Disclaimer: Don't own.

Chapter Twenty Nine

Harry rubbed at his tired eyes roughly, and frowned at the gathered group of people that waited for them. A few of them were Asgardians who were just there to stare and whisper, but there were a number of them that...

"No." He grunted.

Thor returned his frown. "My brother was raised as a prince of Asgard, and is not used to-"

"Yes he is. He just spent Merlin knows how long without them. He is not bringing an entourage of servants to Earth. To his punishment. You're not, so why should he?" The wizard pointed out tiredly.

"If it makes any difference, it wasn't my idea." Loki added helpfully.

Harry just sighed.

Fury apparently decided that dealing with this was his problem. Probably his petulant way of pointing out that Harry made all of the decisions for this in the end. The dark skinned man stood off to the side, his arms crossed imposingly, pointedly ignoring the beings that were considered gods that were gathered around him.

"I am the Heir to the crown of Asgard, it was my father's wish that I learn to take care of myself without servants, as his father had him do before me."

"Don't care. Loki's not bringing servants. Sorry folks. Disperse, if you would." Without waiting for the order to be followed, the wizard motioned to the veritable wall of wooden trunks that were stacked around them. "This stuff everything you're taking, then?" He asked Loki. Really, he would have probably asked in a much more scathing tone, but he was too tired. Grudges were hard to keep a hold of when he felt like this. And he would have to be awake for a few hours more, to ready himself to follow the signal at sunrise.

The Asgardian nodded. Harry waved his wand halfheartedly, and the trunks all shrunk to much more manageable sizes, and floated into the bag that he held out for them. The servants he had dismissed still stood there, wavering uncertainly, but he ignored them, and just gestured the people he was taking back to Earth to stand in a group close enough that they could all touch him.

The four disappeared in a flash of light.

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Fury was dropped off without ceremony back at the still crippled Hovercarrier. Thor and Loki were both brought back to Stark Tower.

Harry sighed forlornly, looking at the door to his room. If he went in now, then he would be tempted to go to bed. Instead, he guided Loki to the room he had been assigned. The night was not over yet.

He ignored the Avengers, who had all thought that they were following the pair discreetly.

"This is your room. You will wake up at six each morning, and lights out at eleven each night. You will be working with a construction group that Tony managed to sign you up for. They don't know who you are, and if they find out because you told them, or you were too obvious about who you are, then you get to deal with the fallout from that. Your magic will be sealed, so don't even try it. Let's just say it'll be painful. I am not going to be around much for the next few weeks, and neither are the kids. I'll allow you an hour each day, supervised, with them if they want to see you. No doubt Fenrir will, and Sleipnir won't. Once I find Jormungand, he might. I don't know. We'll see. Hel might actually show up at some point, just to cuss you out, so that'll be fun. It's up to you if you want to mend those bridges, just know that you'll never get full custody of them again. Once you hurt children like that, you don't deserve to have them." Harry kept talking, even as his eyes drooped. He knew that he would start mumbling incoherently soon, and had to get all of the important stuff out of the way first. "You start your work tomorrow at eight, and finish for the day at four, at which point you'll be brought back here. What you do between four and lights out is up to you. I don't suggest irritating the others too much, as they are really good at holding grudges. Oh! Almost forgot, instead of coming straight here every Thursday, you'll be taken to a psychologist. You will talk to him, and you will tell him the truth. He knows most of your back story already, so don't even think about lying to him. He's had a lot of practice in dealing with liars." His wand was waved, and the trunks extracted themselves from his bag and resized themselves. "Feel free to unpack whenever."

Without waiting for a reply, or any reaction whatsoever, he walked out of the room, leaving the Asgardian alone. He needed coffee.

Loki was left alone in the room. He wondered around the suite, thinking to himself. This was good. This was just what he needed in order to convince the World Walker that he was worth protecting from what was coming. This was more than he could have expected.

But he was being made to work.

Loki sneered, and sat down on the provided bed. He knew what a 'construction group' was. Manual labor workers that he was going to be forced to join in order to 'repent' what he had done. It was shameful for a Prince such as him to do a thing like that. Not to mention the fact that he would have to do so by hand, as his magic had been thoroughly repressed somehow… and yet, he felt like that was not the only thing that the World Walker had in mind for him.

He lay back in the bed, and frowned at the ceiling. It was not too early to plot how this would all end…

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It had been years since he's spent more than two days in a row awake. Back when he was a soldier for some cause that he could no longer remember, he would have to be alert for days and days, the front lines were not the place to let your guard down for even a moment, much less the hours it took to properly rest.

He passed by his own room again. "JARVIS, you can let them out now." He told the AI, and the door slid open. Fenrir tumbled out, obviously having been leaning against it. Sleipnir followed him out at a more sedate pace. "Could you brew me a pot of coffee?" He addressed the AI again, picking up the pup and leaning against the horse.

His eyes felt gritty, and his mind felt like it was full of cotton. Three days with only an hour under his belt did bad things to everybody, add an exhausting bout of 'political pissing contest' and it was a wonder that he didn't just collapse where he stood.

"You were unusually gentle with him." Sleipnir pointed out. Harry wasn't surprised that he could hear his one sided conversation with Loki.

"Yeah, well, I'm not very good at staying angry. Sadly enough, I've seen people do things twenty times worse than what Loki did. I will never forgive him for what he did to you kids, but... I've seen one man obliterate entire civilizations... Next to that, what Loki did to Earth paled in comparison. It was bad, yeah, but it could have been so much worse." Harry shook his head. Trust him to get lost in bad memories when he was tired.

"What happened to him?" Sleipnir asked curiously. He realized that, though he thought he knew all there was to know about this two legger, he knew very little indeed.

"He was one of the few people that I couldn't rehabilitate, even if I wanted to. And at that point, I didn't want to. I had only been jumping for about three hundred years at that point. I killed him, and he killed me." He closed his eyes, remembering the rage of a being who knew that someone had bested him, and then the flash of triumph in the creature's eyes when he realized that though he was dying, so was Harry.

But the wizard moved on, waking up in a new world.

The destroyer had to have died there, on the floor of his own ship, as it burned around him.

"What was his name?"

Harry tilted his head back, thinking hard. "I-I don't really remember, it was so long ago... but I do remember what he was called. The Mad Titan."

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Harry sat on the couch his eyes staring blankly into nowhere, Fenrir curled in his lap asleep, Sleipnir standing in silent vigil beside him, as the sun finally broke past the horizon.

The signal came, and Harry's magic was poised and ready to follow it.

A tendril of his power followed the signal back to its source doggedly, and met with an alien consciousness that observed it with fascination. The magic shoved the information it carried at the source. Harry had imbued it with what who he was, and the basic facts of what was going on with the children and the rest of the planet. It also contained a warning about the presence of Loki on Earth.

The source felt distinctly amused, and Harry was allowed the details of how to find it, with the promise that they had much to talk about.

Coming back to himself, the wizard blinked sleepily.

The sun, outside the window, now hung high in the sky, proving that though it felt like the exchange had only taken moments, it had actually been a few hours since had connected with what could only have been Jormungand.

He ignored the Avengers, who were all ranged around him, talking quietly and staring curiously, and staggered to his room for a well-deserved rest with only a grunted, "Later."

They could wait for an explanation. He, on the other hand, could not wait for a nap.

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He slept solidly through the night, waking only at six o' clock in the morning in order to see that the agents that SHEILD had assigned to deal with Loki (Natasha and Clint, unsurprisingly) followed the routine they were supposed to with Loki.

Fenrir followed his father around, dancing around his feet joyfully. Harry wondered why the wolf pup still trusted the man. The wolf explained it in the broken and halting language of all toddlers who are just learning to speak.

"Father… came to see. Fenrir had no pack. Father was pack. Fenrir and father ran together."

Leaning idly back against the bar, Harry stared. So… Loki came to visit Fenrir, transforming himself into a wolf in order to run with the son that he had denied from birth. Why?

"Why visit Fenrir, but not any of the others? Sleipnir even lived at the same palace as you, and before you destroyed the Rainbow Bridge, you could have come easily to both Hel's Realm and Midgard." He asked the god out loud.

The god of Mischief paused in what he was doing, and looked from the pup that was prancing around him to the wizard that was standing across the room. Obviously the two had been talking over their mind link. He was torn. Telling the truth would most likely win him points with the only one who could most likely protect him from the doom that was bearing down on him, but… it showed a weakness of his. Something he was embarrassed about.

He took a sip of the hot liquid he had been inspecting before the World Walker had interrupted. It was apparently called coffee. He tasted it cautiously, taking his time in order to think through what he wanted to say. It was flavorful, rich and bitter, but also sweet. The World Walker had prepared it for him when he had expressed interest in it.

He remembered the anger that emanated from the shorter dark haired man at their last meeting before he had been taken back to Asgard, but it was absent now, replaced only by distrust. He wondered if it would be prudent to ask what had changed since then.

But it worked in his favor, really, and did he want to risk his life to protect his pride?

Finally, he decided that it was wiser to tell at least part of the truth. "I was always treated differently by the Asgardians. They are a dynasty of warriors, and prize strength over cunning. As a child, it was obvious that I would never grow to my brother's bulk, and that I was far more intelligent than was accepted. Their disdain of me was cemented by my talent in the arts of sorcery…" He did not know how to continue, but the World Walker nodded in understanding.

"So the only being that accepted you was the son you spurned. Makes you think, doesn't it?" He asked before walking away, leaving Loki to stand in the room they called a 'kitchen' alone.

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"So, there's another brat?" Tony asked. The Avengers were finally getting a full explanation for Harry's odd behavior over the past few days, and even the normally exuberant man had held his questions until the Wizard had finished describing the signal he had received.

"Are you surprised? I thought that, out of everyone here, you would be the first to read up on Norse mythology after discovering that you would be working with the literal God of Thunder." Harry said blandly.

Thor, who was trying to protect the leather strap of his hammer from a very persistent Fenrir, looked up at the mention of his title.

"Well, yeah, but… there is really a giant snake somewhere around here? I thought that at least some of those legends were complete bull shit!"

"Stark! Language!" Steve barked, glancing over at Fenrir.

Harry hid a grin behind his hand. Leave it to Cap to actually be one of the few people to think about what sort of thing the kids would pick up.

Tony shrugged and grinned sheepishly.

"Some of them are… ah… exaggerated. But really, you have proof living with you that the legends of two of Loki's children were true, why is it so shocking that the other two legends are as well?"

"Other two… wait, you mean that Loki's daughter Hel is real too?"

Harry laughed. "Oh yeah, remind me to introduce you two sometime. I think you'll get along famously."

Bruce sighed. "Do you really want to introduce Tony to someone that you think he'll 'get along famously' with? He's bad enough already."

Tony waved his hand. "You're just mad that I beat you at chess."

The other scientist smirked. "One time. Out of five." He pointed out.

"Ooh, that reminds me!" Without any sort of explanation, or even warning, Tony grabbed Bruce's arm and dragged him out of the room, heading in the direction of the lab.

"So you're going to go meet with a giant snake then?" Natasha's voice asked in his ear. Because the two agents were assigned to watching Loki while he made his reparations, they could not be physically there for 'story time' as Clint had called it. Luckily they all still had the communicators, so Harry wouldn't have to tell the whole thing twice.

"Yeah, but I'm not sure how this is going to turn out. Should be interesting, right?" He said. The rest of the group had already drifted away to go do their own thing.

Thor was playfully trying to keep his hammer out of reach, and Fenrir was very determined to leave his mark on the tool. Steve had wondered off, probably to go walk around outside again. He didn't seem to know what to do with himself in this world that was so like and so unlike what he was used to. Harry could relate to that.

The dark haired man made his way over to one of the many computer consoles that one could find in the tower. He began typing in coordinates, idly answering or fending the slightly invasive questions that Clint and Natasha were firing at him over the coms. They were a lot more interested in how this would affect everything that the others, but that was to be expected. He had no doubt that every single thing they learned would be put in a report for Fury to peruse.

He hit enter, and the programmed picture of the Earth spun and zoomed, until a very specific region was filling the view.

"Oh, you have got to be kidding me."

I promise that we'll meet Jormungand in the next chapter! I swear!

So, anyway, Harry realized that yeah, Loki could have been worse. What he did was unforgivable, but Harry's always been far too forgiving. He'll never let Loki have the kids back, but he's willing to let him try to earn some ah... joint custody? Sort of? I dunno. This story has taken on a life of its own, I have no control over it now. (sighs) The reason this chapter took so long is because of many reasons, the main one being that I'm working on an entirely original novel (considering putting up the prologue on my fictionpress account to see how well it's received, but not sure if that's dangerous or not...). So yeah, Harry is not gonna kill Loki, Loki maybe might be redeemable, and hey, forshadowing!

Lionna