18. Doomsday

. . .

Sam Koenig sat on the steps that led down to the reflecting pool at the base of the Capitol Columns. In his pocket was a small black box, an experimental device that so far was capable of blocking out communication on all artificial channels in a small zone with a series of wave pulses. Enough to disrupt, not enough to toast electronics. Naturally, the drawback that kept it in the lab was that it would conk out everything the deployer could use to call for help, too.

He hummed to himself as someone's teenage son grumbled by just above him, fussing angrily with his iPhone and begging to be able to go back to the car. His dad wasn't sympathetic. You got like three more hours of park to explore, kiddo, thought Koenig. And that's if your folks haul and maybe skip the Gotelli Collection. Which you shouldn't. They're pretty cool. He kept humming, spotting Agent May crossing the space on the other side of the pool. Like a true professional, she didn't spare him a glance. Nor did she look at the woman approaching the Corinthian-style columns from the west, from where the herb gardens filled the fresh summery air with the scent of juniper.

Koenig could see her reflection in the still water, a tall, athletic woman who moved with the honed grace of a long-serving politician. The ones that knew many in the world still might look at her face before hearing what she said, and made of that what advantage she could. Her black hair was tied tight into a neat ponytail that went down the center of her back, and her eyes were so dark a blue in the tanned face that they might have been nearly violet. A striking woman, von Bardas. Something about her reminded Koenig of Romanoff – if need be, she could become a predator in an instant. One of his teeth gnawed at the inside corner of his mouth. This could go bad, fast.

Well, that's what the other contingencies were for. He made himself relax, and gave an incoming duck a grin when it squawked across the pool.

Still across the water, May stuffed her hands in the pockets of her leather jacket and lifted her head to watch rare trees flutter in the distance. This was going to be where the showdown was. Corner her, cage her, keep her from screaming 'wolf' for all to hear, with Latverian fire to follow.

. . .

There was the squat man on the steps, and the woman across the pond, and she'd noted two others beside at least, as she came down the flowered paths into the depths of the Arboretum grounds. A soft bleat of warning from the pocket of her thin coat told Lucia that her connection to Latveria's transmission grid was cut, and that gave her a clue – these were not Agger's men. They were far more clever than that. Well, perhaps the journey to her endgame wouldn't be so dull and simple after all. She lifted her head to regard the woman as she approached the columns as casual as any other visitor. "I was led to believe you were nothing more than paper tigers, a relic of a world gone by. The fading shadow of what you once were. But then, the man that told me this has proven to be a greedy and bestial fool."

There wasn't so much as a flicker of surprise on the woman's face as she turned towards von Bardas, the gleaming eyes studying her. A tiger to a tiger indeed – and a real one, too. "Sometimes deception's the better part of valor."

Lucia beamed at her, delighted. "A student of the arts. I have seldom been so delighted to be wrong."

The other woman looked unmoved by her approval. Her hands never left the pockets of her black jacket. Not a gun, this woman was not so blatant as that. A stunner, at best. Considering the location, she came with her voice alone, most likely. "Yeah, it's a real pleasure. Call Latveria off of SHIELD."

She made a moue of disappointment. "And now we're straight to the obvious. Well, coleg tigru, I'm genuinely sorry. I can't do that. Your sacrifice is what I need. For a better world." She flicked a hand towards the man on the steps. "I assume by your competence that we are not being overheard by the greater public?"

"You'd know some of that better than I. But we've done what we can."

Lucia nodded, still smiling pleasantly. She let it falter. "I will reason with you, and then you will walk away from me. I am going to let you die, all of you be consumed and light a storm of chaos, because it is the only way to save what remains from what might come if I do not."

"And what's coming?"

Von Bardas leaned forward, her hand outstretched to the slim Asian woman. Her voice was a plea, and inside the cold, merciless calculation that got her this far was a moment of true earnestness. "Doom."

. . .

The city's rustic old-world charms kept the people feeling warm and safe, content under the eye of their unseen king, but as the cat traveled further up the terrain past warehouses and their finely made facades, another truth became visible. There were things rumbling deep in the earth under the dwindling avenues, the constant vibration of some unknown machinery tickling the pads of the huge black feet and keeping his whiskers back in distrust. The earth did not welcome what was buried within it, but he could not take the time to go investigate. There must be the castle and only the castle. The message, and then he must flee back to his own world and his real shape. The rest must be seen some other way, some other time.

The great castle so adored by the people in the city below might have been abandoned, but for the occasional wisp of smoke that came from tall parapets. He scampered through a creaking low door that led to what must have once been stables, wrinkling his short but ferociously adept nose at the smell of must and old, moldy straw. His jaw hung, tasting and categorizing the air and finding it unsettling. Rocky steps led through old unused kitchens still attached to a newer facility, and there he saw a few people muttering quietly to each other.

Meats, whispered the cat-self, not for a moment forgetting the lure that drew it here.

First the game. Then meat. The soul-self gave no hint that it was lying, Loki wanting only to complete this duty and be gone. Some distant warning was intruding at the edge of his senses, something other than just the draining exertion of being other.

The cat shook his head, wanting to rebel. But the alien force that was his real nature held firm and he skulked away down darker halls lined with towering suits of armor. He flickered a glance up at them, most of these suits looking much like the other, and a few some variation on a theme. All held bodies of some silvery alloy that gleamed in the moody torchlight that lit the castle halls, and all of them were robed with the same heavy green fabric. He didn't like that shade, that off-key tone of a color his soul-self considered part of his own emblem. Too harsh and bright a green, no nature to it, no subtlety. There was a sickliness to it, and the huge tomcat began to unhappily lower his body closer to the floor as he continued to look for stairways up.

. . .

"Doom. I'm not impressed yet. We've heard that before."

"Not like this, Miss... may I have your name? Only your name, while we talk." Lucia's hand was still outstretched. The game was in play, and now trust was the only coin to be paid. She must sell his for hers.

"May."

Lucia repeated the name. "You must know so little of Latveria. Victor made sure of that." She glanced down the steps before shrugging. She walked away from 'May,' no doubt troubling her. But all she did was take a seat next to the squat man and his affable face. He tried to not look surprised at this twist in their plan. "Who was the woman that broke our border a few years ago? She was astounding; the closest anyone's ever been to our heart. She must have at least seen the spires of his castle."

"I'm not giving you that."

"Fair enough." von Bardas shrugged. "But I will give you this. My family founded that country. We built it, on our blood and bones, because the people needed us to. My father lived his entire life in service, and we did not call ourselves kings. I am no princess. We did not need the old, half-ruined castle that was but some landmark when we forged our first borders. We lived among the people, the Rromani refugees that you people still hate to this day, the Urdu, the weary Hungarians, the Serbs tired of conflict. We made of ourself an oasis. One place of peace. And then he rose from that oasis, and wears what we could have been as his mask."

She laughed a little. "A brilliant, diseased mind, Miss May. Oh, my father told me he was such a wise child. A curious one. And then the books... the secrets... and one night where everything fell apart. My father died." She looked up at the SHIELD agent. "And he had the temerity, the arrogance to come to me and say serve me, and make my new world with me, and the sacrifices will not be in vain." She snorted. "Sacrifices. The rotten core of Latveria under that good earth is his fault. My father died because the new king knew nothing of limits. He died screaming, in fire, and the king tells me it was a mistake."

"You serve him anyway."

Lucia gave her a bitter smile. "You do not turn away from the king. But in that fire I earned his trust. And now I'll use it to tear him down, to save what remains of the world." She shook her head, her tanned, fine hands clasped on her knees. "What remains. Better than the alternative. I promise you."

Above her, she could see the agent looking away across the water. Her face was solid stone. For a moment, Lucia's resolve faltered. She'd been wrong about their strength. Could she possibly have been wrong about the odds?

She steeled herself, pushing that thought away. "I do not do this lightly, though since you are here I will apologize for the cruelness of it. I will remember you."

"Yeah, we're going to make sure of that." The agent looked down at her. "At what point do you honestly think we're going to let you walk out of this park and make your revolutionary fantasy happen?"

Very well. Reason would not pay the price, nor trust.

There was always another currency.

"This point," said von Bardas, and she rose again to her feet.

. . .

The cat crept slowly into the hall that flickered with a fire's light. The hearth cast its warmth throughout the surprisingly small and cozy space, the great tapestries and their woven murals fluttering against the wind that came from the tall, open windows set inside heavy grey stones. And still, there was no noise nor life for the cat to find.

The throne room, long and austere, had been empty. So he continued to seek some other space where a king might contemplate his deeds and his future, and the smells of a still-warm path led him here. In the center of the room was a wide, low desk of carved hard wood, no doubt the dark-stained trunks of some evergreen breed within Latveria's own ecology. Stools set with rich cushions were scattered around it, and as the cat approached, he used one of these to bound to the table's surface to get a better, more central view of the room.

There was nothing, no track here that he could smell. He widened his eyes to pick out details in the flickering shadows of the room. Not far from the table was a single massive wooden chair, almost another throne. In it was another of those strange armored statues, this one seated with legs arrogantly spread under its long green tunic, as if to mimic some eternally watching royal. With a vague, instinctive fear, the feline's fur prickled along his back as he studied the metal figure. It did not move. It only sat, regarding the table and the scattered documents along it.

It was the best Loki was going to get. He could feel time drawing short, and his own caution warned him, reminded him that the longer he stayed as an animal, the sooner that siren's easy dream would fill his mind to bursting. The cat sat down in the table's center, his full and twitching tail scattering a few papers by casual accident. He gave another distrusting look at the strange metal statue, and then licked at his chest until his fang could snare the black faux-leather collar.

With a gnaw and a snap of his tongue across his lips as he tugged apart the relatively weak magnetic connection, he managed to clatter his cargo to the table, the USB stick making a small plastic clink! noise as it connected with the wood.

The prickling sensation came back, harder and more ferocious. The cat's fur began to rise sharp along the spine, ears going flatly back as the green eyes began to widen to almost full blackness. The huge triangular head swiveled to search the room, trying to find what threatened him, but there was only the statue.

The statue!

There were eyes in it now, gleaming, human eyes flickering inside the steel mask that was its only face. And from the depths of that mask came the low, almost musically basso voice. "It has been written by playwrights and clergymen that 'a cat might look at a king.' That even, assessing stare of the little beasts, and they may not be afraid of that larger shape that looms, even if that shape could but speak a single word and seal its doom."

The statue rose flowed to its feet, the green tunic coiling down to reveal itself as a grotesquely regal robe. For all its size and powerful presence, it moved silently, towering over the cat as he hunched down hard against the table, every tuft of fur now aloft and almost electrical in frozen, startled terror at the hulking thing that approached. The implacable voice rumbled again from within it, deep with conviction. "But you are not some mere cat."

The cat uttered a low, horrified moan, rattling it down within his throat. Inside his mind, chaos whirled as Loki tried to remind himself that this was only temporary, that he didn't need to be afraid, all he had to do was maintain control and get out. That it was a bluff, that there were few on this world that could know magic. But his animal-self, startled by the sudden turn and the focused attention, felt only that sincere promise of danger and fought against him outright. He was caught in the primal, open terror of a beast that found something well far up the food chain from its own safe niche.

He was slipping. As hard as he drove his mental fingers into his own changed flesh, the tips of them still slid against himself. The cat nearly forgot him, licking white spittle from his lips and continued to growl and moan at the shape as it approached. "Or are you? We smell your fear, sorcerer. If you lose against this, we will keep you. Study you, as your fragile life dwindles, and then we will open your body to read the words written in it." The mask drew closer and inside the tumbling animal-mind Loki felt like he could see not the cat but himself, drawn and fading and almost lost, somehow reflected in the flat surface of a steel cheek. Another sensation followed it – something prickling in the ether known by magicians, a stench like ozone and electricity and ice. "We will take your secrets and create something new."

The cat hissed and swung out on instinct, the sharp claw thudding against the collar. Inside, the panic threatened to consume him entirely. The silver thread between his two selves quivered, stretched taut to almost its final extent by the aura of magic that tickled along the fringes of the man inside the mask. No! This one knows! He sees me!

Witchcraft and the dark rumors of sacrifice and demons in the heart of sealed Latveria. He suddenly, utterly believed Natasha's stolen legends, and all he could smell from the man inside the steel beast was a fiery darkness. His heart threatened to burst itself apart.

"Do you think Victor von Doom cares for your message?" A metal gauntlet came down atop the USB. Inside the maelstrom, Loki braced himself for the possibility that the next sound he would hear would be some tiny, plasticky crunch. That would end him, the final failure. He clasped hard onto the possibility that the monstrous king might not, tied a rope to that ledge of chance to try and rescue himself.

The figure – this Doom incarnate – laughed from within the green hood that surrounded his mask, low and rattling. He lifted his hand to regard the offering now nestled in his palm. "Perhaps we do, after all. You gave so much to bring it." The gleaming eyes fixed on him again. "Will you give a little more? Stay. As our guest. We will take only everything from you, as a fine offering to Doom's further greatness."

The cat moaned one more time and flung himself away from the table, the last chance for his mind and soul now resting in a wild flee away from this place. He hit the clean stone with a scrabble of scraping claws, looking for purchase and nearly hooking himself along a scrap of thick rug. He righted himself and kept going, out of the room and looking for the way to freedom.

"Run all you like, sorcerer," said Victor von Doom, looking down again at the device in his palm. The unseen smile behind the mask entered his rumbling voice. "Run, and be chased. If you can make it to the border, then you might be free. This is our mercy, in return for your gift. Run."

Beyond his sanctum, Doom's metal servants came to life with a rattling clank throughout the winding halls, ready to hunt the fleeing animal as it rushed between their feet.