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Chapter Twenty Four

Harry shook his head ruefully.

"I'm a big boy, I can go in by myself." He told the people standing off to the side of the doorway.

Cap shook his head in the negative. "Sorry, Gle-Harry. He was bent on taking over the world two days ago, so we're not risking it. And are you sure you should even be out of bed right now?"

Harry leaned against Sleipnir, ignoring Fenrir's nosing at his hair from where he was perched on his brother's broad back, "I fought in a battle between worlds only minutes after coming back from the dead." He reminded them dryly. "I think it won't hurt me all that much to have a conversation with someone a full day after I passed out. My magic is back at peak levels, I promise."

Thor crossed his arms, and scowled protectively. "The last time you spoke to my brother in a situations like this, there wasn't much talking going on. I believe you turned him into a giant slug. If it was a lack of magic that caused you to faint, then I am wary of allowing you to use any more for a while."

Harry's eyes widened, and he huffed in indignation. Fenrir placed his paws on the wizard's shoulder. "First, please say 'pass out' or something. Fainting makes me sound like a girl. Second, there's no 'allowing me to use my magic'. I am eight hundred years old. No matter how young I look, remember that I am no child, and whether I use magic or not is not for you to allow, Thor Odinsson." He said sternly.

The god blinked, and hunched slightly, properly chastised. "I- no- I'm sorry, it's just..."

The wizard sighed and ran his hand through his hair. "I know, you were worried. But you don't need to be." He looked at the two blond men who stood on either side of him. Bruce and Tony were still working on the transportation of the cube, and Natasha and Clint were back on the Helicarrier reporting to Fury or something. "Alright. You two can come in. But could you stay quiet, no matter what happens or is said? This is between me, the kids, and Loki." Thor's part in this would come later, once Loki had a long talk with their father. For now, the only bridges Harry was looking to cross (or burn) were those between the dark haired god and his estranged sons.

Cap nodded curtly. Thor paused, then repeated the action.

Harry sighed again, this time in relief, and turned to the door. He smiled slightly to the guards, before moving past them and leading the little entourage through the metal portal.

The room beyond was simple, almost spartan. A stool stood on one side of a large cell wall (most likely where another guard had been sitting before they arrived) on the other was a toilet, a sink, and a cot. The cot was where they found their goal sitting.

"Loki." Harry acknowledged.

The god looked up from where he had been staring at the floor. His face was a study of blankness, but the wizard could detect the slightest hint of nerves in his once again green eyes. "World-traveler." He said blandly.

"How are you enjoying SHIELD's hospitality?" Harry asked politely. Sleipnir moved to peer suspiciously over his shoulder, Fenrir leaped off his back and pressed himself against the bars of the cell, his nose cast in the air and his tail wagging happily.

"Father! Packmate helped father! Bad anger gone gone gone." The wolf sing-songed in his head.

Both dark haired humans looked at the wolf. "So your bond progressed that far with him." Loki murmured.

"Do not get my brother's exuberance wrong, there is still anger... but the pollution is gone. And the anger is not even as volatile as it was before his fall." Sleipnir told Harry. Loki's head whipped in his direction, and his green eyes widened.

He moved toward the bars, and stared at his children as if he was seeing them for the first time. "I was not even aware the horse was capable of speech." He commented.

Thor started, and shifted as if to go for his hammer. He quelled under Harry's glance.

"The horse's name is Sleipnir. You would do well to remember that. The wolf is Fenrir. Call them by their names if you're going to talk to them at all." The wizard said, fighting to keep his voice bland. "They're both brilliant, and capable of more than most give them credit for. It might be your genes shining through."

Loki shook his head, and frowned. "They are animals, not proper heirs. Not in the slightest."

Harry snorted, and casually leaned against Sleipnir. "You know, I'm not good with regime lines and all that, but I figured that the Asgardian throne, like most I've seen, pass on to the older brother, not the younger, so, whether they're fit heirs or not... a point on which I disagree with you anyway, isn't relevant. Not unless there's a few deaths ahead of them." He commented, his voice polite.

Loki looked ready to snarl something, but between one second and the next, he deflated. "Even if it were not so, I would no longer be in the running for the Asgardian throne. Odin would not accept me back after..."

The wizard shrugged. "Oh, you would probably be surprised at what Odin would and would not do. But... I guess it's not my place to talk about this, hm? You'll be seeing him soon enough. No, this chat is all about you," He motioned to the captured man, "And them." The hands moved to indicate the animals.

He was weighing Loki now, though the god did not know it. Weighing his worth as a parent. He had done so many times before. If the other man came up short, if Harry couldn't bring him around to seeing his offspring as they were, and not failed experiments well... Slugzilla would be considered almost pleasant compared to the things he could do and had done to purposely and repeatedly negligent parents that had refused to change.

Loki crossed his arms, "And why do you even care if I reconcile with... them? Tell me that, world-walker."

Fenrir danced around Harry's feet, looking at his father, "This is packmate!" He introduced, unaware, it seemed, of the tension between 'packmate' and 'father'. "Packmate is good! Packmate take care of us and fix father!"

Harry smiled wanly down at the prancing creature. He knew that if he had to make it so that the two never had contact with Loki again to protect them, it would devastate the wolf. He was not looking forward to it.

Loki frowned and tilted his head slightly.

The wizard jumped when a thought struck him, causing his silent protectors to jump too, and go for their weapons. A glance from Harry had them settling back into their ready stances, though. "Hey, if you can hear them talking to me over the link, can you hear what I'm thinking?" He demanded, more interested than worried.

The Frost Giant looked unimpressed. "I cannot actually tell what... they are saying over your 'link', I can just sense the passage of messages over the bond."

"Oh, like the traveling of electric current over phone lines. That's interesting, actually. We'll have to discuss that more, when we all get back to Asgard."

He tilted his head towards Sleipnir to address a question where the god would not hear, "So... he doesn't have a link with you two? I mean, because you can both hear each other and me through the link, if he was also connected he would be able to do the same, right?"

"Why do you think he would allow himself to sink so low as to have any sort of link to us lowly creatures?" Sleipnir tossed his head. Harry could tell that no matter how well today went, any problems that lay between the god and horse would take more than one talk to get through.

"Well, he is your father, I just thought..."

Sleipnir's sigh was gusty in his mind, "Any link he had with us from birth... he willingly broke himself not long after." His answer was reluctant.

Harry forgot himself. "What?" He yelped out loud. "But with most links like that, breaking them would mean-"

"Extreme physical pain for both sides, and acute mental weariness for weeks after? Had I known that before hand, I may have been more reluctant. But the pain lessened with each broken connection, until I barely felt it." Loki said, and found himself pinned with burning eyes an admittedly brighter shade than his own.

"You bastard." Harry hissed, picking up Fenrir and drawing him to his chest. "Do you know what you put them through, when they were just infants? What damage you could have done to their minds? Did it not occur to you that your age and mental acuity protected you from a good deal more of the backlash than they experienced? Now I'm going to have to betray both of their privacy to make sure your ripping at important paths in their minds didn't damage all of them irrevocably?"

He turned away from the god, seething. Fenrir whined in confusion. "We're done here." The wizard growled to his bodyguards, and stormed out the door, followed by a contemplative Sleipnir and two very confused blond men.

None of them looked back, so none of them saw the shock and the beginnings of remorse on the god of mischief's face.

He was silent all the way back to Stark Tower, brushing off any attempts to speak to him while he pet both wolf and horse soothingly.

It was obvious that Loki was no master of the mind arts. He couldn't have had any idea what sort of damage he was doing to the children he didn't care anything about. Harry just wondered furiously that even had he known at the time, would it have mattered?

When they arrived, he barely acknowledged Bruce's and Tony's greetings, leading his two animal companions to his room. He didn't hear hear Thor and Steve try to explain the situation to them the best they could.

He had more important things to worry about. He closed the door and called, "Jarvis, could you make sure no one bothers me?"

"Certainly, Mr. Potter." he AI answered.

Harry sat heavily on the bed, and settled Fenrir on his lap while Sleipnir stood nearby. "Alright, I'm going to explain all of this, but first we need one more member of the party. Hel! Got any free time?"

He felt a weight land beside him on the bed. "For my favorite Master of Death? Sure. I'm all yours." She said, and he smiled wanly at her.

Taking a deep breath, he delved into the explanation. "Alright, so... Hel, I'm not sure if you had a connection with him from birth, seeing as how you're not animalistic in base nature, but Fenrir, Sleipnir, and most likely Jormungand, were born with a mental connection with your father. The main purpose of this connection was so that, if they were ever in possible distress, they would be able to notify him immediately."

The girl nodded and settled herself more comfortably for story time.

"Most magical animals are born with this connection to their patriarch. They establish it in vitro to both parents. Unfortunately, from what I understand, both your mother and Sleipnir's sire were both killed by Loki, right?"

Hel nodded sadly. "Yeah, once he saw us, he decided it had to be her fault and killed her."

Harry placed his hand on hers for a second before withdrawing it to continue. "Anyway, so this connection usually wears thin over time, breaking naturally by itself once the child considers itself old enough to be independent. Breaking it too soon, though, often has dangerous repercussions for the child. Loki broke all connections to any of you, not only before they were ready to be broken, but when they were strongest. The backlash from doing so would have caused a great deal of both mental and physical pain, and would tear at the infant's neural connectors viciously, sometimes resulting in instant death."

Hel gasped and sat forward, her expression thunderous. She glanced down at Fenrir, who did not seem to be following the conversation very well and had spent most of it gnawing on Harry's shoe. Sleipnir clopped his foot on the ground in agitation at the announcement.

"So he could have killed them before they even had a chance to live?" She grumbled. Then stood, intentions clear in every line in her body.

"Sit back down, Hel. You're not allowed to kill your father, and you know that."

She plopped back down with a mutinous expression, and crossed arms. "But I could maim him irreparably." She grumbled, scowling when he shook his head. "Fine. Why is he not dead already?"

"Mainly because I'm trying to convince myself that he had no idea that what he'd done was possibly lethal. But if find out he knew very well what he was doing... well..." His eyes flashed, and sparks flew a short distance from them. "Then feel free to do what you will with the pieces of him I leave behind when I'm done with him."

Hell sat back, and her answering grin was vicious. "That's all I ask for."

When both calmed their anger sufficiently, Harry described to her what a broken connection like that would feel like, and she assured him that she would look for signs, and upon finding any present herself for a few sessions of heavy mind healing.

She disappeared, and Harry smiled grimly at Sleipnir. "I won't do this without your permission, Sleipnir. I would need to delve through a lot of your mind, and spend a few hours reconnecting and healing any connections that were damaged."

"You never said how this sort of damage would affect us." The horse pointed out.

"Well, it's different in most cases, but you've heard about animals who were calm and peaceful just suddenly snapping with no warning?"

"I have witnessed it once, with a nag in Odin's stable. They put her down."

Harry flinched slightly. "Well, it won't come to that here. We caught it in time. But what happened there was a main connection, one from rational thoughts to action, eroded so much it snapped."

"So it is possible I, or Fenrir, will do the same?"

Harry nodded sadly.

"Then I give you consent for both myself, and my brother in his stead. He's too young to understand what's going on." The horse tossed his large head. "I... trust you."

I'M ALIVE! I am sooo sorry about the sudden dropping off the face of the Earth. My family life has been hectic to say the least over the past... oh, God, three months? Wow! Anyway, I've barely touched a computer, but I'm back now! This is an idea I've been kicking around recently, and I really meant for this chapter to be a lot more upbeat, but... well... Anyway! Chapter twenty four, my most sincere apologies, and a more trusting relationship between Harry and Sleipnir, while Loki has been a bad boy long before he hit the silver screen. I feel as if I packed a bit more into this chapter than originally intended...

Lionna