I do not own any of the source material for this story. Reviews and constructive criticism are greatly appreciated.

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"Your eyes can deceive you. Be mindful of your feelings. Girls are fun but dangerous. Lando has extra cards up his sleeve."

- Ben Skywalker

"This is definitely the type of work a monkey could easily do," Leopold Fitz complained as he scanned the latest chunk of battle debris for extraterrestrial spectrographic signatures.

From somewhere above, Grant Ward teased "You're our little monkey." The fondness in his voice took the sting out of his words, but Fitz shot him a dirty look regardless. Ward smirked.

Before Fitz could answer with a jibe of his own—something about Ward being the team's big, dumb gorilla— the sound of a cell phone ringing distracted him. The two men turned to look at their coworker, Jemma Simmons, who was fishing the ringing device out of her pocket. Her porcelain doll's face tightened when she read the caller ID, and she muted the call.

She caught Fitz's disapproving expression. "Don't give me that look. I'll talk to them when I talk to them," she said, a bit defensively.

"Talk to who?" Ward asked, frowning.

Jemma hesitated, then said "Mum and Dad. They want explanations and answers for…well, all this." She gestured vaguely at their surroundings. The half-destroyed section of university building had been converted into a field lab, with opaque curtains of plastic substituting for walls. Metal work tables had been set up in a semblance of the orderly patterns of a classroom, and rubble from the battle with the alien invaders was scattered every which way, like Legos from a masterpiece knocked over by a child throwing a tantrum.

As the only member of their team with two living parents, who also happened to be British citizens living in Devon, England, Jemma had the strongest connection to the world outside of SHIELD. Usually, that meant little, since SHIELD was primarily based in the United States, but aliens had no reason to care about national borders. It was pure luck that the Bus happened to be en route to London when the battle broke out. Jemma's parents had known she was coming; simple logic dictated that she would have some idea of what had happened.

"But I don't have any answers," she continued. "And, more importantly, I haven't talked to them since I was ill. And if they knew that, they'd be even more terrified. So, you know…," Her phone rang again. She silenced it once more. "…Why waste any of our time, really?"

Ward and Fitz both stared at her. Her answering smile was so unconvincing, a drunk monkey could have seen through it. When she resumed combing through the debris, Ward shrugged and followed suit, leaving Fitz little choice but to do the same.

Most of the debris was ordinary: pieces of the university buildings, chunks of burned mud. The Asgardians had collected their dead and the remnants of the one ship they'd lost, but they'd left everything else untouched. The impossible telekinetic who'd reportedly destroyed several of the alien spacecraft had done them all a favor by using his powers to gather most of the debris from the Thames into one spot, where Dr. Selvig and Dr. Foster could teleport it off-world. The same technology had also been used at the crash sites of the rest of the alien ships. Unfortunately, that meant that most of the pieces left behind were too small to identify from a distance, forcing the cleanup team to gather everything and comb through it all by hand.

Why were they the cleanup team, anyway? Fitz was fairly certain most countries, including the UK, had their own version of Damage Control to handle stuff like this. Perhaps Coulson wanted to feel closer to the Avengers. He never did get his trading cards signed.

From somewhere nearby, Fitz heard footsteps accompanied by the sound of Skye asking Coulson about the Asgardians and his patient answers. "That's too crazy," Skye was saying. "Do you think other deities are aliens, too? Vishnu for sure."

"You know, it'd be nice if, for once, Thor and his people sent down the God of cleaning up after yourself," Coulson said with what was, for him, obvious exasperation. The man could make anything sound banal. "They probably have a magic broom for this kind of thing."

"I just wish they'd left their alien ships behind," Skye mused as Coulson tossed something into the bin she was carrying with both arms.

"So we can clean that up, too?" Melinda May sniped from the other side of the room. She was hunched over a debris pile on one of the tables, which she'd been poring over so quietly that Fitz had nearly forgotten she was there.

Skye was unfazed. "So we could go inside, get a peek under the hood, maybe take one for a spin," she said excitedly. "Come on, you're telling me piloting an alien ship isn't on your bucket list?"

May looked up, suddenly intrigued.

Coulson seemed to grow surlier, though it was always hard to tell with his endless reserves of equanimity. "I can't think of a single time when anything alien in human hands ended well," he insisted, giving Skye a pointed look.

Fitz, Jemma, and Ward had all paused their own tasks to observe the byplay. It had been a while since Coulson had been on the backfoot in the never-ending game of banter Skye had the team playing between missions.

"Wouldn't mind getting my human hands on Thor," she mused, a vacant smile blooming on her face. "He's so dreamy."

Coulson wasn't giving up yet. "Sure, he's handsome, but—" he started when May cut him off.

"No, he's dreamy," she said with finality.

Coulson looked at her like she'd stabbed him in the back.

Et tu, Melinda? Fitz could admit, in the privacy of his own mind, that he wasn't in Thor's league when it came to looks, but he didn't mind. If May of all people would openly call him dreamy, what chance did the rest of them have?

Sky shot Coulson a triumphant smirk.

The work resumed, and the next piece of black debris Fitz scanned triggered a sequence of beeps from his tablet. "Definitely not from here," he muttered. "Another piece of the ship."

Quick as a flash, Ward swooped down like an eagle from on high to snatch the misshapen junk from Fitz with a gloved hand.

"What are you doing?" Fitz demanded.

Ward calmly sprayed the piece with an identification aerosol, then placed it inside a sensitive cargo case. "Out of sight, out of mind," he explained.

Out of the corner of his eye, Fitz saw Jemma nod in approval.

"That's why we're here," Ward continued. "To keep this stuff under control."

"Because we're so good at that," Skye said sarcastically. Everyone looked at her, and she flushed. "What? You know it's true. The Avengers are the ones who did all the hard work. We're just their janitors. Who they don't even know about."

"The Avengers, and an Asgardian war fleet," May noted. "Plus a telekinetic." The last word seemed to cost her a great deal. Fitz shared the sentiment.

After the dramatic first contact with Thor, SHIELD had dismissed his incredible powers as the product of advanced technology in his hammer. Later, Loki's illusions were written off as holographic nanotech, the properties of his mind-altering scepter attributed to its relationship with the Tesseract. Even the wormholes that had defined the attack on London were rooted in physics that at least a few scientists understood.

Telekinesis was not so easy to accept. Most SHIELD scientists and agents had refused to believe it was possible, which was easy when every instance of it they'd found had turned out to be a hoax or a case of misidentification. Unfortunately for everyone's sanity, the universe didn't care what people thought was possible. It was filled with wonders and horrors and impossibilities. What humanity had learned in the last few years only proved how much they didn't know.

"Do you think we're about to get a new Avenger?" Jemma wondered.

Coulson grew thoughtful as he scanned his next hunk of junk. "I don't know. The reports we got indicate he's at least on the same level as Thor and the Hulk, and he knows what he's doing in a fight. Never hurts to have a guy like that in our corner, but we know next to nothing about who he is as a person, or whether he's trustworthy."

"Hard to add a guy to a team if he's a bigger mystery than Thor," Ward agreed.

"Well, if AC can do it, I'm sure the Avengers can," Skye said, giving Ward a pointed grin. He scowled at her.

Fitz only partially succeeded in smothering a grin.

The Asgardian shipyards were as unique as Asgard itself. Instead of a more conventional orbiting space station, the Aesir had constructed a massive subterranean complex directly beneath the landlocked districts of their capital city, with docking bays that opened out on the artificial planetoid's mountainous underbelly. Accessed by turbolifts of varying size, the shipyard complex seemed to cover an area as large as the city itself, with numerous tiered levels featuring cavernous drydocks and maintenance hangars, onsite smelting, refinery, and parts-manufacturing facilities, and other ship-building necessities.

The dozen largest caverns were dedicated to constructing and repairing Asgard's largest warships, each a kilometer long. The ship left by the last Jedi to stumble into the Yggdrasil was not nearly as large, and so it had been moved into one of the smaller, mid-level maintenance hangars. Having skimmed through a debriefing packet he'd received from the servant who'd brought him his breakfast that morning, Aemon knew its general history, and he found it fascinating.

Apparently, the ship was originally a weapon of the enemy, part of the Sith Empire's X-70 Phantom line—highly advanced, long range stealth transports designed for elite Imperial Intelligence operatives—though the Aesir hadn't bothered to identify the exact model. One of the few vessels of its type to survive the collapse of the Empire, it had been kept in the Galactic Museum on Coruscant until some time during the early decades of the New Sith Wars, when it had been requisitioned and retrofitted by the Jedi Order for use as an intelligence gathering vessel. It had served in that capacity for over a century until it was stolen by smugglers. The X-70 had then changed hands and names several times until two Jedi recovered it another hundred years after the original theft.

Unfortunately, during the voyage back to Coruscant, they were ambushed by the Sith. Damage to the navicomputer and engines had caused the ship to essentially bounce across hyperspace until it was swallowed up by one of the hyperspace anomalies that made it so difficult to leave the galaxy. Instead of being wrenched back into realspace or destroyed, like most vessels that hit those anomalies, the X-70 had been slingshotted across the void between galaxies. It had also, bizarrely but not uniquely, been displaced in time. The ship emerged in Yggdrasil space in 1219 BBY, centuries after its initial disappearance and centuries before the fateful Seventh Battle of Ruusan, yet its pilots had only experienced a week in hyperspace.

It was that pair of Jedi who had chosen to use their talents to fight injustice in the Nine Realms and nearby space rather than return home. They had not founded a lineage of Force-users to succeed them, and so following their deaths the X-70 had been left to languish in a stasis field in the Aesir royal museum. Now, the ship awaited its new master, as well as another round of modernization, in the bowels of Asgard.

So it was that Aemon found himself being led through the well-lit maze of tunnels and atriums toward its hangar by Thor, who was happy to answer Aemon's questions.

"Asgard's fleet of spacefaring craft is small," Thor was explaining as they walked. "With the Bifrost at our disposal, we rarely need them. When we do need them, though, we do nothing by half measures."

That, Aemon had already surmised from his interactions with the Aesir over the last two days. "You don't seem to need to enlarge your ships very drastically to make them powerful," he noted.

"No," Thor agreed. "Our power generators and other systems do not need to be expanded as much as those that are based on more traditional technologies when we upscale them for shipbuilding. That allows us to compact more of everything we need into a smaller space."

"That's because your tech is based on the same fundamental principles as your supernatural abilities," Aemon continued. "What does that mean for ships built with more traditional tech, as you call it?"

"Oh, we can work with traditional technology," Thor assured him as they rounded a corner. "We may no longer have need of it for ourselves, but we are an interstellar culture. We trade with various peoples within and outside of the Nine Realms, and we have our share of visitors who need their ships refueled and repaired."

Aemon frowned. "I haven't seen any ships arrive or depart from Asgard since I arrived, and I would have, given the structure of the planet. In fact, I haven't seen a single non-Aesir either."

Thor grew pensive. "My father feels that our people should have as little interaction with the short-lived races as possible. With our lifespan, we tend to outlive most beings by centuries, or even millennia. Our mortal friends and loved ones age and die while we watch on, helpless to prevent it. It is better, he thinks, to keep them at arm's length. Trade is conducted at outposts built solely for that purpose, and we only accept immigrants with lifespans similar to our own."

Recalling the camaraderie Thor shared with the Avengers and the obvious love between him and Jane, Aemon said "You don't agree."

Thor looked at him askance. "I understand his logic, but I am not one to shut someone out from my heart simply because I know they will not always be there for me to let them in."

Aemon nodded slowly. "It's better to love and lose than to feel nothing at all."

Lord Scourge had had his life artificially prolonged by Vitiate's dark sorcery but, ironically for a Dark Side user, at the cost of his ability to feel, physically or emotionally.

For his part, Aemon had discussed immortality more than once with Rifton, who had stumbled upon the knowledge of how to achieve it during the Rishi debacle. It wasn't a question of personal ethics, but of whether he could handle the strain of outliving everyone he loved and spending eternity alone. How Aemon's disappearance had affected Rifton's final decision on the matter was anyone's guess, but Aemon had found it telling that the Asgardian histories couldn't confirm the deaths of multiple members of the inner circle the two of them had shared.

Thor's blue eyes grew dull as Aemon looked into them, and his Force aura grew heavy with a mix of grim emotions. No doubt he was thinking of how his human friends would each experience their whole lifetimes in what, for Thor, would seem to be a mere eyeblink.

The silence was broken when they passed through a pair of metal blast doors onto a service balcony that hugged the walls twenty-five meters above the floor of a cavernous maintenance hangar. The hangar looked to be about one hundred and fifty meters wide and half again as long, and it was filled with the organized chaos typical of a functioning mechanic's workshop: racks of spare parts, fuel cells, construction cranes, fluid exchange hoses, repair droids, and handheld tools. The centerpiece was a series of tall gantries that interlocked to form a drydock, which was swarming with Aesir engineers and mechanics.

And when Aemon saw the ship that hung cradled in the drydock, all thoughts of Thor, Midgard, and immortality fled from his head. He wasn't looking at a relic from his time. This was a ghost from his past.

The ship was shaped like a barbed arrowhead, with a non-reflective gray hull that flared out into a lateral wing at the stern. The artfully curved shell opened at the very tip of the tapered bow to make room for the cockpit viewports, while the auxiliary engine pylons that bracketed the wings were capped at their forward tips by retractable guns. If the weapons were retracted, most beings would mistake it for a civilian yacht. Those familiar with the Phantom line would be forgiven for thinking it was an X-70B prototype at first glance.

On closer inspection, however, they would notice subtle differences. The hull where the weapon pods connected to the lateral wing was thicker, allowing for a bigger cargo hold. The weapon pods themselves were parallel rather than offset from one another, and the ventral bulge was altered to create space for an undermount docking bay large enough to accommodate a starfighter. The cockpit viewports were less prominent, and the landing struts were slightly taller. This was indeed a ship of the X-70 Phantom line, but it wasn't just a prototype: this was an X-70E model, the ultimate refinement of the class. Very few of these beauties had ever been built, and even fewer had made it out into the galaxy.

When the Revanite spies manipulated the Republic military into unjustly declaring Aemon and his crew traitors, his Defender class Jedi corvette had become a liability. To maintain the cloak of anonymity, he'd been forced to ditch the ship and steal another from a smuggler. On learning as much, Rifton had pulled an entire puppet show's worth of strings to create a scenario that allowed Aemon to not only steal the Phantom assigned to his personal fleet, but modify its systems to recognize Aemon as its true owner.

When Aemon confronted him about it, Rif had called it "two decades' worth of missed birthday presents from your big brother wrapped into a single package."

Even after he'd openly turned his back on the Dark Side and abandoned the Sith, Rifton had never claimed to be sane.

Given what had happened since then, Aemon couldn't help wondering whether the Force itself had nudged Rif into presenting such a gift. A gift that had now followed Aemon to the ends of the universe. "The Nightlight," he breathed.

Thor looked at him in confusion and said, "I beg your pardon?"

Aemon didn't answer. His mind was somewhere else. Rifton was gone. Kira was gone. Theron and Lana were gone. T7 and Doc and the rest were gone. Everyone Aemon loved was gone, but somehow his starship was here. Quite a piece of magic. If he needed any more proof that the Force had intentionally brought him to this place and time, he'd found it.

After everything else, it was too much. He threw back his head and broke into hysterical, mirthless laughter.

With a languidness that belied his unease, Loki opened his eyes and stared out through the containment field that defined his cell. The energy barrier did little to muffle sounds from the outside, and so he had heard the echoing footsteps and recognized the telltale gait of his visitor long before they came to a stop outside. It was Father.

Not Father, he corrected himself. Never Father.

Odin stood less than a meter away from the containment field's edge, wearing the stoic face as he peered at Loki. He wore his armor, but Gungnir was nowhere to be seen. Either he had elected to leave it behind or, more likely, he'd simply stowed it in a pocket of folded space. He'd exchanged his gold eyepatch for a black one, and despite his countenance, the slightly accelerated pulse rate of the vein in his temple, a tell none save those who knew him best could have detected, suggested he was nervous. Interesting.

The Allfather had never visited Loki in his captivity before, and that was just the way Loki had preferred it. There was no need to pick at old wounds. But considering what had happened in the last few days, it made sense for the king to attempt to extract testimony from his disgraced ward. That didn't explain why Odin had personally come to the prison, though, nor did it explain the lack of guards. Despite his words at Loki's trial after the Midgard debacle, Loki was sure that Odin didn't have the stomach to kill him in cold blood.

If he was honest with himself, Loki shared the sentiment. He would gladly steal the throne for himself if he ever got the opportunity, but he didn't want the Allfather, or any other members of his so-called family, dead. Not anymore, anyway. Sanity had its advantages, and he was too intelligent to delude himself into thinking he'd been anything less than utterly mad from the moment he'd touched that thrice-damned Scepter to his… encounter with the green monster.

Admitting this fact aloud, of course, was out of the question.

Getting up from the couch he'd been laying on, Loki sauntered to the barrier field's edge and looked Odin in the eye. "So, the great and mighty King of Asgard has finally deigned to visit me in my lowly prison cell," Loki remarked when he realized the King had no intention of speaking first. "To what do I owe the honor?"

If the irreverence of Loki's words had any effect on Odin, he showed no evidence of it. "For a man who claims to have no love in his heart and no family to share it with, you were awfully easy to persuade to help Thor in his little rebellion," he said, speaking in the same flat, stern voice he used in trials.

Behind a subtle illusion he cast to hide his own expression, Loki allowed himself to grin at the memory of provoking Odin into breaking his facade during his own trial. Aloud, he said "When the options are stay in prison and let the Aether linger on Asgard, where it might consume its host at any moment and Asgard along with her, or escape and take them to where the threat can be permanently dealt with before going free, it's not exactly a choice, is it? I like breathing."

A muscle in Odin's jaw tightened and his eye twitched. Not so long ago, Loki had been all too eager to experience his last breath, and had come infinitesimally close to doing so. Loki did feel a bit bad about putting Thor through the pain of losing a brother, if only because the sentimental oaf was too blind to see what was right in front of him. But Odin wasn't Thor.

To Loki's disappointment, Odin's voice remained as flat and controlled as ever when he responded. "If your only motive was self preservation," he said slowly, deliberately, a cold echo of the way he'd spoken whenever he caught Loki or Thor after a particularly egregious bout of rule-breaking when they were children, "then why did you not flee when the Jedi Master arrived? We both know you could have easily slipped away in the chaos of battle. Why linger? Why accompany Thor to Midgard when you knew he no longer needed your help?"

Neither Loki's expression nor his posture changed. Even so, he knew better than to think he could hide his reaction from the man who'd raised him for centuries. But that was what illusions were for. "Perhaps I wanted a chance to take the Aether for myself," he said with a false grin. "Perhaps I wanted another opportunity to show the Midgardians that they'd be better off with me ruling them. Perhaps I wished to work my way back into Thor's good graces so I could watch him embarrass himself trying to convince his Midgardian pets to trust me while I plot their deaths."

Odin exhaled forcefully through his nose. The vein in his temple relaxed. He was amused. Amused! "Was that bravado," he asked, "or a jest?"

Damn. Loki was definitely losing his touch. He knew he should have fled into the wastes of Svartalfheim when he had the chance. Why had he listened to sentiment and let himself be captured again? It was a question he'd been asking himself from the moment he'd awoken from the effects of whatever Jedi technique he'd been subjected to. He still had no answer.

"Your actions during your brief period of freedom are far more in line with your true character than anything you did on Midgard last year," Odin said. The mask was back on. "You will be given one more chance to explain yourself. Depending on your answers, you may be given the chance to redeem yourself fully from your crimes."

Loki blinked. "I… What?" He stared at Odin in undisguised astonishment. Talk about the void? Talk about the asteroid field? Talk about the Black Order? About… No.

Before Loki could say or do anything, Odin turned on his heel and strode away. As his footsteps faded, Loki continued to gaze out his cell's barrier field for a long moment.

No.

He whirled, summoned as much of his seidr as was possible within the cell's confines, and blasted the chair behind him with green light.

To his surprise, the chair didn't simply fly backward and break apart, as he'd expected. Instead, it disintegrated into a pile of ash and smoldering splinters. He should not have been able to do that from inside the prison cell.

His eyes narrowed.

Had he not asked Heimdall to help him search, it would have taken Thor hours to find Aemon al'Cazar. After his outburst in the maintenance hangar, the Jedi Master had assumed an even more terrifying countenance—a mask of perfect, cold calm of the sort one could only wear when they were anything but on the inside. al'Cazar had explained his surprising personal history with the ship in a short, clipped voice that had frightened the Aesir engineers within earshot, then teleported himself to parts unknown. The skies of Asgard had darkened with iron gray clouds shortly after, rumbling intermittently.

Thor tightened his grip on Mjolnir as he guided it through a turn, rounding the protruding tail of a tree-covered mountain that extended into the sea. He landed on a sandy beach nestled in a hollow of the rock formation. As his boots touched the sand, Thor looked out in the direction of the sea.

Master al'Cazar was sitting on thin air at the edge of the dry sand, just beyond the uppermost reach of the surf. His legs were crossed, and his hands rested on his knees. He was obviously practicing some sort of meditation, but Thor didn't believe for a second that al'Cazar was at peace. Floating meditation was hardly Thor's area of expertise, but he was fairly sure the practitioner wasn't supposed to hold their posture so rigidly they looked like a statue or telekinetically agitate the air around them into a twister that kicked up a spiral of sand.

Abruptly, al'Cazar dropped to the beach. He managed to get his legs under him and land on his feet, sending a wave of displaced particles in all directions. He trembled from head to foot, then screamed and flung an arm out in front of him. A familiar screechy, echoing boom violently parted the sea from beach to planetary edge, as if the waters had been slashed by a giant sword. The wound closed as quickly as it had appeared, but al'Cazar reopened it with another blast, and then another, and another one after that.

Thor marveled silently. Invisible though they were, the Jedi Master's telekinetic strikes were as potent as anything a starship cannon could produce. He shuddered to think what that kind of power looked like in the hands of the Sith.

al'Cazar loosed one more blast, then stopped. His shoulders slumped, and his arms hung limply to either side of his torso.

"Have you got it out of your system?" Thor asked with faux nonchalance.

al'Cazar glanced back at him. The man's normally stony face looked broken, and his eyes were red. "No," he croaked.

Thor nodded. Wordlessly, the two men took up positions ten meters apart in the middle of the beach, halfway between the woods at the base of the escarpment and the surf. Thor hefted Mjolnir as al'Cazar pulled a single lightsaber off his belt and ignited its cerulean blade. They stared blankly into each other's faces, then, with no prompting save a narrowing of the Jedi's eyes, charged.

For the second time in two days, Steve marveled at the double-edged sword that was his reputation as a "boy scout" with unquestionable integrity and no grasp of guile. On the one hand, it was excellent for PR. People who saw him as the ultimate example of heroism and selflessness tended to listen to what he had to say, even if they didn't always agree, which gave him a great deal of leverage in the fight for social justice. Furthermore, most of the world trusted the Avengers to protect them because Captain America was their leader.

On the other hand, Steve's reputation was built on a foundation of incomplete or embellished stories stitched together by propagandists, history books, brothers in arms who he'd inspired, prisoners of war he'd captured, and civilians he'd rescued from HYDRA or the Nazi regime. Some—ok, most—of the stories were accurate on the core facts, but they didn't paint a nuanced picture of his life before the ice, or of who he was as a person.

No one from this time, with the possible exception of the Avengers, saw Steve Rogers. They saw Captain America, the patriot, the Star Spangled Man With a Plan, the symbol, and symbols were ripe for reinterpretation.

Even SHIELD, an organization that had made it its mission to know Steve and others like him inside and out, tended to make assumptions about him. For every admirer, there was a critic. You don't understand how the world works. Things have changed since 1945, agents of every rank and clearance level told him, sometimes silently through body language and occasionally out loud. The world isn't black and white anymore. You have to make compromises for the greater good. We know how ugly this job can get, but it's necessary. If you want to make a difference, then get with the program.

Steve knew exactly how the world worked, thank you very much. He'd grown up in Brooklyn during the Great Depression and fought on the front lines of the bloodiest conflict in human history. He knew exactly what depths people could sink to. He knew the difference between compromising for the greater good and crossing the line that divided you from the enemy. The world had indeed changed, mostly for better, but in some ways for worse.

People hadn't changed, though. They never did, if history was any indication.

Steve was the first to admit he wasn't built for espionage. The lies and half-truths? Keeping secrets from your allies and subordinates out of sheer paranoia? He understood the need for discretion, even secrecy, in matters of national security, knew all too well what could happen when the right knowledge fell into the wrong hands, but he was a soldier, not a spy. The distrust leveled at him by the same people who were his most devoted advocates was galling. Keeping sensitive information safe was second nature to him. Outright deception? Not so much.

The number of living people who understood that about him could be counted on one hand, even if you cut off fingers. Ironically, or perhaps appropriately, Steve's goody two shoes reputation gave him an in in the information game few enjoyed; complete freedom from suspicion. With the proper training, it was an asset beyond price. Natasha Romanoff and Clint Barton were excellent teachers, even for students as talentless in spycraft as he was, even when operating under the added limitation of having to conceal their activities from their own boss.

The lessons had paid off.

No one, even trained agents of SHIELD, expected Captain America to catch them playing a one-sided game of hide and seek in the streets where they were the seekers. No one anticipated that the Boy Scout in Stars and Stripes could hide by dressing up like a tourist, losing his tails, and adopting a fake Danish accent as he flirted with the concierge in a hotel until she gave him the exact room he wanted. And no one would have believed the heroic patriot who rescued cats out of trees and helped old ladies carry their groceries home had the stomach to spy on his own allies with hunting binoculars from a hotel room window.

Natasha's warning about the SHIELD security team guarding the battle site had reminded Steve of the disaster-in-waiting that was Phase Two. Despite the impressive combination of Aemon al'Cazar's telekinesis, Dr. Selvig's gravimetric spikes, and Jane Foster's ingenuity, a significant amount of alien debris remained to account for. After al'Cazar and the Asgardians departed, Steve had led the rest of the Avengers in cleaning up what they could, but there had been so much to sort through, the battlefield such a mess, that they'd had to delegate the task to SHIELD.

Thor had done his best, but some civilians had been hurt by falling debris from the sky battle, and the giant lightning bolt he'd dropped on Malekith had superficially damaged cars and buildings for several blocks around the university campus. Steve didn't regret his decision to lend the emergency services his assistance, but in retrospect he should have set up a rotation of Avengers keeping watch over the battle site. If he had, SHIELD wouldn't have dared bar them from returning to it.

That was why Steve was studying the other side of the Thames from a top floor hotel suite in Canary Wharf as SHIELD agents picked through debris and mud for alien artifacts. It had taken him most of a day to get access to a room with a sufficient view, and he'd spent the last two hours making up for lost time.

Steve was surprised to find that most of the agents were soldiers guarding the perimeter, leaving only a small team to actually conduct the cleanup operation. He had anticipated a swarm of scientists in hazmat suits. Instead, he'd identified no more than six individuals, all of them dressed in innocuous clothing, their only protective equipment their disposable gloves and the armored, internally cushioned containers SHIELD used to transport sensitive objects. He supposed that wasn't a major cause for concern, given how the majority of Earth's interstellar visitors never seemed to bring alien diseases or biotoxins, but he had expected SHIELD to be more cautious after the Chitauri virus outbreak a few months back.

Far more concerning was the team's apparent leader. Steve could tell the man was in charge from the deferential body language the others adopted in his presence, but Steve hadn't gotten a proper look at his face before he'd gone inside one of the partially destroyed campus buildings. He appeared to be a slightly balding man of average height wearing a simple, well tailored suit. He had looked exactly like an ordinary businessman out on the town, except for the pistol holstered at his waist, concealed by his suit jacket except when his arms were spread.

It was the quintessential, nondescript-yet-important style common to high ranking SHIELD agents. Steve had seen it plenty of times at the Triskelion, aboard the Helicarrier, in bases around the world. Even without the eidetic memory afforded him by the super soldier serum, he would have been able to recognize such agents at a distance simply because of how consistent their individual dress patterns were. Without a direct look at this man's face, Steve couldn't be certain who it was, but that particular combination of details—the height, the hair, the body shape, even the cut of the suit—looked very familiar.

Unnervingly familiar.

Finally, it happened. Three members of the cleanup team pushed open a plastic curtain wall and stepped out into the outer courtyard. Steve pressed the binoculars harder into his own eye sockets. There were two women of east Asian descent, one much younger than the other, with dark brown hair and eyes. The younger wore her hair slightly longer than the stern-faced elder, and her expression held the openness of a particularly optimistic rookie. Beside the elder woman was a man whose funeral Steve had attended.

Steve pulled his face away from the binoculars, blinking and rubbing his eyes with one hand. He looked through the binoculars again. It didn't help. For someone who had been stabbed through the spine and heart by an alien spear, Phil Coulson looked remarkably healthy. Steve lowered the binoculars once more and stared out the window for a long moment, his thoughts reeling. His mouth opened, and three words slipped from his lips.

"What the fuck?"

Thor brought Mjolnir up in front of his face to absorb a bolt of his own lightning, which Master al'Cazar had redirected at him with some sort of Force technique. Before he could retaliate, his vision seemed to flicker, and suddenly he was looking not at Aemon al'Cazar, but Heimdall. He froze, and a Force wave blasted him off his feet. He landed in a heap, covered from head to foot in sand, his head ringing, and instinctively raised Mjolnir again. When no follow-up attack came, he inwardly sighed in relief. al'Cazar must have sensed the change in his mental state just as the wave had connected and paused.

Getting to his feet, Thor saw the apparition more clearly, and felt Heimdall's mental presence at the very edge of his awareness. Behind the projection, al'Cazar was staring in open bewilderment, lightsaber dipped toward the ground. "What is it?" Thor asked, worried.

Heimdall's expression was grave. "Loki has escaped," he said calmly.

Thor cursed and forced himself to close his eyes. "Show me the way, and we'll be right there." The darkness of his closed lids became a stream of images and sensations. The prison under Valaskjalf was a mess, almost as bad as it had been during the Dark Elf raid. Marauders thronged the corridor, using their sheer numbers to overwhelm the Einherjar sentries. The guards were orders of magnitude stronger than the majority of individual prisoners, but they were too few to form a proper phalanx, leaving them stranded in a sea of hostile flesh.

Of Loki, there was no sign. Thor blinked again, and he was back on the beach beside Master al'Cazar and the projection of Heimdall. "We're on our way," he said. Heimdall's presence vanished, and al'Cazar extinguished his lightsaber.

"What's happened?" he asked.

Thor gave him the short version. "Loki. Prison break."

al'Cazar didn't waste time asking questions. Quick as lightning, he dashed to Thor's side and grabbed his armored forearm. The world flickered, and the sounds and smell of the sea vanished, replaced by the deceptively tranquil courtyard in front of Valaskjalf's main entrance. If the Jedi Master had been winded by the effort of transporting another person, he didn't show it. "Go," he barked. "I've got your back."

Thor was running before al'Cazar finished speaking. The grand entry doors were closed, but al'Cazar flicked his hand as the two of them approached, telekinetically overpowering the electromagnetic seal and forcing them to swing outward. Their edges nearly clipped Thor's shoulders as he rushed inside, and he heard them swing shut again behind him at another gesture from the al'Cazar. With Thor leading the way, they dashed through hallways and down flights of stone steps until they reached the subterranean prison.

It was like going back in time. Marauders, pirates, and mercenaries were everywhere. It was all Thor could do not to reflexively repeat his earlier promise that those who surrendered would be left unharmed. Given the circumstances and past experience, he was in no mood for games, so leaped into the chaos fists first. He was careful not to kill anyone—these beings, vile as they were, were being used as pawns in Loki's game—but he wasn't soft either. After only a few seconds he switched from using his hands and feet to blasts of wind. In the confined space, surrounded by hard objects, his gentlest method of attack turned utterly brutal, flinging would-be escapees into spine-rattling collisions with the walls, floors, and each other.

Master al'Cazar did one better, planting himself at the threshold of another corridor lined with empty cells and knocking down the entire horde of criminals crowding it with a Force wave.

Bolstered by Thor's presence, the Einherjar rallied, and within minutes, every prisoner was either on their back groaning in pain or unconscious. Loki, though, was nowhere to be seen.

Thor cursed. Why did his brother have to be so blasted difficult? They still hadn't accounted for every prisoner who had escaped during the chaos of Malekith's assault on the palace, and this incident had certainly set things back again. Thor thought furiously for a moment, and then his heart sank. It didn't matter which direction Loki had gone. With his mastery of concealing magic allowing him to hide from Heimdall's astronomical senses and his unparalleled knowledge of the secret paths through Yggdrasil, Loki could practically go anywhere in the Nine Realms undetected. But if he was still on Asgard…

"Master al'Cazar!" he shouted, uncertain of the Jedi's location. "Can you sense where Loki has gone?"

From another corridor, the human shouted back. "I've been searching, but this isn't like Svartalfheim. There's too many living presences to filter my senses through, and he's already too far away. I don't know Loki well enough to identify him from a distance with this much interference."

Thor swore again, loudly and extensively, using words that would earn him a stint in prison on certain planets.

The search for Loki took hours, but not even the combined efforts of a Jedi Master, Thor, Odin's ravens, Odin himself, Frigga, Heimdall, and the Einherjar could uncover any trace of Asgard's wayward prince. Finally, Heimdall detected a surge of dark energy—the spacetime warping kind used to power the Bifrost—in the mountains beyond the city, the kind that signaled the activation of a secret path off the planetoid and onto another Yggdrasil-bound world.

Loki was gone.

"I'm sorry," Aemon told a dejected Thor, Odin, and Frigga in the Allfather's private study, near the pinnacle of Valaskjalf. They were sitting on the couches in the high-ceiling chamber's foyer rather than around the great stone desk. A large window behind the desk provided a view of a sweep of urbanized coastline and mountains. "I did the best I could."

"Do not apologize," Frigga said, gentle but firm. "The fault isn't yours."

Odin nodded gravely. "We were careless. It appears that the Kurse warrior Malekith used to sabotage our defenses was more subtle than we thought. The investigators found traces of his power in the control station for the prison's containment field generators. The effects would have been inconsequential under normal circumstances, but Loki is the greatest mage of his generation. He cannot be contained by anything less than our best countermeasures."

"He blasted his way out?" Aemon asked.

"And freed the other prisoners to cover his escape," Odin confirmed. "With the chaos of a riot to distract the guards, he would have gotten away unnoticed if not for Heimdall. The fault is mine," The king sagged in his chair. "I visited him this morning to tell him about you, Master Jedi. That almost certainly is what provoked him."

Aemon thought about it, then shook his head. "There's no use assigning blame. It's your fault, it's the Dark Elves' fault, it's my fault; it doesn't matter. In the end, Loki made his own choices, except with the Chitauri, based on what you've told me."

The three Asgardians looked at him, then one another. Thor broke the short silence. "What now?"

"Now," Odin said, "we regroup. Loki is too skilled in the art of stealth to be tracked. If he does not wish to be found, he won't be. We shall remain alert for signs of him, of course, but an extensive search through the Nine Realms would be a wasted effort."

"Then we have to draw him out," Thor said.

"Yes and no." Odin squeezed his eye shut, then opened it again. "After everything that has happened, I do not believe Loki will reveal himself to anyone unless he deems it absolutely necessary. He will go to ground."

"Are you certain?" Thor asked.

"I am," Odin asserted.

"So am I," Aemon added, surprising himself. He could just feel the truth of it through the veil of the future, so he pressed on. "If the Force leads me to him, I'll do what needs to be done, but I don't think Loki's interested in causing more trouble. He knows he'll have nothing to gain by showing himself. He wants to avoid a confrontation; that's why he fled."

"What if he goes back to Midgard?" Thor demanded. "What if he starts hurting people again?"

"How would that benefit him?" Aemon rejoined. "He only led the Chitauri attack because he was coerced, right?"

"As far as we can tell."

"He's in complete control of his own actions now. If he does go back there, it won't be to try and finish what he started. The Avengers humiliated him; he'll want to avoid them. Most likely, he'll set himself up where he can be comfortable and in control and stay anonymous."

Frigga looked stricken. "He will forsake us for the rest of his life, if we let him."

"It won't be forever," Aemon assured. "I don't know him half as well as you do, but I believe he does care, deep down, or else he wouldn't have helped fight the Dark Elves. He'll turn up eventually, if only because his ego tells him that Thor will need his help again, and we'll be ready when he does."

Thor hesitated. "You want to let him come to us on his own terms?"

Aemon nodded. "I do." Part of him was apprehensive at the idea of letting someone who had tried to destroy a planet run loose, but everything else he'd heard and sensed regarding Loki, as well as his sense of the future, told him this was the best way forward. How odd a notion.

After a long silence, Thor nodded. He and his parents were no less unhappy, Aemon could tell, but they knew he was right. "Very well," Thor said. "But we have to inform the other Avengers, at the very least. They deserve to know."

"Of course," Aemon agreed, "provided they won't report this to SHIELD. Otherwise, there'll be a manhunt, and that won't end well."

"Agreed."

Aemon took a breath and braced himself. What he had to say next would be no less controversial. "If that concludes our urgent business, I'd like to go back to Midgard. Today."

The Force rippled with the surprise and confusion of his hosts. "I've read enough about what happened to my home galaxy to know that there's nothing left for me there, and the Force brought me to Midgard for a reason. I… I'm grateful for your help, all of it, but I can't stay here anymore. I need to get my feet back in the water where I'm needed."

"Without reading anything about its history or its people?" Odin asked.

"Frankly, I'm tired of reading. I've done too much of it in the last day, and it's brought me no comfort. I'd rather learn about my species' homeworld from firsthand experience." And I'll be able to actually help when things go rancor-shaped. His strange vision of his friends unwillingly training weapons on him had been haunting him, as had other nightmares. He needed to do something, anything, to fill the horrible vacuum of helplessness before it consumed him.

He sensed a surge of tension in the Force, but it quickly subsided.

"Will you at least provide specifications for refurbishing your ship?" Frigga asked.

Her words drew an image in his mind's eye. He was stepping off the boarding ramp of a starship, not the Nightlight, and into a landscape that resembled a desertified coral reef. In the depth of his being, he knew this was a lost memory, one of the last before he'd traveled forward through time. That he'd left the Nightlight behind didn't surprise him. The ship itself wasn't nearly as famous as he was, but any member of the Alliance would have recognized it on sight, and secrecy had been paramount to his final mission, whatever that was.

Mentally shaking himself back into the present, Aemon said, "Yes. There isn't a lot on that front. I have a copy of the original schematics in my commlink. Base your upgrades on those. Try to restore all of its original functions, if you can." He stood up. "If that's all?"

"Not quite," Frigga said, holding up a hand. She gestured, and the flow of Force energy through Asgard shifted momentarily, warping space. An ingot of silvery metal the size of a human hand appeared in midair over her palm and floated toward Aemon.

He plucked it from the air and turned it over in his hand. It was heavier than it looked, and when he probed it felt rather like a sponge, as if the metal was eager to embrace the energies of the Force. "Is this?…"

"Uru," she confirmed. "I would offer you the technology to forge it into a tool of your choice, but I don't believe you need it."

For the first time all day, Aemon smiled. "You're right. I don't."

Happy Star Wars Day!