly hot against Loki's skin and Loki realized that he must be in his Jotun form. "Don't try to change back," Tony said quickly, guessing what Loki had been thinking. "There's a chunk of ice between your heart and your brain. Right now your blood's half antifreeze, if you change odds are you'll give yourself a stroke." Memories of the fight rushed in and Loki started to reach up, but Tony caught his hands and pushed them down, "Don't think about it," he advised. "You healed before, when you got impaled. You'll heal from this too."
Loki let himself drift away again. He spent the next few days floating in and out of consciousness. But gradually Tony's technical babbling became less comforting background noise. As Loki began to make sense of what Tony was building he realized that Tony had lied when he said that it would be alright. It had always been his plan but somewhere along the way it had turned into a last resort and one he was loathed to use.
"You with me?" Tony asked somewhat later. Loki's gaze focused on his face. "Odin outlined the specs for a bomb," Tony said quietly. "He turned cagey when I asked about delivery methods but I've spent enough of my life making things go boom, I know a short range weapon when I see one."
Loki swallowed, there was an audible crack as the ice shifted and a wave of pain. Tony pushed a writing pad into his hands. "Don't try to talk."
Loki ignored the pad, "You're not wrong." He winced at the sound of his voice, low and rough, full of glaciers. 'The voice of a monster.'
"So what's your plan for getting this thing close enough to Thanos to do any good?" Tony asked.
Loki's gaze dropped to the center of Tony's chest, it only took a moment for him to catch on. "You absolute bastard!" Tony exclaimed. "How long have you been planning this?"
"After Thor took me back to Asgard I had nothing but time to think," Loki said. "I thought about our conversation, about Thanos knowing everything that happened while I held the scepter, about what the Hawk told me of your device's potential. Enough power to get the job done. An innate ability to counter the power of an Infinity stone, at least at point blank range. And he cannot meet you without bringing it into his presence. I was rather put out when I noticed that it was missing " Loki admitted. "Then I realized it could be replaced and there might be advantages to be had if the damage that had initially necessitated it were gone."
"All along, your end game was going to be sending me to Thanos with a bomb in my chest," Tony breathed. "You know I can't take your word that the war's that bad."
"To sit on Hlidskjalf would drive a mortal insane but I could attenuate the vision it grants, if you have that much trust in me," Loki offered. After a moment he added, "I plan to go with you. The war is going poorly, I will act as if I am foolish enough to believe that Thanos would take me back if I offer him something of sufficient worth."
"Me," Tony realized. "Why would Thanos care about me?"
"There is power in names, Merchant of Death," Loki replied. " You are an acolyte of the mistress he so ardently courts."
"It's just something the media liked to call me," Tony protested.
"When I fell from the Bifrost I had attempted genocide. It marked my soul, a blazing beacon that called out to Thanos from the void so strongly that he was able to reach in and pluck me out," Loki informed Tony. "I sense in a you a similar mark. Your species is so short-lived, to bear such a strong mark you must have started building implements of death painfully young."
Tony's face blanched. "Everyone knows I built a circuit board when I was four," he said distantly. "But Dad never told them what it did. I didn't design it, I was four! I snuck into his lab, I wanted to impress him, so I finished the work he had laying out. It was the arming circuit for a nuclear warhead. By the time I started college, and I started young, I was a senior member of SI's R&D team. People think Dad was upset that I studied robotics instead of nuclear science. All he cared about was that I got the degree and that my pH.D. thesis could be published without violating any confidentiality agreements."
Loki nodded, unsurprised. "While I was in contact with the scepter Thanos was aware of all that I saw and heard. He knows you bore in your chest a star that could turn aside the power of the Mind Gem."
"So you send it to him… Only we rig the Arc Reactor to power a bomb specially tailored for the purple-people-eater before hand," Tony realized. "And wait a second. Assuming you can back up everything you said, why are you going with me on a suicide mission?"
Loki shrugged, "I have enjoyed the last three years more than the three hundred that preceded them, I do not even wish to discuss the hell my life descend into following Thor's failed coronation. I have no interest in returning to that existence. And so I will go with you to deliver our bomb to Thanos. When I 'died' saving Thor both he and Father grieved for me, perhaps this will be enough to prove that I could have been something more if they had ever offered me the chance."
"Childish," Tony rebuked him.
Loki pouted in return.
"It totally is," Tony insisted. "How long have you been plotting how best to hurt your old man by dying?"
"I've always been pragmatic, I played the villain and they were smug and self-satisfied in their decision to forgot me but when I died… Beyond that,I am tired. Tired of being afraid, I want to die and know that I won't wake in Thanos' dungeons. I am beyond exhausted by my charade of being Odin," Loki sagged back against his pillow. "I thought I could prove I would have been a good king but all I see is evidence that Loki of Asgard was nothing but a lie, I could never belong here. At least I will die under my own name… Along side the only friend I have ever had."
Tony glanced away.
"It wasn't my original plan," Loki admitted. "But now I find it impossible to think of sending you to Thanos and not going with you myself."