AN: Oh my goodness, I am so, so sorry for the delay. The last month or so has been a recovery from a very, very bad run of a few months, and while things are finally looking up, they're still a bit uncertain, and my muse was in serious hiding during the time. She finally came back, and I only hope the next update doesn't take so very long.
A million thanks to my patient and speedy betas, Amanda, Jade, and Majoline! You three are wonderful, and thank you so much for the feedback on Clint, especially. And a million more thanks to all of you who have been patiently waiting, who have encouraged me to stick with this even on the worst of days.
Clint wondered how the rest of them could be so blind.
Tony and Thor were beyond lost causes, Thor because of blood and Tony from whatever idiotic comparison he'd drawn between Loki and himself. The man had red in his ledger, as Nat so often put it, they all did. What Tony had and Loki so glaringly lacked, however, was guilt. Tony might have been the "Merchant of Death," but at least he had the grace to feel shitty about his tech blowing up thousands of people in the Third World. If you pressed Loki, if you twisted him to admit even a shred of guilt, if you tore out the space where his heart would be, there'd only be regret he hadn't made the world burn.
Steve and Bruce, who knew where they stood. Clint had caught that moment last month, where the Hulk could have crushed Loki into rubble but didn't. He didn't know if it was Bruce's mercy or the Other Guy's, and he didn't care, he only knew it left a bitter taste. Steve would do whatever he thought was right. Considering how far Tony had dragged Steve down the rabbit hole of this ridiculous quest for redemption, Clint doubted Steve could even figure out what 'right' was anymore.
At least he still had Natasha, who'd seen the worst he'd done, hell, who'd felt it, heard it, tasted it as he struck her again and again, the blood bright of on her lips. He still dreamt, though not so often, he'd killed her - snapped her neck in his hands, drove an arrow through her pale throat. He'd wake, shaking and pale in their bed, and she knew enough not to ask. Her arms held him, but even the warmth of her skin and the reassuring thrum of her pulse couldn't touch his guilt, much less his rage at Loki and himself.
He'd been undone, she said. It had been a long couple of years, remaking himself, not at all helped by the fact the asshole escaped what the Asgardians considered high-security imprisonment and came back to Earth, hell-bent on taking the planet down with him when the Chitauri came to kill his sorry ass. And then Loki vanished, and while Clint hoped some Chitauri had gotten their rightful vengeance, he knew it was too much to hope for.
It would have been better - for him, for the Avengers, for the whole planet - if Odin had killed him. Or however you tried to kill a god, anyway. If he had, and the gagged, defiant Loki in Central Park was the last the Avengers and Earth saw of him, one girl, out of who knows how many children, would still have a parent who wasn't a genocidal maniac.
Phil was the first one who'd called him Hawkeye, and even if the eggheads like Selvig flung it at him like an insult, Phil had meant it with nothing but respect. Clint might be aloof, he might be a "cold-hearted bastard" as more than one person had called him, but until Loki came along, his long-distance approach meant he was never compromised. Until Loki came along, Phil was alive and New York had been mostly in one piece.
Nothing Loki did could bring back the people he'd killed and the city he'd almost destroyed. He thought Tony realized this, saw it as clearly as Clint. But now Tony was blinded by his dark reflection, this monster who helped kill a woman, took her child, and now wanted a second chance.
Clint had his sight taken away once, and he wouldn't lose it again. Even if he had to take on Tony, he wasn't going to let Loki take the world or one of its children. Ever.
***
Loki adored his daughter. Adoration might not be love, but it was safer by far.
No amount of adoration, however, could make him miss working seidr any less.
At least Kara now believed her beloved lie, that her father was a mutant with a penchant for heroism. Sometimes for her amusement, he spun a shield above his head while she tried to fling her toys through it, laughing maniacally as her stuffed animals flew back towards her. These were mere cantrips, the first spells he wove when he was scarcely older than she. There was an aching chasm between feeling connected to the magic that flowed through all the realms and acting upon it in any meaningful way.
That he still had the connection was a minor miracle. He had expected the All-Father to strip his magic from him the instant Thor had yanked him, gagged and bound, back to Asgard. He did not know what stayed Odin's hand - his mother's softness, no doubt, as Thor's had run out - but whatever caused the weakness, it was the only reason Loki was alive. The Chitauri had found him, as promised, and it was only his magic that spared him when what was left of their forces tore through Asgard's golden walls to find the tesseract and the traitor who failed to deliver it.
They had only found the latter, but Loki snatched at the slenderest of Yggdrasil's branches, the connection to the realm he knew and had come to despise, and if Asgard wouldn't burn in his own death throes, than in recompense for its defiance Midgard would.
Neither he nor the Chitauri, however, had their vengeance. The world he once scorned, if only for its dearness to Thor, he grudgingly accepted for the sake of one small girl.
He planned to continue tolerating this realm for a while longer yet. Nearly four months were gone, four months in which he had been not perhaps Stark's model of reformation, but silent enough, he hoped, to give the man an anxious serenity.
Kara could only see the man he feigned to be. Barton at least had the sense to see the monster. But Stark saw them both, and he wanted the man to be true so badly he imagined a means to salvage the monster. Stark looked at Loki and saw a fellow son whose desperation to prove himself led to questionable life decisions.
It would be so pathetically easy to twist this misguided empathy, along with his brother's delusional love, into a guard against S.H.I.E.L.D. and Asgard's prying eyes. Not a permanent measure, certainly, but enough to wrestle, wrangle, or deceive decades of stalemate from those that would see him thrown in a cell.
Four months of their little bargain were already gone, time flown through his fingers. Every day Kara's eyes were a little sharper, her words clearer. He was proud and pained, that she was growing wise and brighter; but why did she have to do so with such aching swiftness?
All he wanted was however many decades she had. Less than a century, a blink of an eye and a lifetime both. All he had here, realistically, were the next eight months, or however long he had until someone who was not Tony Stark let his family situation slip to Fury.
He wanted to say he had come up with the idea himself. But it was Kara, clumsily sounding out the cover of "Hawwy Potter and the Sorsher's Stony" in the children's section of the library branch just down the street, who had first put the spark in his brain. She was so smitten with Harry (who Loki, perhaps, empathized with as well), and his passage through brick walls to a magical world that welcomed him like no other realm could.
Well. That was certainly something he could do.
Could, unfortunately, turned out to be the operative word. He knew, perhaps best in all the Nine Realms, how to slip between the worlds. The roots of Yggdrasil ran deep, and it wasn't hard to find a tendril in a stately maple on the gentle slopes of Cedar Hill. Establishing that link, that pulsing, living tie, made him painfully aware to lead not one but two safely through its branches, to Alfheim and then to some world where S.H.I.E.L.D. or not even Asgard could find him, would take more power than that he possessed.
Perhaps it was simply easier in Asgard, at the heart of the great tree and the source of the Bifrost. But Midgard drew powerful, dangerous things to itself, such as the Tesseract and himself. Surely there must be something sufficiently strong he could claim for his own in the next few months?
It was easy enough to insinuate himself at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Human documents and credentials were so easy to forge, personas so easy to create, and thus Luke Gwydion, now with a first in Archeology from Cambridge, found his way into a version, in miniature, of his father's vault. And though some items had promise, they never had enough, and a few of these Loki fobbed off onto Doom. Let the human think he was still in Loki's graces and regard.
Loki and, by extension, his daughter's salvation was unassumingly small, nearly overlooked. A small stone carving, like something a poorer Asgardian child might have played with. The swirls and markings of the carving, and the other items, collected over the now-finished lifetime of an enthusiast for Scandinavian archaeology, had an unwelcome familiarity. Loki would have politely refused indexing the pieces, save for the thrum he felt as his fingers closed about the tiny figure. It pulsed of magic, the familiarity now welcome and right and by the Nine, this was worth his very close attention.
He looked down at the wolf cradled in his hand, his bright, feral smile a mirror of its own.