Author's Note: Thank you all so much for your patience. My life just feels on hold, and sadly my writing went on hold too. :( For all of you who waited and waited and waited, I hope this chapter is worth the anticipation. And a million thanks, as always, to my betas, Majoline, Jade, and Amanda. :)

"You look well. And very much alive."

The last time Thor had seen his brother's face was watching his brutal and rather public murder on what the humans called the news. It was not him, of course - it never was - merely a magical double spun into existence for Loki's protection. No one was surprised Loki had survived the violence, though it pained Thor to note Agent Barton could scarcely contain his disappointment. Loki had made enemies across the realms - what was one more? But an enemy who could strike at him, and with such indiscriminate violence raised Thor's ire, his concern, and the protective urges that still surfaced, no matter how often his brother tried to harm him.

Loki smiled and shrugged, clad in Midgardian wear (finely tailored, of course), ever his same, shifting self.

"You of all people should know I'm rather difficult to be rid of. Among other secrets." Loki's lips curved in a familiar smirk, yet the steely glint of his green eyes was warning enough to keep silent regarding those other secrets. As if Thor would be so foolish to murmur even a hint of the truth to the young girl running up to her father, her attention at last diverted from a non-descript grey pebble she slipped into the cat-shaped purse slung at her shoulder.

Kara had grown in these months, in size and sagacity. Her glare was a darker, younger, feminine mirror of the look he'd grown so used to upon Loki's face.

"I'm glad you didn't bring your hammer," she said, crossing tiny arms across her chest. "I hate it."

"Beg pardon?' Thor was hardly expecting such open animosity from the girl. Then again, Loki had raised her the past few years. Perhaps he thought the disdain would wait.

"Now, Kara," Loki said, shaking his head. "It's polite to say hello to people before we insult them."

Kara's arms were still clenched tight. "There was a storm. You smashed my favorite tree ."

There were multitudes of trees in the city, Thor thought. Could she not pick another? He had the sense not to say this aloud, and instead he gave Kara a warm yet apologetic smile. "I am so sorry. I will try to bring down a tree you like less next time."

Thor hoped his words would at least mollify the girl. He had not expected her to fling herself forward and wrap herself around his knees. "There's a girl at my school. I don't like her. I don't like her a lot. Can you break her favorite tree? If you make it fall on her house, that would be even better!"

Thor raised a brow at his brother, whose lips had twitched upwards at Kara's outburst of affection and mayhem. "What is that humans say? Apples do not fall far from trees."

There was a festival of sorts, the rolling, grassy park strewn with brightly colored tents, crammed with rides, the air rich with the smell of roasted meat and fried fare. Kara tugged at Loki's hand often as she begged to try each of them.

Thor sympathized with her culinary enthusiasm - with a bittersweet pang he thought how Volstagg would adore the girl. He indulged her persistence, and his own hunger, and purchased two baskets of the deep fried oreos. Loki abstained, but Thor swore he saw his brother stifle an envious gaze.

Kara gave him a wide, toothy smile, her face flecked with powdered sugar. She was a stranger, in all respects, a child his brother had plucked away and taken for his own for reasons that he would take to this life and the next. Yet she was family, his brother's child. This was the day he had asked for, in an impulse he still did not understand.

Thor knew enough not to let the word 'brother' pass his lips - if it did, he would pass it off as an Asgardian greeting - lest Loki try and kill him where he stood, though that should certainly give the truth away. Yet there were no awkward, strained silences, for Kara seemed more than content to fill the space between he and Loki with breathless, winding stories.

"And then Daddy got up and sang the Octonauts song!" Thor had struggled to follow her rambling account of a camping trip with the young group of girls Loki supervised - an amusing and frightening thought - but this bit, this caught his interest. As it did Loki, who jerked out of a morose, sullen silence with a jerk.

"Kara," he said, waving his hands, "you don't have to tell this story."

"I think I would very much like to hear this tale," Thor said, unable to check a grin.

"Maria likes Octonauts and I like Octonauts, but she likes Kwazzy and I like the Captain, because he's a Captain, and she couldn't remember the Creature Report song, and I couldn't, so Daddy-"

"Look, Kara, there's a very large and hideous, I mean wonderful stuffed animal prize that would love to come and meet all your friends." Loki had turned an odd shade of pink that Thor suspected had nothing to do with the summer sun. "Why don't you ask Thor to swing that hammer and win it for you?"

"But you said I don't need any more stuffed animals!"

"Well, I changed my mind." Loki slipped a five-dollar bill from his wallet and thrust it into Thor's hand.

Thor would simply have to ask Tony Stark to find this show so he could hear the song for himself, and imagine his brother singing it to a group of small, be-smocked girls.

Exile on Midgard, it seemed, did strange things to the sons of Odin.

After one swing he delivered the misshapen, bright pink animal (he could not tell what sort it was) into Kara's outstretched and slightly sticky hands. He then gave a small card and handed it to the game operator. It would connect the gangly, pimply lad with a friendly and patient woman at Stark Enterprises, who would reimburse for the broken pile of wood and the bell that was once atop it - wherever in the Tri-State area it landed.

"Do you have fairs on Asgard? That's where my teacher says you're from. Maybe." Kara narrowed her eyes over her plate of French fries and a half-eaten hot dog. "If you're really from there."

Thor chewed quickly - his fifth hot dog to her first - and smiled. "I am. And we do have feasts, after events of great importance, or hunts-"

Brown eyes widened. "Hunts? Like hunting animals?"

Thor frowned. Were these sausages in buns not made of meat? "Yes…"

"That's so mean!"

Loki tut-tutted over his salad. "It is rather cruel. Asgard sounds like a positively barbarous place…"

Thor sighed. "We only hunt those animals which are a threat."

"I imagine there are a great deal of those," Loki said.

Kara peered between the two. "Do you know each other?" Her voice was young but suspecting. "You argue like Olivia's daddies."

Loki raised a brow as he sipped at his drink. "There's an interesting thought. But he's merely amusing to needle, like the rest of his merry costumed band."

"He's not even wearing his costume today, Daddy," Kara said, rolling her eyes. "And he's not in a band, he's in the Avengers." Kara's drink was apparently finished, as she pushed her cup at Loki. "I'm still thirsty. Can I have more lemonade?"

Loki sighed, his expression echoing one Thor remembered many times upon their mother's face. "You already had two."

"But I'm still thirsty!" It seemed Kara was as hard to sway as her adoptive father.

"Very well," Loki said, and though he rolled his eyes, the smile upon his face as he stood was patient, even kind. That kindness, however, became a smiling icy warning as Loki turned to him. "Can you manage to watch her without...incident?"

"You have my word," Thor replied, responding to Loki's implicit challenge with a righteous indignation.

"It's a good thing you don't have the intelligence for deception," Loki replied. "It makes you one of the few whose word I can trust."

"Your father is an...interesting man."

Kara raised a tiny eyebrow as she pulled her stuffed aberration close, wrapping her arms around what he presumed was its neck. "Good interesting or bad interesting?"

Thor chuckled. She truly had Loki's gift with words, for good or ill. "When it comes to your father, I believe he is interesting interesting."

That eyebrow remained raised. "Do you like my daddy?"

Thor could not check the sigh that escaped his lips. "That is a complicated question." He paused - there was no better chance than now to gauge how the girl fared under his brother's care. "Your...father seems to care for you very much. Do you care for him as well?"

A heavy weight settled into Thor's chest at how her eyes widened. He remembered when Loki was her age, a tumble of gangly limbs and wide eyes and trails of green-gold magic charging down the halls into his waiting arms.

"I love Daddy!" Kara nearly leapt out of her seat at the words. "He's funny and reads me stories and gives me hugs and we go everywhere, like parks and museums and tea-" Kara leaned forward. "Do you like tea?"

"I am more partial to the drink you call coffee."

"Ewww! Coffee is gross, and you can't have a coffee party." Her nose wrinkled in appropriate disgust.

"Thankfully there are parties for many other things." Thor leaned his head to one side. "Such as birthdays. Will you be having another celebration this year?"

"Yep! Are the Avengers coming? If they all can't come that's okay - just Captain America is okay. Maybe Iron Man too." Kara pulled at the stuffed animal's ear. "You can come too, if you want." Her indecision changed into something more akin to hope. "You gave me a present last year! The lightning tree! It's on my shelf, with all the pretty rocks."

Loki had not consigned his gift to the refuse? That was mayhap a sign his brother could still be reached. "I am glad you esteem it so highly. What should you like for this year?"

"I like everything!" Thor had no reason to doubt her words or her exuberance. "Especially dinosaurs and pretty rocks and stuffed animals - or stuffed dinosaurs! Or maybe a magic wand, like Harry Potter! Daddy and I are almost done with the first one."

Of course she would have Loki's penchant for the arcane arts. Thor was thankful he understood the reference, at least - Darcy had insisted Thor watch the movie, to become better acquainted with contemporary mythology. "The young orphan boy who does attends a school for wizards, and has an owl for a companion."

"You know Harry Potter?" Kara's eyes were even wider than when he had won her the oversized and strangely colored animal.

"I know of him. We do not personally know one another. Though he seems a fine fellow."

"He is, but Hermione is my favorite! She likes libraries, just like me and daddy! Daddy says books are the next best magic there is, after real magic."

Thor smiled, even as that weight sank further in his chest. The man she described sounded so much like his brother of old, the brother Thor saw no trace of when he looked in Loki's eyes. "You remind me of someone I once knew. He loved books, reading, and knowledge of all sorts-"

"Just like Hermione!"

"Very much so, though he had less regard for rules." Or for little else, save himself, and now this young girl. "But you are so very much like him."

Kara's smile faded, and she wrapped her hands tighter around her toy. "I'm sorry," she said, with a gentleness that he doubted Loki had taught her.

"Why ever should you be sorry?"

"Your eyes got sad," she said, with equal parts compassion and matter-of-factness. "Do I remind you of somebody who went far away?"

"Very far away." Thor caught sight of his brother and his familiar stride. "I don't know if he's ever coming back."

Kara clung to her wooden horse as it rose and fell on its circle around the carousel, but she still waved every time she saw Loki. And although his brother was distracting himself in pointed silence with his iPhone - a rather human vice if there ever was one - Thor noted Loki still waved back every time Kara raised her hand.

How long had it been, since he and his brother had merely sat together? The day of his coronation, likely, when everything began to go wrong. Even if these minutes upon a park bench were passed in uneasy silence, they were minutes that Loki was not trying to kill him.

If nothing else, life on Earth, as well as living with one such as Tony Stark, was teaching Thor the value of patience.

"She reminds me of you, in many ways." Thor did not turn to face Loki as he spoke, but the chill of his brother's unseen glare cut through the stifling summer air. "I mean her curiosity, her intelligence, even her playfulness."

Thor could nearly hear Loki's eyes rolling as he spoke. "Yes, because that is precisely the word I would use to describe myself. Playful."

"You were, once." A bittersweet smile came to Thor's lips, and he wondered if that was the only sort of smile he would ever have for his brother."Perhaps you have forgotten."

"There is a great deal about our childhood, brother," Loki said, hurling the word as if it was an insult, "I would gladly choose to forget. The Allfather preening over you, your friends worshipping you as they spat upon me, the whispers and glares over the little dark-haired prince." Loki's brittle laugh was icy. "That I was so foolish to think we were brothers, if only of the same mother. Sad that it was preferable to think her unfaithful than the Allfather a child-thief."

Thor sighed, even if he wished to shake Loki until he listened to reason. "What good does it do to relive these same arguments, again and again? We will go no farther than the horses that she rides."

"Than what shall we discuss? This miserable heat, where one really does find the best food trucks in the city, the woes of back to school shopping?" Loki finally set his electronic distraction down so he could give belittling Thor the due attention it apparently deserved.

"What of the danger you face? Surely you realize she is in danger as well?"

"No, I had not even considered that option!" Loki's smile was utterly mirthless. "What shall I do without Thor and his blinding skills of deduction?"

"Brother, I merely mean-"

"Does it make you feel superior, to swoop in, to try to save me yet again? It was foolish to utilize Doom before, I realize that, but if I could handle a force of angry Chitauri while a prisoner, I think I can manage one Midgardian who thinks himself a sorcerer." Loki snorted, as if to show he thought Doom petty, and beneath him, but Thor could still see the tension in his shoulders, in the subtle twitching at his temple. "I should not even concern myself with him, were it not for her."

Loki paused, hands clenched tight around the phone in his lap. "There is something I would speak to Stark about, regarding her, and you make a good a messenger as any. It regards the end of this trial year, which is coming to a close."

"What is that?" No one had truly expected Loki to hold to the arrangement for this long, much less to its end. Even the thread of hope Thor clung to felt more like a premonition of dread, waiting for his brother's next act of betrayal.

"I have a proposal, which I would like you to give to him." Loki took an envelope from his bag, and after a long pause, holding it aloft, slid it into Thor's hands. "There are things I must have, namely security for her, and continued discretion for myself. But there are a few...favors I am willing to grant, in exchange."

The thin envelope felt heavier than Mjolnir. "And how long will this new arrangement last, should they agree?"

Kara and her brightly painted steed came into sight, but it was Loki who waved first, a wan smile on his lips, and a gaze that reminded Thor of the frightened little brother who would seek shelter in his room when they were boys.

"As long as she has." Kara and her horse passed out of sight, and Loki's hand dropped. "Which you of all people should know is not very long at all."

No, it was not long. Time on Midgard passed with a swiftness that caught Thor off-guard, and that seemed to go faster with each cold Jane brushed off, each imperceptible wrinkle she found in the mirror. "And what then?" Before, Thor would have asked Loki to come home. Begged him, perhaps. Now he knew enough to keep his silence.

"The Bifrost will still be broken, the rest of your Avengers and the other oh-so-charming man in an eyepatch dead…" Loki laughed and slowly stood as the carousel began to slow. "I think I should have a world of possibilities."

"Brother-"

Loki clenched his jaw. "Will you ever stop calling me that?"

Thor watched as Kara nearly slid off the horse in her eagerness to be back with Loki. With her father, whom she clearly adored.

"When you no longer consider her your daughter." Thor rose slowly to his feet."That seems fair."

"I don't like it." Thor hardly expected Agent Barton to say otherwise. "Seriously, people, what part of trickster god do you not understand?"

"He seemed in all earnestness, though my brother has quite the talent for falsehood, I agree." Thor acknowledged Barton's reserve. The arrangement his brother proposed was, perhaps, more surprising than Stark's original bargain.

"Nat, does it check out?" Tony Stark leaned against the bar, yet he was anything but relaxed.

"Completely. The law firm who filed it - I'm pretty sure it's the two lawyers who were at the party - they're legit. If you guys sign it, Tony, it's legally binding. Whatever that means to him, anyway." Agent Romanoff may have been superior to his brother when it came to disambiguation, yet Thor was fairly certain of her truthfulness.

"He could have let me know before. A little common courtesy," Stark said, pinching between his eyes. "I guess having at least five doubles disintegrated in broad daylight makes him a little nervous."

"She's a ploy. I know you want to think he cares about her, but she's a human being. I thought we'd established he doesn't care about them. Or about anyone but himself." Barton looked between Thor and Stark, but it was Dr. Banner, to Thor's surprise, who responded.

"Everyone has exceptions. Even crazy demi-gods." Banner winced. "Or semi-crazy, anyway."

"I know you all have reason to question whatever I might say about Loki. Although he has harmed your world, harmed you individually," Thor said, nodding to Barton, "he has hurt me greatly as well. I do hope that my brother has made a change, and that it is genuine, but I know better than to have false hope. I know I have failed to see things about him." It pained Thor, still, to admit how blind he had been to Loki.

"But for all his lies, my brother's eyes have always been honest. They give his emotions away. And in his eyes I saw something my brother no longer had the capacity for: the ability to care for another. His feelings for her are genuine, as is, I imagine, his desire to protect her."

Barton snorted. "He cared for you, once. That didn't seem to do any good."

"Guys, I appreciate the colorful commentary, but Loki didn't ask for your signature." Tony sighed and pushed himself off the bar. He looked to the Captain, who'd thus far remained silent. The other signature his brother had requested.

"He wants us to take care of his little girl if anything happens to him," Rodgers said, tilting his head.

"Be her legal guardian," Romanoff interjected. "Little bit more of a big deal."

"Whatever it's called, we're being asked to help an innocent kid. And whether Loki holds up to his end of this deal or not, and helps take down Doom, or corral any Tesseract weapons left…" Rogers shook his head. "We're the good guys. I say we help."