Author's Note: Here is a belated holiday gift! I am so sorry on the pace, yet again - break has been manic with the holidays and family, especially my two little nephews, and this is going up much later than I hoped. In my own list for the new year, I might need to add "timly fic updates" to the list! But thank you, everyone, for being patient, and here's the next installment. Hope you all have been having a very happy (or simply calm and peaceful) holiday season, and best wishes for a brighter new year to all my readers!

And very special wishes to my betas, as always, Amanda, Jade, and Majoline, for trimming the ribbon and bells on this chapter! Any lingering mistakes are solely mea culpa.

Maybe it was better not to see gods, even if they weren't exactly real. They lost a little of their grandeur when they were sitting in a plush chair, sipping from an oversized mug and reading a Christie's catalog.

"Don't you look cozy?" Bruce caught a whiff of something sweet and fragrant, not acrid and bitter. "I didn't exactly peg you as a tea man. I was thinking more like double shots of espresso."

"So very sorry to break the spell," Loki spat, his sarcasm and the flimsy paper as impenetrable as Steve's shield. "I rather prefer mischief and lies, not manic hyper-caffeination. Can I possibly help you?" Loki snapped the catalog shut, letting it fall to the table. "Or better yet, can you realize whatever possessed you to find me is misguided and dangerous, for all our sakes?"

Bruce knew what it was like to have Loki's magic buzzing around in his mind like a swarm of angry if uncoordinated mosquitos. And even if his mojo had more focus today, it only had a fraction of its power, compared to before, when he'd ripped the Other Guy out of him, unwanted and uncontrollable.

Bruce grinned and scratched at his ear, the buzz fading to an annoying but tolerable hum. "Only dangerous if you throw a tantrum and smash your nice little mug. Me, I just came to have a cup of tea and a little talk."

"And what if I oh-so politely decline?"

"Then I might have to ask not so politely."

Loki leaned forward, fingers curling almost predatorily around his mug. "Since you seem to insist on ruining what had otherwise been a pleasant morning, the least you can do is to keep the discomfort somewhat brief."

Bruce blinked owlishly, fingers fumbling at the edge of his glasses. "I think there was a 'please join me' somewhere in the middle of that." He caught the light, floral notes of Loki's tea. "First flush darjeeling. Nice to see you have a taste for megalomania and good tea. I'm more an Assam guy myself."

Loki raised an eyebrow. "A detail I'll have to recall if I ever have you over for a cup. So, which one of your associates put you up to this? Stark? Your little bird?"

"Tony just told me where you were. And if Clint wanted to tell you something, he'd do it himself. Probably with an arrow." Bruce chuckled and sank down into the plush, overstuffed chair across the table. "Let's just say I know sometimes you need the conversations you least want to have."

"Tell me, is this truly a private conversation?" The edges of Loki's lips curled above the brim of his mug. "Or can I expect to be accosted by the S.H.I.E.L. you've hidden away behind the bakery counter?"

"No one here but me." Bruce sipped calmly at his own mug, setting it down into the no man's land strewn with napkins, crosswords, and teaspoons. "Backup seemed a little...much."

"How very considerate of you."

Bruce pushed a sugar packet between his fingers as he lurched straight into the land-mine strewn conversation. "So, did you and Kara have a good Christmas? Or Yule, or the Hunt, or whatever you call it?"

Loki's gaze wavered between maliciousness and a thinly feigned boredom. "We had a marvelous Christmas. So marvelous, in fact, my heart grew three sizes."

"No, it didn't." Bruce's little grin almost hurt as he sipped at his mug

"Of course not." Real or not, the disinterest slipped away from Loki's glare. "I know you're presumably what passes for intelligent on this planet, but how, exactly, do you know about the Hunt?"

Bruce chuckled, rubbing at his chin. "I might have a Ph.D, but I'm not above Wikipedia. I, ah, actually had a more direct source."

"Thor." Trust Loki to turn his brother's name into a metaphorical four-letter word. "And with what sort of stories of our childhood did he regale you?"

"He wasn't really regaling." Bruce raised a single brow, running a surprisingly dry palm across his lips. "Regaling usually means you're happy. This might be none of my business-"

"Oh, it is none of your business-" Loki's hands gripped the table so tightly Bruce swore he could hear the wood crack.

"Leave breaking things to me, okay?" Bruce leaned across the table, aiming for a comforting sort of threatening, or a threatening sort of comfort. "You can talk with me over tea, or with the Other Guy. And you don't want to know what he likes to drink. But it was Christmas, or whatever it is you guys call it, and Thor was missing his family. A little sad he's the only one of us who really has one, and it's pretty much you."

Loki loosened his death grip on the table. "I don't know what it will take to make any of you understand, but we are not family."

Bruce felt a throbbing behind his eye that had nothing to do with the Other Guy and everything to do with divine family drama. "Yeah, Thor mentioned you two aren't exactly biologically related. But you realize coming from someone who adopted a little girl, what you just said makes less sense than you usually do. Which isn't much."

"Thor may have told you I was adopted." Loki's words stung like little barbs, lodging beneath his skin. "Did he also tell you I was stolen, changed, lied to my entire life, made to be a pawn in a political game that could not possibly be won?"

Bruce blinked. "Not so much, but you do tend to be...a little dramatic about the details."

Loki's laugh, brittle and bitter, drew more than a few stares. "Of all the people to learn the dark truths of the House of Odin, it's the fellow monster."

"Hey, I took out Harlem. You tried to take out the entire planet." Bruce tilted his head, the words tasting bitter and ashen as soon as he spoke them. "Moral arithmetics aside, how am I more qualified to be any kind of judge? I thought you and Tony had the unspoken bond."

"Stark may see what similarities he cares to see, but he could not possibly comprehend this." Loki pushed at his mug, for a moment his gaze focuses on the tea sloshing across the brim onto the table. "You look just like the rest of them, but beneath, truly, you are nothing but icy fury, wanting nothing but to avenge every wrong, every slight of the universe against you, even if doing so proves every horrific thing you heard about your kind since you were but a child."

Bruce slowly slid his glasses on, peering in confusion over the wire rim. "You know, I don't think that speech was about me at all. When you say kind, you mean less human looking aliens, yes?"

"Your kind called them - called us the frost giants." Bruce could hear the tension between pronouns, and for a moment he felt for Loki, because he knew that battle, that struggle between us and them, between self and other. "We had a fondness for taking over this pathetic realm, until the Allfather put a stop to that and waged war upon our world, and took me for a prize."

"If he took you for a prize, why lie to you? Why didn't he just parade you through the streets, or whatever it is you guys do up there?" Bruce was a little surprised they even took prisoners alive. Maybe they made exceptions for really small prisoners.

If there was mercy in Odin's actions, Loki didn't see it. "Because it was not enough for him to take an abandoned child, he had to treat me as if I was something to do with however he wished."

"Wait, were you abandoned or were you a prize?" Trying to get the truth out of Loki, Bruce imagined, was an exercise in futility, if not hazardous to the point of fatality. But that last admission had an edge of painful, accidental honesty. The brittle, cold fury in those blue eyes only confirmed it. "Because if it was the first one, as horrible as it is being lied to, it's a little better than being dead."

"I think at times I should have preferred death." Loki slunk back into the oversized chair, his gaze not on Bruce or the room or even the planet, but somewhere far, far away. "If he wanted to show mercy, he should have left things well enough alone."

It wasn't exactly a secret that Loki had some homicidal urges. But suicidal? That was new - or rather, old - a raw wound, festering around the edges. Empathy pulled heavy and unbidden, and Bruce understood for a fleeting moment why Tony took on this ludicrous little project.

"You know what, I get the death wish. I get hating part of yourself, loathing part of yourself so much that for a while you think ending it isn't such a bad idea. I'm sure some people think it would have been better if you'd shuffled off the mortal coil, immortal coil, whatever. But maybe your dad-" Bruce paused as Loki made a muffled, almost strangled noise at the word. "Maybe Odin didn't have a plan when he found you. Maybe he didn't steal you. Maybe he saw you and didn't see a future monster. Just something small and helpless that needed to be saved."

Loki had gone unnaturally, unnervingly quiet. "Even if that was true, which I highly doubt, it doesn't change what transpired. It changes nothing between Thor and myself."

Bruce chuckled softly, finishing his tea. "No. That's up to you and him. I don't know if Thor even knew your Dad's little secret. I don't know if you even know who you are now. You're not the little brother Thor remembers, but maybe you aren't the guy who tried to kill him. So you aren't quite what you seem. Who is? So you're a megalomaniac frost giant sometimes. I'm a big green ball of rage. That's the funny thing about redemption. You don't stop being who you are. But you learn a little control. You learn to find a better cause than what you had before."

"And that cause is making nice with Thor?" For all Bruce's effort, all he got was a arched eyebrow along with the expected sarcasm.

Bruce shrugged as he pushed himself from his chair. "I don't know what the cause is. You get to find that out on your own." And for all his purported intelligence, Loki could be a little slow on the uptake when it suited his purposes. "You free this afternoon?"

Both of Loki's brows went up at the question. "Because this talk was just so lovely I'd love to endure it again."

"It's not so much talking as knocking stuff down," Bruce said, keeping his voice non-chalant as he shrugged into his jacket. "There's a building that got hit in October when - whatever those things were - shot up the city. There's no money to bring it down, and they can't rebuild till the land's clear. Figure if there was a little tussle..."

"The building will come down and everyone will be filled with good cheer." Loki plucked the catalogue off the table, already paying more attention to it than to Bruce. "And what do I get out of this token gesture of goodwill?"

"The warm glow you sometimes get from destroying things?" And some actions to go along with the words he was sure Loki wouldn't even bother to remember. "Sometimes I like it even better than tea."

The next time Loki decided to turn over a new leaf, as the Midgardians so put it, Loki would do as the vapid magazines in offices and waiting rooms insisted. He would gain those last stubborn ten pounds only to lose them, organize his closets and his bank accounts, and take up meditation for busy megalomaniacs.

Or he would vow never again to listen to Bruce Banner.

The Hulk and the rest of his ilk had shown, as promised. Though he was loathe to give Banner any credit, the thought of inflicting violence at something hard and unyielding - as well as the building - did give Loki an odd sort of cheer. Loki had gotten a few oddly unsatisfactory blasts at Thor, and wondered idly if using him for knife practice would have given him some kind of solace instead. He felt the need to inflict some tangible damage, anything in recompense for the morning's conversation that left him feeling vaguely unsettled, if not infurlated, the entire afternoon.

The building had toppled as expected. It was a lovely art-deco building, one that reminded him faintly of his apartment, pale green marble, elegant curves and lines he was learning to grudgingly appreciate. Humans were so fickle, so mutable, and some of their fashions were downright atrocious. The 1970s, he was convinced, could only be explained by the drugs.

Stark would no doubt take this as a sign of some sort of redemption, that Loki gave more regard to the aesthetics of the city than to plans of conquest.

If Banner's plan had been a simple matter of bludgeoning the half-ruined building into a cloud of dust and a handful of debris, he should have felt marginally better. The latter half of the battle, however, the Hulk had seized on him as his personal rag doll. Again.

Lying pinned atop the rubble, barely able to breathe said dust into his lungs, he felt quite the opposite of all right.

"Hulk not crush puny god-" Loki tried to protest, to scream back, but it came out a strangled wheeze, and he struggled to take in another breath beneath the Hulk's massive hand.

"You...you rather are crushing me...you ignorant brute-" The beast only pressed harder down, and Loki felt the concrete beneath him crack. Or perhaps it was his spine. The world began to go black, silver dots dancing in front of his eyes, and then the pressure was gone, or at least less.

"Hulk not crush puny god! Puny god see?" The beast - Banner - whatever it was was hovered inches above Loki's face, gaze boring into his, and there was a glimmer there Loki honestly did not expect.

"For the last time, creature, I am not a puny god!" And then the weight was back, and the stars and the blackness, and Loki was dimly aware he was nodding as air and light and searing pain all rushed back. "Puny god sees! Puny god sees," he croaked, and the Hulk grinned, a terrifying sight, rocking back on his heels.

"Hulk smart," he said, tapping at the side of his overgrown green head, as Loki sat up, an arm wrapping around his ribs, which felt as if they'd been set afire.

"The next time you have a point to make," Loki wheezed, looking for a piece of rubble as a handhold. "Please make it over the cup of tea."

"This way more fun," Hulk said. "Little guy think you not listen before."

"Oh, I will pay more attention in the future," Loki said, so winded he almost sounded earnest instead of deeply sardonic. Though he didn't want to admit Banner had a point. He may share his body with this monosyllabic brute, but somehow he controlled it. The monster, at least for now, did not control him.

"If you don't, Hulk make puny god listen," the beast said, and as he drew back his fist, Loki gathered up his energy and winked out of existence before the said reminder sent him flying home instead.

Loki let his head slump against the door, his poor ribs still knitting themselves together. He was too exhausted to even care about thinking of a plausible excuse. The keys shook in his hands, fumbled in the lock, and he hoped Sarah or, the Norns forbid, her mother, didn't think he was breaking into his own apartment. An overly energetic dust bunny could knock him over in his current state.

"Hey, Mr. G." Sarah turned her head, ever so slightly, from where she sat hunched over on the couch. The apartment was eerily calm: no cheery music, no cartoons, only a muffled sort of thumping coming from Kara's room. A single brow went up and she shook her head at seeing her employer, once again, looking as if he'd gone ten rounds with a truck.

"Dare I even ask what in the world happened?" The entryway was pristine, no signs of damage or chaos or obvious reasons for exiling Kara to her room that he could see.

"I'd ask you the same thing, but you don't ever tell me." Sarah pushed herself to her feet and sighed, crossing her arms across her chest. "I hate to say it, but Kara's starting to be a bit of a brat."

"She is strong-willed, I admit, but I hardly think that leads her down the path towards brat-dom." Loki found himself checking his words as Sarah, who otherwise adored his daughter, only looked at him in stony silence.

"We had a snack and she knocked her juice over-"

"Perhaps it fell?" Sarah's arms only tightened across her sweater, and Loki dimly recalled her mother had likely taught her martial arts as well.

"She knocked it over, and I asked her to clean it up, and do you know what she told me?" Sarah raised her voice to Kara's girlish pitch. "Only stupid, poor people clean. I think you should do it."

"I'm not gonna clean it! I'm not stupid!" Kara's voice, however muffled by the door, was only too audible. "I don't have to do stuff if I don't like it!" In her tone Loki heard Thor's echoes, his youthful bragging and boasting, his casual disdain for the commoners of Asgard that Loki had become rather fond of, if only to be contrary. There was a line between knowing you were superior and acting like an utter prat, and his daughter had just stuck a toe across it.

"I...am sorry you had to hear that," Loki said, the apology sliding awkwardly but genuinely off his tongue. "I'd not realized she'd become so insufferable."

"She's not horrible, but she's gonna be soon. But you're her dad, you couldn't see it if you wanted to."

"I suppose I do have somewhat of a blind spot where she's concerned." Loki tried his best to look contrite, or whatever passed for it.

"You could drive a semi through that blind spot," Sarah said as Loki fished in his wallet for her customary fifty, thought better of it, and doubled her pay. "I know you won't take her out of that school, but you should have her do something a little more local."

"Such as?" Loki knew a remedy was needed, sorely, but he didn't realize being a parent only came with increasing social entanglements.

"Put her in Girl Scouts. It's made Miri way less of a brat." Miri was Sarah's youngest sister, just a little older than Kara. Loki faintly recalled she had been somewhat of an unholy terror when they first moved in. The fact the little pigtailed hellion hadn't come screaming down his hall at six a.m. was something in this group's favor.

"Girls as young as Kara scout? I imagine the discipline would be a benefit to anyone, but don't you think that's somewhat drastic?" The look of dumbstruck confusion on Sarah's face made Loki wonder, not for the first time, how badly the All-Tongue failed to pick up on nuance. Or the contemporary and far different usage of words.

"Not army scouting, girl scouting." Sarah shook her head. "With arts and crafts and singing and badges."

"I hate badges! And crafts are stupid!" Kara gave the door a kick for good measure, rattling the painstakingly glitterred sign reading "Kara's Room" that Loki certainly didn't make.

"They go on trips, do service projects, and basically are normal girls," Sarah said, ignoring Kara's outburst, which was probably for the best. "And the best part? You always get all the cookies you want."

There was a long pause from behind the closed door. "They have cookies?" Kara's voice was much quieter, and far more amiable. Loki remembered the bright boxes they'd bought the spring before, far too many of them, and the near fit he'd had when he couldn't manage to find a single box of Tagalongs in the city.

It was all the encouragement Loki needed.

"Where do we sign up?"