"They left you here all by yourself?" a woman frowned, slinking into the lab room.

Bruce Banner looked up in confusion. Who was she? Her hair was messy, probably self-cut, and she pointed with a coffee cup that looked like it had seen better days. Banner shook his head, looking back down at his work. "Uh, yeah looks like. I guess they didn't need me. It's just a little round-up. I would probably make too much of a mess."

The woman pursed her lips and stared at the holo-monitor. A grid map jolted and shuddered, searching desperately for something. She assumed it sought the Tesseract. That was why Banner was up here in the first place. "What is this looking for?"

"It's tracking gamma radiation data. Hunting down the cube. Not to be rude, but, who are you, exactly?"

So it was for the Tesseract. Teagan nodded, continuing to watch the map. "Teagan Hill. I basically run the project that needs that cube. One of the projects, anyway."

Banner nodded quietly. "Oh. You're young. Does everyone start young in S.H.I.E.L.D.?"

Teagan quirked something of a grin. "You'll never believe how long I've been here."

Banner stayed quiet, preferring to study the same algorithms over and over again. He had nothing to do until they secured the cube. If all he was needed for was a math equation, he could have emailed it to them.

"I was there when the place exploded," Teagan said suddenly. Banner peered at her over the rims of his glasses. She hardly seemed affected by whatever explosion she meant. "When that guy came through the cube. They sent me out first in the evac because I was 'more valuable'. I couldn't collect my data in time and lost all of it. Sometimes it's hard to remember what I'm here for and then these things happen. You know, I'd only been there three weeks before the place crumbled. I got my own research lab and test facility and everything and there it went."

"I think that's the life of anyone," Banner offered. "You do a crap ton of work only to have it blow up in your face and you have to start over."

Teagan chuckled. "I think I could get along with you."

"Really," he said with some sarcasm.

"I'm changing the world, Dr. Banner, and the whole place hates me. Though, the feeling is mutual. You should be honored."

He rolled his jaw. "Okay."

"Do you believe in a god?" Teagan asked.

"What?"

"Do you worship a deity, have a faith, anything like that?"

Banner stumbled for the right words. This was a landmine of debate that he did not want to participate in. "No, uh, no. But I don't have anything against religion. People should be allowed the comfort of having it."

"Even if it's a lie?"

Banner put his hands up in defeat. "I really don't want to be a part of this. I just want to work in peace. I'd really appreciate it if you either didn't talk anymore or left."

Teagan offered something of a smile and walked out. As she wandered back to her own lab, her pocket buzzed. Coulson left her a text message. "They found him. Turn on your screen. BIRD-0021-CAM-7836084-91." She shut herself in her lab, pulled up the camera, tipped her empty coffee mug to her lips.

There he was, that bastard thief who destroyed her work. A mass of people knelt before him. He cornered them all in the square. The camera shuddered. Somehow, Teagan was seeing double. No, she saw quadruple. Four horned bastards preached to this crowd of Germans in crisp English. Teagan scoffed. This was Thor's brother, the man who smashed Puente Antiguo? Even from this distance, he was a twig. He called himself a god; he certainly had a god complex. A man stood to defy him. The horned thief raised his weapon. Teagan would have choked on her coffee had she any left. She quickly zoomed on the weapon. The staff. The picture was thankfully clear, being of S.H.I.E.L.D. design. The jewel set in the center bore an uncanny resemblance to her Tesseract. The bolt he sent off made her pale.

"Tell them to get that staff. That's got to be linked to the Tesseract and he wields it like a weapon." Teagan swallowed heavily and waited for a reply. None came.

The quinjet drew into view of the thief. Natasha Romanoff's voice blared over the camera mike as she presumably aimed the rifle. "Loki, drop the weapon and stand down." Teagan thought she saw him smirk; the camera jolted quickly. Romanoff apparently anticipated his attack. Teagan didn't know he'd sent off any sparks until they whizzed past the camera. The quinjet slid back into position, trying to zero in on the horned thief. "The guy's all over the place," Romanoff muttered. Rogers and Loki tossed each other around. Teagan felt like she was going cross-eyed just watching them.

"Agent Romanoff, you miss me?"

Teagan curled her upper lip. Stark overpowered the PA system and blasted ACDC. It distracted the two on the ground long enough for Stark to make his entrance. And attempt to blast a hole through Loki's chest. "Make your move, Reindeer Games."

Teagan was somehow thankful terrible nicknames were not reserved for just her.

Loki sized up his opponents and held up his hands. His armor practically melted off of him. Teagan immediately pulled up a screen for Norse Mythology. She should have done this the moment she learned about Thor. She picked up the basic profile. Loki was a trickster of a god, a shape shifter and a con man. He got around – had at least five children with four different mothers. (In the case of the horse child, Loki was the mother.) He had a knack for screwing up people's lives and upsetting the world balance. He caused the Asgard apocalypse, and was said to be chained to a rock with the entrails of his kid to be blinded with snake poison. Teagan closed the page. At least one of those were wrong. He was most certainly not blind.

Besides, the cube said nothing about this version of Loki myth.

҉

"Father, we cannot be patient anymore."

Odin sat in silence.

Thor struggled to contain himself; to be better, he had to act better, and acting was not his talent. He took a deep breath.

"We must recover the Tesseract before any damage is released on Earth. You know other realms will come to take Midgard if they see they are valuable. Loki is not himself, father. This is unlike him. He seeks war where he used to seek a friend. I understand there is a code to be upheld. If you allow me to bring them back, Loki and the Tesseract, I will not hinder you from punishing him."

Odin's good eye snapped up, searing through his son. "Do you seek to stop Loki's schemes because you fancy a woman?"

Thor held his father's gaze. "I seek to stop him because he is my brother, and he is not himself."

"If you bring him back, he will be a war criminal. He aids the enemy. He will rot in chains. Are you prepared to be the cause?"

"If it is what I must do," he murmured remorsefully.

Odin stood from his seat in the council room, raising Gungnir. A cold sort of magic began to swell in the room. It drained any notion of happiness Thor once held. It made him feel desperate and lonely and incapable of his task. Even the light itself seemed to be swallowed by the dark energy. When sufficient magic was summoned, Odin sent his son to Midgard. There was a loud pop, a crash; Thor was gone, and with him, the feeling of oppression. Odin wearily sat back in his seat. He wheezed and coughed and summoned the maids for wine and meat. They brought him his favorite goblet and a plate of fresh roast. They played him music and sang bittersweet songs and told stories of old battles. Odin did not have the strength to listen. He sent his ravens through the void to follow Thor and watch his movement. If the golden haired prince was to go back on his word, Odin would have no choice but to label him as a war criminal as well.

As Thor barreled through Midgard's clouds, he had a strange thought. What if they could go back and do everything again? What if anger and fear and hatred were not needed? What if they could have lived peacefully as a family? These were strange thoughts indeed, as Thor was not accustomed to wondering about what could have been. They plagued his heart and made him unhappy. He wrote it off as a side-effect of the dark energy. Besides, there was never any use in worrying about what-ifs. This path was already set in stone. Things could never go back and be fixed, and Thor could not waste any more time on these thoughts.

He lit up the sky with his lightning. A small black something cut through the clouds. On it, the mortals kept Loki. It reminded Thor of the archaic models of a personal flyer, though flatter and without topside propellers. He landed heavily on the roof, shaking the flyer. It shuddered under him, and bowed slightly under the sudden weight. The rear hatch opened; Thor dropped inside. Loki sat harnessed into a seat, guarded by a man in red and another in blue. The red aimed to strike. Thor had no time for him, pushed him away as gently as he could under his tried patience, grabbed his brother by the neck, and flew out of the flyer.

It wasn't much of a flight, really. Thor dropped his brother onto a rocky cliff, hoping to snap the sense into him. There was no change. Loki groaned heavily to be dropped on his back at such a speed.

"Where is the Tesseract?" Thor asked.

Loki laughed. "Oh, I missed you, too."

"Do I look to be in a gaming mood?" Thor growled.

Loki picked his head up. In the dimness of the night, Thor could see how pale he was, how the scars hid under the collar of his cloak, how a layer of cold sweat clung to him like an illness. "Oh, you should thank me," he grunted, struggling to sit up. "With the Bifrost gone, how much dark energy did the All-Father have to muster to conjure you here to your precious Earth?" he spat. His head spun as he pulled himself on his feet. Even with the staff out of his hands, Siv still whispered to him.

Thor dropped his hammer and grabbed Loki by the back of his neck. "I thought you dead," he muttered.

Loki studied him down the bridge of his nose. "Did you mourn?" he tested flatly.

"We all did," Thor nodded. "Our father –"

Loki held up a finger. "Your father," he corrected. Thor was stunned into silence. Loki shrugged him off. "He did tell you my true parentage, did he not?"

Thor stood by as Loki hobbled away, holding his back.

"We were raised together," Thor insisted desperately. "We played together, we fought together!" Still, Loki walked away from him. The betrayal squeezed Thor's already aching heart. "Do you remember none of that?"

Loki paused, turned. Something was not right about him, Thor noted, as Loki stared up coldly. If only he could hear the tormenting whispers, the curses, the lies Siv poured into her puppet. "I remember a shadow. Living in the shade of your greatness. I remember you tossing me into an abyss. I, who was, and should be, king!" he spat.

"So you take the world I love as a recompense for your imagined slights?" Loki reared at Thor's words. "No. The Earth is under my protection, Loki."

Loki chuckled menacingly. "And you're doing a marvelous job with that. The humans slaughter each other in droves while you idly fret. I mean to rule them, and why should I not?"

"You think yourself above them?"

Loki blinked in confusion. "Well, yes."

"Then you miss the truth of ruling, brother. A throne would suit you ill."

Loki bared his teeth and pushed Thor away to pace the cliff. He saw Odin's ravens, Hugin and Munin, circling around. Thought and Memory. How ironic that Thor tried so desperately to restart Loki's familial attachment with such grotesque things. He had all he needed already – aside from Midgard under his thumb, but that was fast approaching.

"I've seen worlds you've never known about!" Loki snarled. "I have grown, Odinson, in my exile. I have seen the true power of the Tesseract, and when I wield it –"

"Who showed you this power?" Thor asked. When did Loki stop seeing the cube as Siv? When did he begin to degrade it, deny its conscience, destroy its emotions? Was it the curse? Was it the shard that did these things to him? Or was it his allies, who ruined his heart beyond repair? Thor drew near. "Who controls the would-be king?"

"I am a king!" Loki roared.

"Not here!" Thor matched. He grabbed Loki once again. All of this stemmed from that mortal girl his brother once loved. Thor could take this no more. This was not Loki. This was not the man he grew up with. Thor found himself wishing things were different for a second time this evening. Thor would give anything to have his brother back. Even if that meant sacrificing what Loki once adored. Could the clever raven haired prince not see that if he did not change, Thor would have to destroy him?

"You give up the Tesseract! You give up this poisonous dream! You come home!"

For a moment, Loki could have cried. But he blinked back those strange emotions and shook his head. His voice became slick and treacherously playful. "I don't have it." Thor summoned his hammer in anger. "You need the cube to bring me home, but I've sent it off, I know not where."

"You listen well, brother," Thor growled, pointing at him with Mjølnir.

But whatever words Thor had for him were stolen away as a jettison of light rammed into his side, tossing him off the cliff.

"I'm listening," Loki said sarcastically.

҉

Fury snapped a hand out and held Stark back. "Are you telling me he just sat there while you three fought over him?"

Stark shrugged, smirking. "He's house trained."

Fury, Romanoff, and Teagan were thoroughly unamused.

"Look. You've got a squad of twelve boys with water pistols having a tea party with him in the quinjet. He's handcuffed with a couple of twisty ties someone snagged off the bread bags. You're going to parade him straight through your lab facilities without so much as a bat of your pretty little eyelashes for what could happen if he got loose down there. He's not secured until he's in the pit, and then what? We get to sit and watch him under the microscope? Fury, I'm not saying he let us take him, but he let us take him. You should have seen the way he looked while the golden retriever swung around his light-up toy. He was probably up there getting off on the fight. What's this guy all about, chaos? Deceit? If he's anything like the god he's supposed to be, we're two steps from hell."

"When did you ever care for theology?" Teagan asked, shooting him a glare. Even the simplest things made her despise him all the more.

Stark gave her a sarcastic smile. "I do my research when the opportunity is first given. Why don't you go get your tape recorder and jot down a few of L'oreal's favorite one-liners for your diary of doom? And who let you in here anyway, this is for the grownups."

Teagan curled her upper lip at him, ready to spit fire.

"Hill, why don't you team up with Thor in the cabin and write us up a report on what we should be expecting," Romanoff asked, breaking up the tension for one sacred moment. "We could really use it."

"Fine," she grunted.

"What, you can't let her do that, she's the baby on board, she doesn't know how to do anything but complain about higher powers."

"Get your fucking facts straight, I'm 26," Teagan snarled.

"Teargas, you need to check yourself before you wreck yourself."

Stark allowed her to punch him in the gut as she stormed past. He was surprised she had such a firm fist. "Don't touch me," he chuckled dryly, despite making no move to stop her.

Fury gave him a look.

"What?" Stark shrugged, open palmed.

"Keep riling up my lead theologist and you're gonna have a whole lotta crap hanging over your head from her babysitter."

"I'm not afraid of Coulson."

"Not yet you're not," Romanoff smiled.

"Well, what now?" Stark asked, ignoring her.

Fury jerked his head toward the hall. "I'm going to fetch our guest. You two get situated. And Stark?"

"Yeah?"

"Make sure you stir everyone up. I like my plans to go as wrong as possible."

Stark laughed. "You got it."

As Fury turned and headed for the tarmac, he couldn't help but feel a twinge of something one would liken to anxiety. Something was wrong. It was all wrong, actually. Thor was never supposed to come back. The facility was never supposed to blow up. The Tesseract was never supposed to be out of their hands. But Fury had been in his position for long enough to know that everything always went wrong. And very, very rarely, something went right. And that was what he knew to fear. If something went right, it was always the wrong thing.

҉

In all corners of the helicarrier, they watched Fury and the thief. Every S.H.I.E.L.D. agent not directly working watched the camera for the historic moment – the moment the humans captured a god. Even the busy ones heard the conversation through their ear pieces.

Loki rolled his eyes as the cage closed around him. Everything was so pristinely clean and white and sickly. Sickly like him, though he did not feel it.

"In case it's unclear," the director said, voice echoing though the empty corridors. "If you try to escape, if you so much as scratch that glass," – the floor underneath the cage opened, eagerly waiting to swallow the thief whole – "it's thirty thousand feet straight down in a steel trap. You get how that works?" Fury closed the gaping hole.

"Ant." He pointed to Loki.

"Boot." He pointed to the control panel.

Loki chuckled darkly, stepping into the center of the cage. He was illuminated with the cold white lights. "It's an impressive cage," he admitted. "Not built, I think, for me."

"Built for something a lot stronger than you."

"Oh, I've heard." Loki turned to grin at the camera that hounded his every move. "A mindless beast who makes play he's still a man. How desperate are you that you call on such lost creatures to defend you?"

"How desperate am I? You threaten my world with war. You steal a force you can't hope to control. You talk about peace, and you kill because it's fun. You have made me very desperate. You might not be glad that you did."

"Ooh," Loki breathed, "It burns you to have come so close. To have the Tesseract, to have power. Unlimited power. And for what? A warm light for all mankind to share. And then to be reminded of what real power is."

Fury allowed an empty grin. "Well, let me know if Real Power wants a magazine or something." And with that, he left Loki to his thoughts in that forgotten corner of the ship.

From her lab, Teagan felt swallowed by something she could not even begin to explain. She reached for her coffee mug, only to find that it was, unfortunately, still empty.

23:01

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