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Chapter 8

Pepper walked into the room. Phil relaxed a little, knowing she wouldn't have left unless the Asgardians were settled in.

"Bite-sized finger-food for everyone?" Tony asked.

She matched his gaze. "It was the easiest way I could think of to make him feel like he belongs here as an equal instead of luggage. Feeding him after everyone else, in private when no one else ate in the van, and constantly the same cheap food... Tony, what were you thinking?"

"It was what we could find, and we couldn't have all eaten at the same time since we were on the road..."

"You were feeding him on the move even after you found out being in the van and in motion makes him too uneasy to sleep?" Bruce broke in.

"Thor said he wasn't acting any different," Phil added, wondering if it was worth getting involved before things escalated to requiring tazing.

"And Thor Odinson is the sort of person who is usually in tune with the emotional states of others? I mean, this is force-feeding we're talking about. If he'd jerked from a bump..."

"It wasn't true force-feeding," Steve corrected.

"Thor just told me the same, Bruce," Pepper concurred. "Once it's in his mouth, he eats it. The problem is getting food that far."

Bruce swore very calmly, but the vocabulary gave away just how much that fact bothered him.

"What is it?" Steve asked. "Match your theory?"

He nodded.

Tony leaned forward. "So, what are we dealing with?"

"I think he wants to eat, but can't let himself," Pepper said frankly. "I think I'll stay there while Thor's feeding him, just to observe and be certain, but he's not really fighting with a hope of winning, is he? Not if he backs down like that."

Bruce nodded. "I'm guessing it's a failsafe."

"What do you mean?" Phil asked. "There are multiple control systems that were clearly in effect."

"They had control of him until he left Earth. Did anyone see him eat? No? Then we don't know how he was eating while being controlled. Or how often, or what."

Pepper sat down. "So they meant this to happen, you think?"

"Well, to put it bluntly if he'd gone where they couldn't make contact or someone who didn't care too much about him was the one to rip everything out, he'd have died a few times over by now. At best, what he's been doing would be seen as a hunger strike and he'd be force-fed the ugly way." Bruce leaned on the table and gestured with a fork. "He needs permission, at the least, and that permission is never happening again."

"That's not a failsafe," Phil said in the silence that followed.

"It's a kill switch," Pepper finished with clear horror in her voice.

"We can't be certain that's what it is," Tony reminded them all.

"We could always get another opinion," Pepper offered. "Besides ours and Natasha's, and I think she's been more concerned in symptom management than figuring out the causes?"

Steve nodded. "She has."

"Well, then, we just need to find someone else cleared by SHIELD for dealing with our visitors who has some experience in observational psychology and get another opinion."

"That list is rather short," Bruce told them all. "And better than half are people I don't want within two miles of me if I have anything to say about it."

More like if the Hulk does, Phil thought.

"Tony, aren't you always telling me carnival mind-reading is always done with body clues and subtle hints in tone?

"It is, Pepper." A pause. "Oh no. No. Not in the Tower."

"Tony, either SHIELD was right and Dr. Strange can do legitimate work, or he's not really capable of what he says he is but can do the same kind of deductions we've been doing well and from a completely different angle. Either way, we get a window into what's going on."

"No, we may get a window. Or we get an answer that sounds good, has no basis in anything but imagination, and ends up inspiring us do things that make Loki deteriorate instead of improving. And SHIELD didn't sign him up as anything."

"Except as a potential occasional consultant," Phil corrected. "At his insistence that he couldn't swear he'd be available to do more, or on quick notice. No sign of him during the invasion, for one thing, despite living within three miles and there was no record he'd traveled anywhere that entire week."

"The charlatan said he wouldn't be available?" Tony asked.

"Said he had 'larger responsibilities' that took precedence and so could promise nothing. And yes, we asked to what and were basically told the universe, so... The official word was that we shouldn't press him about it. Higher than Fury."

"Hippie charlatan, then. Always wondered about his taste in clothes."

"Tony..."

"Well, it's true, Pepper. The man has no fashion sense. And he's one of those fools who claims the title 'doctor' with no evidence of it. Bad enough when someone uses an honorary doctorate to do it, but I've seen no evidence he even has one of those. Dr. Banner, please back me up."

"If he doesn't have it, he shouldn't use it," Bruce confirmed. "I felt odd enough doing medical work after I gave up explaining that my doctorate wasn't that sort but that I knew enough to muddle. At least your honoraries were for things that would have earned proper doctorates if you'd done the work within a university setting."

Tony's face lit up and Phil really had to fight the urge to roll his eyes. "Really? You think so?"

"We've been over this before," Pepper said with a smile. "And doesn't MIT keep calling you Dr. Stark whenever they get you to do guest lectures on campus?"

"And they shouldn't, not when my highest degree is a bachelor's from them..." he started explaining.

Steve coughed meaningfully. "Does anyone have any better ideas?"

Even Tony had to agree that they didn't.

Pepper stood and grabbed two plates. "I'll take the boys their food then, and ask Thor if it's all right with him since he's next of kin."

"You're eating when?" Phil asked, concerned. He knew how easy it was to lose track of your own needs in a situation like this, and her relationship with Tony meant that when she was minding him she could be sure to make herself eat at least as often as he did.

Juggling Tony and the Asgardians, there would be no single person whose self-care cycle she was sure to have as reference. Maybe Loki's, but that was no pattern to follow.

"Talk later, upstairs?" Tony asked her.

"Sure."

Natasha came in almost as soon as Pepper left. "Clint's a wreck. I'm taking our food and spending some time with him. Sorry."

"We can all eat together once Loki's stable enough here for he and Thor to join us," Bruce told her. "The dinner together idea's already fallen apart, so why be sorry about it?"

She left.

"So, what else do you have against Strange?" Phil asked as they finally started eating.

"Not right now," Tony snapped irritably. "So, Bruce, what have you been up to in the lab while I was gone? Don't tell me you worked on that project we started just before Thor asked for help without me..."

Pepper stuck her head in the door and was relieved to see that nothing beyond Loki sitting up had changed. "Hi, Thor. Hi, Loki. I brought your food."

"Thank you, Pepper," Thor told her with a nod. He looked between the plates as she set them down on a bedside table. "Is there a difference between the two?"

"None. I thought it might be welcoming for him if he was fed the same at the same time. I don't know what Tony and Phil were thinking - you should have all been eating in the van."

Thor was still grinning at her when she returned from filling two glasses with water at the attached bathroom's sink.

"He is hungry, and I not so much. He reacted before when he was going to be fed first, but we don't know what caused that." Thor brushed some of Loki's hair back with his hand. "I wish he could talk to us."

"There's something we need to ask you about," Pepper told him as he started feeding Loki. "Something that might help us with your brother."

"What is it?"

"More like who is it. Your people believe in magic, right?"

Thor nodded. "My brother is himself an innate shapeshifter, although he uses it consciously rarely and poorly. It is why he looks like me and not like the Jotun he is biologically related to. And he was a reasonably-skilled mage using technology before all this happened to him." His eyes narrowed when he looked up at her. "I have told you much of this before."

"We have people on Earth who claim to be able to do magic. A lot of the time, it's just using illusions to deceive people, but there's someone close who SHIELD thinks may be touching on the real thing. One of the things he claims to be able to do is mind-reading. Even if he's faking, he'd have to be really good at deducing things from body language and facial expressions to pull that off, and Natasha's been able to use what she knows of doing exactly that with humans to figure Loki out before, so..."

"You are asking my permission?"

"Loki can't consent, not in his state. You are the available next of kin and his caretaker. We have to ask you for anything that isn't a response to an immediate threat to his life, at least until he starts expressing his own preferences."

Thor nodded, then took a bite from his own plate.

Two seconds later, all emotional hell broke loose on the bed beside him and it was all they could do together to get Loki calmed back down.

He stared at them with something Pepper could best describe as desolated confusion on his face.

"What just happened?" Thor asked, clearly struggling to keep his voice light.

"I... It looks like he thinks eating before you was wrong."

"But I forced him to."

"Thor, I think you're going to have to finish your dinner before he eats anything else. And I take back everything I said about him eating with other people - it looks like he has to be fed alone for now."

Thor nodded, sadness in his eyes.

She put a hand on his shoulder. "We'll figure it out. Even if we can't fix it yet, if we can just figure out the rules he's trying to live by and keep from making him feel he's breaking them..."

He nodded again, face a little brighter, and started his own meal in earnest.

"Pepper?" he asked when he was nearly done and she was refilling Loki's glass.

"Yes?"

"When Jane comes, I will need someone to watch my brother, unless he is to be with us and I do not know how that would go for either of them."

"Right. He's in no state to be left alone."

"Would you?"

"I'd be honored. Why me?"

"He has no negative associations about you from before, seems to trust you, and you treat him well."

She smiled. "I'm glad you think that."

The warm feeling of knowing an alien prince, Thor-Odinson-God-Of-Thunder, trusted her with his defenseless brother stayed all night, even through the rehash of Tony's issues with 'that charlatan' when she told him Thor had agreed to the plan over her extremely delayed dinner.