"Wait here," Loki told Thor, as they rounded the Brooklyn street corner onto the road the Burrow squatted on.
"Why? What about our father? What are you planning? Loki, if you think you're going to be able to escape me again –" Thor warned, jabbing a large finger in his brother's face.
Loki batted it away. "I have an errand to run," he replied irritably. The dusty Earth air was getting under his skin. "Don't wander off."
Before Thor could protest any more, Loki marched away up the street to the familiar squat, red-brick building. The usual burly, tattooed thugs were hanging around outside – one looked up from his copy of The Financial Times to glare at him.
"What do you want?" he asked in a thick Staten Island accent, as his companion closed his copy of Crime and Punishment with a frown.
"Get Gw – Mouse," Loki said, folding his arms. "Don't worry. I'm not planning on hanging around."
The larger one nodded to the smaller, who put his battered paperback down and slipped inside. "We've been told to break your nose if we see you round here," he said.
"Charming. What's stopping you?"
The man shrugged, and rustled his newspaper. "Don't wanna get turned into a frog."
"I've never –" Loki began, and gave up. "How's Wall Street?"
"I don't like what they're doing with equity collars," the man said, not looking up from his newspaper. "It's too risky, what with China."
"Really?" Loki asked. "I would have thought that the Chinese situation made the change imperative."
"Well," said the man, "you would, wouldn't you?"
The door opened and Gwen came out, leaning on her stick. Loki had forgotten just how dark her eyes were; how they seemed to pull light into them, like black holes. She'd lost some weight since he had last seen her. She hadn't been this thin since he had picked her up off of the streets. Loki started to wonder if she was eating well, before having to remind himself that he didn't care.
"Go to hell," she said.
"Where's my father?"
"Huh?"
"I left him with you. Or did you forget?"
She glared at him. "Shady Acres care home," she said. "Walk five blocks north, turn left, follow the big street until you reach a Macy's and go right. Anything else?"
"No," said Loki, and turned around – directly into his brother, who had somehow managed to sneak up behind him without him noticing. He must have been distracted.
"Hello," he said cheerfully, as though he hadn't just been berating Loki. "I'm Thor."
"I know," said Gwen, looking very unimpressed. Loki couldn't help but smirk at that.
Thor looked between the two of them. "Am I… missing something?" he asked, and Loki rolled his eyes so hard that it hurt his optic nerve.
"Ask your dickhead brother," Gwen said. "Bye."
And then she slammed the door in their faces.
Thor turned to Loki. "Well?" he asked.
Loki jumped to the bottom of the stone steps and took off down the street. "I thought you wanted to see our father," he said.
"I do," Thor replied, running after him. "But I also want to know who that woman was. What did you do to piss her off? Did you stab her?"
"No. I barely stab anymore."
Thor caught up. "You can't hide things from me, brother," he said, and Loki raised an eyebrow at him. "Well… apart from all of your evil schemes and false deaths. But I will get this out of you!"
"No, you won't."
They bickered all the way to the retirement home.
%
Gwen drummed her fingernails on her desk as she waited for Dr Strange to pick up the phone. Seeing Loki had put her on edge, and now her heart was hammering in her chest. God, he made her so angry. He always had and, most likely, he always would. What had she ever seen in him apart from a selfish, insufferable –
Someone just as sharp and clever and quick as her. Someone who didn't care for her multitude of sins. Someone who understood.
"Hello?" said an unctuous voice on the other end of the phone, and Gwen jerked out of her reverie.
"It's me," she said.
"Who? How did you get this number?"
"Guess. The Odinsons are in New York again," she told him. "They're going to visit their father."
"Ah," said Strange. "Right. About that…"
Gwen gritted her teeth. "What?" she growled.
"There was some kind of spell on him, scrambling his senses so that he didn't break free and go wandering unsupervised. And… I was having a poke around inside his head, just to see what kind of magic it was because as Sorcerer Supreme, it is my grave responsibility to –"
"Get to the point, Gandalf."
"He's gone."
"Gone? Gone where?!"
"Norway," Strange replied. "It was either that or somewhere off-planet, and I can't keep an eye on him there. I was going to tell you, but I thought you might stab me, or something."
"I don't stab people," she snapped. Not recently, at any rate. Not without due reason, certainly. "Couldn't you just stick the spell back on him and chuck him back in the home?"
"That home is being demolished as we speak and besides, it would have seemed cruel to do such a thing to a dying man."
"Well, it'd solve a lot of my – wait," she said. "He's… Odin's dying?"
"Yes. It's why I let him go."
"Shit," Gwen said. "Bollocks. Fuck."
"What?"
"Nothing. Thanks for letting me know," she said, and hung up before Strange could say anything else. Odin dying was almost definitely not good. Loki had told her about the weakening of the walls around Asgard when he had been in Odinsleep, and that wasn't nearly as bad as this. Also, Loki's father going AWOL while terminally ill under Gwen's care wouldn't make the Norse mischief god too happy with her.
Not that I give a damn, she reminded herself hastily.
Before her brain got any more smart ideas about her feelings, she stood up, walked into her bedroom and pulled The Compleat Hiftory of Afgard out from under her bed. She flipped through it until she found the pages on Odin. The spine was still stiff, here; it did not appear that Loki had read this particular part too much before. It must be pretty weird to see your dad in a textbook. Gwen, whose father had done nothing more historically significant than impregnate her mother, could not relate. The golden text glimmered and swirled around the page, resolving itself into new paragraphs as though it knew that she was reading it.
Death, one of them began with. Beneath it there was a very unpleasant illustration of Odin lying flat on a golden slab, with a hideous black-and-green creature crouched on his chest. It looked a little bit like Loki, but its horns were not gold but black and jagged and appeared to be growing straight out of the thing's head.
When the Allfather beat back the darkness, the book read, and made his golden kingdom, he used his life force to create a shield to protect the Nine Realms. Should his All-Seeing Eye close forever, this shield should falter and fail and the world will once again be at threat from those creatures he fought so heroically to defeat.
It read more propaganda than it did history. "You're lying to me," Gwen murmured, running her fingers across the page. The ink seemed to shudder in offence. "If you won't tell me the truth, then I'll go to someone who will."
She closed the heavy tome with difficulty, kicked it back under the bed and stood up. "JAMES!" she hollered, so loud that the Rats in the basement heard it and exchanged worried glances.
He appeared within the minute. "What is it?" he asked, as Gwen changed into her sneaking-around boots and pulled her coat on.
"I'm going away for a while," she said. "I'm not sure when I'll be back. Don't wait for me. There's instructions in my bottom drawer for you, Bobby and Ben." She unhooked her knife harness from the bed's headboard and fiddled with the buckles. "Don't do anything stupid while I'm gone."
"Gwen," he said as she grabbed her cane from the bedside cabinet. "What's going on?"
"You've never called me Gwen before," she said, stopping for a moment. "James…"
"Yes?"
"Thank you. For everything." She hugged him, rising onto tiptoe just to be able to reach beyond his waist. "Look after yourself."
"Gwen, wait –"
The purple crystal was already in her hand. The last thing she saw was James' worried face before the world turned to a violet rush and she went a long, long way from home.