Stark's words stirs up a brief clamoring of opinions between everyone in the room, and Loki will admit, Stark's knowledge of the girl's time-traveling activities is not something he'd expected to hear, especially since his savior bore a great resemblance to man now confronting him. Due to their similar features, Loki had concluded that she'd obviously come from Stark's bloodline—though she was perhaps not yet grown or born, if the lack of full recognition from the man with the glowing chest was an indication—and he'd vowed to not speak of the matter, knowing full well that the mere idea of time-travel would tempt the mortals into learning all they could from her. Such actions could permanently curse them all with the future she had come to change.

No. Best to leave the issue alone, he'd decided.

But Stark's question had brought it to light anyway, and worse is that they had an audience. Couldn't the man have kept this between just the two of them? With his powers still unsettled, Loki would've stood a better chance of erasing the idea from just one mortal mind. But four? He might as well just erase every memory they'd ever experienced.

Well, perhaps that was why the man hadn't approached him alone. Curious though, how he could've come to such a conclusion, if he had come to that conclusion at all. If so, then it seemed that this mortal isn't as stupid as most of his peers.

The unprecedentedly intuitive man grins smugly and takes Loki's reaction as a compliment to his guessing prowess. "I knew it. Spill, Reindeer Games. What's up with Anna-girl?"

A bluff, Loki realizes too late, and he chastises himself for falling prey to Stark's act. Underneath the loud, flamboyant attitude is a brilliant and clearly devious mind, and Loki swears never to forget the moment Anthony Stark managed to trick him and earn his esteem.

Feeling both chagrined at his blunder and impressed at Stark's successful ploy, Loki cautiously chooses what to tell them. "All I may safely say is that Lady Anna used magic to free me from Thanos's possession, and that magic bore my unique signature. Seeing as how I've never met her before in my life and therefore could not have given her any of my magic before or while Thanos held me captive, I could only conclude that I had or would have done such a thing in the future, after Thanos leaves my body."

"That was like the end of a really long thesis paper," Stark says randomly, and Loki could only get a vague impression of what he'd meant by that comment. "What else? C'mon, that can't be it!"

"Is this seriously happening?" Romanoff questions, her brows furrowed. "We're actually talking about a time-traveler?"

"Why didn't you bring this up during the meeting?" Coulson also asks, his thumbs pressing at his phone. Stark instantly darts around the table and snatches the device out of the agent's hands.

"Don't!" Stark snaps, looking down and fiddling with the other man's phone before looking sternly at both SHIELD members. "You're here because I'm letting you hear this."

"Excuse me?" Coulson hisses with narrowed eyes.

"What do you think Fury's going to do if he hears about this?" Stark hisses back.

"Interrogate her," the agent replies instantly. "She has information about future events that we can—"

"No, Phil," Romanoff cuts in quietly, staring at Stark searchingly. "Fury isn't going to interrogate her, is he?"

Stark's jaw clenches in anger, though he doesn't answer her. Instead, he turns to Loki. "Do you know who she—?"

"Stop," Loki shakes his head. "I'm bound by magical oath to speak nothing more about Lady Anna. The magic used to bring her here to our time was passed from the source to Lady Anna, which she then passed to me in order to free me from Thanos's control. As that source appears to be myself, or at least my future self," Loki amends quickly, "any information I discover regarding the time-traveler must be kept to myself and no other, as it risks her purpose in returning to the past."

Stark blinks, absorbing the statement, and then leans forward. "How? How does all that work?"

Loki hides how taken aback he is at the level of interest Stark conveys, and constructs his words with great consideration. "Time is akin to a pond full of leaves. If—"

"Oh no," Stark declines. "Please no zen-nature metaphors. I hate those."

Loki bites back a laugh. "You're much like Thor." And surely enough, his brother has a look of dread etched onto his expression. "Very well, life is not unlike a game of chess. To a traveler hailing from the future, the game is already over and one side has already won." Loki gives them a moment to see it in their mind's eye. "Now we can assume that the traveler is the player who lost the game. In traveling to the past, the player is undoing the choices that led to their defeat, stopping where they believe they began to lose. There, we can assume that by stopping at a certain point, the player has amassed the key pieces they believe they need to win. However, once the game starts again, every decisions the player makes anew is contingent upon specific rules—rules that had not been in place the first time around."

"What are the rules?" Stark asks before Loki can finish his sentence.

Loki pauses to think about how this could affect Lady Anna's purpose, but finds no harm in allowing them to know the rules, at the very least. "The first is golden, and can't be overcome—tell no mortal of their future."

"Why?" Coulson asks immediately.

"Self-fulfilling prophecies," Stark suggests intuitively.

"Indeed," Loki nods. "Time-traveling is generally considered to be 'cheating,' you see, and therefore, should Lady Anna inform a mortal about the future they face, it causes that future to inevitable."

"Like a safety net," the one known as Bruce Banner analogizes, "of sorts."

"Yes," Loki agrees. "The time-traveler should be the one person who manipulates the events that will lead us away from defeat."

"Which is impossible," Coulson says, cutting off whatever Stark was about to say, "since that person is being possessed by a murdering psychopath. What's to say Thanos doesn't call one of us up there and tell us our fate?"

"Ah, but that's the thing," Loki replies with a grin. "Even if Thanos does speak of the future, it's not considered as cheating, simply because it was not Lady Anna who spoke of it."

Stark jerks forward eagerly. "Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait," he spits out in a rush. "Are you saying that we can grill Thanos about the future and he'd tell us because he doesn't know he can't cement the future that way?"

At that, Loki shoots him a withering look. "You think Thanos hasn't had enough time to realize that such efforts would be futile?"

"But what about the information that the cube would be at New York?" Romanoff asks. "She told us it would be there. Isn't that telling us the future?"

"It is," Thor speaks up, "but she told no one of their fate, did she?"

"Well, no."

"A loophole!" Stark declares, rubbing his hands together with a smile. "I love loopholes."

"Don't be hasty, my friend," Thor warns, glancing at Loki briefly. "The situation at hand is challenging. Any information we collect from his vessel may take us down a path that leads to our defeat. If we're not careful, those who did not die in Lady Anna's time might be killed now. This is why we need Lady Anna's guidance, not the misleading words of a treacherous and dangerous enemy."

"So what you're saying is without this Lady Anna leading us by the nose, those who didn't die in the future she came from could die now instead," Banner mutters sardonically. "That's…great."

"No," Coulson frowns. "What he's saying is that without that girl, it won't matter what we do. We're still going to lose against Thanos."

"Don't be such a downer, Agent," Stark says, rolling his eyes. "That's not what's going on."

"Oh?" the agent narrows his eyes at his fellow mortal. "Enlighten me, then."

"The game's been undone," Stark begins, impressing Loki even more for going directly for the heart of the other man's problem. "So we may have lost somewhere down the line, but he," he points at Loki, "is the…the reset button, the start of our do-over."

"English, Mister Stark. Normal people's English," Coulson amends, "not your English."

Stark grunts. "Loki's chess analogy. Anna-girl is our side's player, and our side lost. Coming back here, she undid the moves that made us lose and…what was the word? Amassed? Yeah, she amassed the pieces she needs to win."

"Loki," Romanoff states quickly.

"Exactly! Thank you!" Stark draws everyone's attention again, so no one notices Loki look down as he suddenly feels like he's…important, in a way he never had been before. "She went back all the way to the moment we first saw her—when she exorcised Thanos out of Loki's body. That was her first move, but why?" He taps the table pointedly. "Because whatever happens in the future? Thanos's play was Loki—it always has been—and by setting him free now, in the middle of the game?"

"She gave us our fighting chance," Thor concludes, clapping a hand on Loki's shoulder and giving his brother a proud smile. Loki smiles back, and despite the lack of action, he feels more useful than he ever has in any battle he'd had to face at Thor's side.

"Yep," Stark nods.

"But what if she dies?" Romanoff asks suddenly, frowning along with Coulson.

"I'm kind of guessing that she can't," Stark replies, glancing at Loki knowingly, and Loki tilts his head in his direction.

"Lord Stark is correct. Though her soul can be lost to the cosmos and her body will age quickly should she conduct magic, Lady Anna is a traveler, and as such, immortality is bequeathed to her 'til the moment her purpose for returning is indubitably accomplished."

"I have a headache," Coulson sighs.

Stark sighs as well. "She can't be killed until we thoroughly kick Thanos's ass." He gives Loki a narrow-eyed look that is not quite a glare, clearly ignoring the way Coulson protests that he'd understood Loki's meaning and that he was no imbecile. But Loki is paraphrasing, of course. "Why can't you just say it like that?"

"Wait," Romanoff declares, pressing hand to her ear. Everyone turns to her attentively as she seemingly listens to whoever was speaking. "Yes, sir," she finally adds after a few moments, looking at Loki. "The girl is conscious," she tells him. "Director Fury is asking if you'd be willing to speak with her."

"Here," Stark says, toying with one of the glass panels that seems to be technological as well. Suddenly, a moving image of Lady Anna appears on the glass surface. She stands now where she had once been writhing on the cage floor, and with the exception of the slightly wrinkled uniform she had apparently stolen, the slight dampness on her forehead and the mess her large curls had become, her body shows no other signs of the torture she had undergone. And her eyes, when they open, are an obvious blue hue instead of the brown shade Loki had seen in the stilled image of her—a brown that matches the coloring of Stark's eyes.

"She has been broken," he murmurs, feeling conflicted. While he dislikes seeing the proof of her defeat and wishes she had been spared the horrors she must be witnessing under Thanos's hand, he is also grateful that he himself was no longer the one to bear the burden of being Thanos's vessel. 'Twas his fault, Loki knows, for acting too slowly in his attempt to send Thanos's energy to another dimension. It had given his former captor the chance to take Lady Anna.

"She can still be saved, right?" Banner asks him. "I mean, she saved you, Loki. There has to be some way to get Thanos out of her too."

"There is," Loki nods. "I know of several spells to exorcise the excess energy held within—"

"So why haven't you?" Stark demands, looking both confused and angry at the same time. For the first time, Loki wonders if the reason the man was so concerned was because he had actually deduced Lady Anna's parentage. If so, then even a master trickster had to tread carefully, for one with Stark's brilliant mind was clearly not to be trifled with, especially in regards to his heir.

"'Tis a complicated matter, Lord Stark." Appealing to the mortal's sense of entitlement might help a little, yes? "Thanos has lived a long life, and so his energy would be greater than Lady Anna's. The spell most powerful enough to exorcise Thanos requires the body to recognize its original soul, but I fear that instead of expelling Thanos, the body might not consider Lady Anna's energy as its own. In that case, Lady Anna's energy would become the excess, and the body would expel it instead."

"Huh." He doesn't show it, but Loki can tell that Stark is dejected. Perhaps he has deduced Lady Anna's true parentage—a dangerous prospect, considering the rule of traveling to a time before one's conception. There were reasons why such rules had been put in place. "Fine. Whatever. So what now? Are you going to talk to her?"

Loki almost frowns in distaste, sensing the trickery the request was laced with. The leader known as Nicholas Fury wished to see how Thanos would react to him, to see whether Loki could either trick or wring the details of Thanos plans from his borrowed lips. But that could also go both ways, as he perhaps wished to see how Loki would handle an encounter with his former captor, to determine how useful Loki could be against the warlord he'd earlier described.

In the end, Loki decides, "I see not how such an encounter would not be beneficial to us."

Stark sighs. "You know, you could just say, 'sure, I'd love to go see the bastard that possessed me and an innocent girl.'"

"The girl found a way onto the Helicarrier," Romanoff interjects. "She's not as innocent as you seem to think."

"Anna-girl invaded your home base," Stark smiles, openly expressing his amusement as the two agents subtly fought the urge to shift uncomfortably, "so your opinion about her is biased. I say that if the Purple Gas-Cloud hadn't turned her into his new joy-ride, she'd be standing right here with us, telling us how to stop the aliens before all hell can even hope to break loose."

Loki shakes his head at their petty fighting. "You'll forgive my manner of speech, Lord Stark," he replies dryly in response to Stark's previous statement. As he'd expected, the antagonism fades in the wake of his words. "I am a prince."

Stark grins widely. "Say Lord Stark again, would you?"

Coulson releases a huff of exasperation and amusement. "Loki, why don't you head down to the detention room with Agent Romanoff?"

Loki nods in agreement and follows the woman with blood-colored hair out the door, vaguely hearing Coulson tell his brother, Stark and Banner to follow him as he flexes his powers lightly. His body seems to have adjusted suitably enough to the additional amount of power running through his being, and part of him couldn't wait to test his new limits. The other part…

Well, he was going to face Thanos once more. The other part of him trembles.


Tony, Bruce and Agent arrives at the briefing room in time to see the show start. Fury, She-Minion and Capsicle are already there, and all five eyes don't even look away from the screen.

"Hello, Loki," Anna-girl's voice comes from the speakers hidden inside the table.

On-screen, Loki stops in the middle of the catwalk with a weird expression on his face. Tony doesn't really have a name for it, but he's seen it in the mirror since his return from Afghanistan. "And so you have broken," Loki murmurs.

A low hum travels the airwaves, and Anna-girl's lips stretch into a smile that tugs at something familiar in Tony's memories. "I hope you aren't disappointed," she says with a mocking pout. "You know how persuasive the Overmaster can be."

"Overmaster?" Tony scrunches his nose. "Really?"

"Shut it, Stark," Fury tells him.

"Indeed." Loki takes a step forward. "Lady Anna, can you still fight him?"

"Nope." Anna-girl shrugs. "He brought out the big guns for me. Apparently I'm some sort of prodigy for the mind arts, so he had to loosen my inhibitions or some shit." She smiles sweetly, and again, the sight of it has Tony struggling to remember where he'd seen her before because he swears he knows her from somewhere. "I was touched."

"I am sorry."

"What is he doing?" Fury growls. Tony rolls his eyes, but since the killjoy had told him to shut up, he vindictively doesn't explain that Loki—the wily bastard—is obviously poking at Anna's control, trying to see if she could slip them a clue like Loki had done once before.

"Oh, don't be." Anna-girl tilts her head, still smiling. "It's been very enlightening so far."

"Don't give up, my lady," Loki tells her, abruptly changing the topic. It irks a few certain people all-too-clearly. Meaning Fury and his neatly-pressed disciples. "I will do everything in my power to free you as you had me."

Anna-girl's smile becomes sharper, her eyes narrowing dangerously. "You can try." She holds a hand out and somehow makes a ball of gold and pinkish light flicker to life above her palm. "Thanos is teaching me a lot of your neat little tricks, dear mischief-maker. I wonder how much magic it would take for my soul to turn as black as your shadow."

Tony doesn't bother hiding his smug smile, because he'd totally called it. Now they know that she was learning magic.

"Thanos will never let you go—" Loki looks pained for a second, "—just as he would not have let me go."

"That's true. But you know what?" Anna-girl stands from the small bench she'd been perched on and begins walking towards Loki. "He likes me a lot better than he liked you."

"Indeed?" Loki shifts, spreading his feet wider as if preparing for an attack.

"Indeed," Anna-girl mocks, stopping inches from the glass door. "You see, he showed me what he did to you—" and at that Loki rears back, looking aghast, "—and honestly? That was nothing compared to what he had to do to me."

That seems to make something in Loki snap. "Truly?" he sneers. "And what, pray tell, did he do to you that was worse than the tortures he had me endure?"

"Romanoff, get—"

"No, don't!" Tony snaps, annoyed yet again. Fury stops and gives him a narrow-eyed look that might have been a glare, but only made him look weird. "Just watch."

"…never mind, Agent Romanoff. Stay where you are." Fury puts his hand down. "You better be right about this, Stark."

Tony snorts. "Please. This is me we're talking about."

On the screen, Anna-girl's smile had returned. "Well, for one—he never touched my body. Not like he did yours, Loki Laufeysson." Beside Bruce, Thor hisses and clenches his fists angrily, his anger turning his face red.

"And so what horrors has he made you think you've done?" Loki scoffs, trying and failing to not show how her words were affecting him. "Did you pierce the heart of your father? Crush your brother with his own weapon? Strangle your mother until life faded from her eyes? Rape and butcher your closest friends?"

"Loki…" The anger had drained completely from Thor now, and he was pale and appalled instead.

"Tell me, dear lady," Loki hisses, his eyes actually flashing red. "What frights has he made you do that he's not shown me?"

"I ate the one I loved the most."

"Okay," Tony mutters as on-screen-Loki grimaces. "Gross."

Anna-girl rests a hand lightly on the glass, leaning in as if she was sharing a child's secret. "I strapped him on our dining table, sat on his back and carved him by the joints." Her other hand comes up and slices imaginary lines across her wrist, elbow and shoulder. "And when he promised to kill me with his bare hands, I chewed on his fingers and sucked the marrow from his bones."

"This can't be still PG," Bruce murmurs, and Tony doesn't blame him for looking disgusted. He himself could feel the bile rising at the back of his throat.

"He begged for me to stop and let him go. He said he'd love me more, that he'd quit taking on jobs and stay at home and be with me. So I took a hammer and put a nail through his tongue to get him to stop talking. He writhed underneath me, screaming, 'Anna, please, it's me, Cl—' Argh!" Anna-girl's eyes suddenly widen, briefly flashing to her normal brown color before turning back to the unnatural blue hue. Her body bows down, hand squeaking as it slid down the glass.

Through the revulsion he felt at the monologue, Tony chuckles. "Gotcha," he murmurs smugly, feeling proud and glad that Anna still had even a modicum of control over what Thanos could and couldn't say using her body.

"So," Loki drawls, smirking as he drops the act he had been playing, "how goes your attempt to control the girl, Overmaster?" Thor chuckles at the obvious taunt, relaxing as he realizes that Loki had been in control of the situation all along.

"She has her mother's unbreakable spirit." The idiot possessing Anna-girl's body laughs and straightens up. "And her father's impertinence."

Loki smirks. "A trying combination, I am sure."

"It is," Thanos agrees unexpectedly. "I've never had a more difficult host."

Tony notices Thor twitch at the dig against Loki, but the dark-haired god doesn't even seem to notice the insult. "She'll never succumb to you."

"Perhaps," Thanos allows. "But I'm learning from my mistakes as I never have before. She's a marvelous teacher, your Lady Thorsdót—" Again, Anna-girl's body seizes, cutting Thanos off.

The table suddenly rattles as Thor launches himself off his chair and out of the room. Loki turns sharply to look at the camera. "Damn!" he exclaims, running off and disappearing from sight.

Tony takes his cue from there and drags Bruce up with him. "C'mon!" he says, rushing after the so-called god of thunder. "Party's this way!"


When the detention room fades from her view again, Anna finds herself back where they had left off.

Thanos hadn't been lying to Loki. The bastard really had been showing her all the things he'd done to the second prince of Asgard—from the mental tortures to the physical. The physical had proven more effective on Loki, especially when Thanos threw him into what seemed to be a lava pit.

But beyond the horror stories that summed up Loki's time as Thanos's esteemed guest…

Tiny balls of lights flicker to life above her palm, swirling around like tiny rainbow-colored fireflies. Across her, Thanos hums proudly. "Very good, Anna," he tells her. "Very good indeed."

Hesitantly, Anna looks down at her creation, and smiles as well.


Notes:

I actually skipped a lot of context by taking out a good portion of Anna's POV, because if I put it in here, then the story would start to focus on Anna herself instead of the Avengers. It's not that I hate Mary Sues, but I do know when the story shouldn't focus on Anna or her sufferings unless it provides real progress to the story. Besides, we can make a story out of that angle if I ever write a sequel.

Overmaster: This is one of Thanos's canon titles. I discovered it in Thanos's page at comicvine-dot-com.

Anna eating Clint: This is part of Thanos's strategy, because the arrogant bastard needs her to be submissive long enough to dangle a more enticing activity than torturing/killing Clint in her face: a respite from mental torture and, as seen above, learning magic. That one will be in the next few chapters.