So...you might want to queue up "Magic" by The Cars as you read. It just has the right feel for the end of the chapter.

Stark was very confused by Thor's request (and that it was Thor who spoke when he was expecting to hear the voice of Coulson from this particular phone), but still intrigued enough to grant it. Within moments, he was able to give Thor an address, which Thor passed along to Coulson when he returned his phone.

"You want me to take you there now?" said Coulson.

"If you would. I want to be sure everything is in order. Would you also ask Barton and Romanoff to meet us there as soon as they are able? And Banner, if you've finished your business with him."

X

Loki watched Thor move restlessly around the private room they had been shown into at their destination, pacing and repeatedly adjusting chairs encircling the round table (which, like most things on Midgard, seemed to be made of very flimsy materials). A young maiden poked her head into the room every other minute to ask if they needed anything, to which Thor kept replying in the negative as he continued to fuss. Loki had no idea what benefit his brother hoped to gain by staging this first meeting in such a place, but their location while they awaited the arrival of the soon-to-be-Avengers was not what interested him most. "You haven't told me anything of the final member of this band of yours. Rogers, I think you called him."

"Captain Steven Rogers, yes. He was a great and celebrated warrior of his people in the last Midgardian war we took note of on Asgard."

Loki frowned. "But that was decades ago. Surely too many for him to be a warrior still, if he is truly a mortal."

"He is certainly more than an ordinary mortal," Thor agreed, "but the reason he remains a young man is that he has spent these decades frozen in ice not so far from the early battlefields of the Aesir-Jotnar war." His expression grew a little somber. "In that time, much has changed about this realm, at least from a mortal perspective."

Loki's frown deepened. This Rogers was rather like Brunnhilde, then. Returned to a world that still admired him, but which was not as he remembered it. Perhaps Loki ought to have tried a little harder to persuade her to be here for this meeting.

"He has strength and wisdom and a valiant heart," Thor went on. Then, with a brief, furtive glance at the door, he switched to the nameless tongue. "He has already been fighting against the foe we will tell the others of today."

"The Hydra within SHIELD?" Loki asked, following suit. A soft noise drew his gaze to a corner of the room, but nothing was there. Perhaps it had merely been a groan from the poorly constructed walls.

"Yes," said Thor.

Loki looked back at him. "And you are certain it is sensible to deviate from the way you fought this organization before?"

"I think there is more sense in making good use of the time we have than trying to retrace our steps when the terrain is changing under our feet, and it will give the Avengers something to unite against. I only hope it will be enough, in the absence of an invasion."

"An invasion you have already thwarted by removing the Tesseract to Asgard?"

"And by not smashing the Bifrost and keeping you free from Thanos's clutches."

"Me?" said Loki sharply. "What do you mean?"

Thor's expression clouded. "It's not important," he said, looking away.

"Not important?" said Loki. "How can you say that after I've already had one narrow escape in this timeline, let alone the fact that you watched Thanos kill me in the other?"

"It's not important because it won't happen again," Thor growled.

"Why not?" said Loki, getting to his feet. "Because you will it so? How am I to know to avoid a danger if you won't tell me of it? Was it mere chance that Ebony Maw learned of me so quickly on Sakaar, or will Thanos be sending more minions after me? Ought I to be constantly on the alert?"

Thor closed his eyes. Loki glared at him, waiting. After a long moment, Thor finally spoke, seemingly dredging the words up from some deep, painful well inside him. "When you fell from the shattered Bifrost, you landed in his territory. Or at least he found you soon after. I couldn't guess what black magic he used to keep you hidden from Heimdall and Hlidskjalf and even Mother's scrying for a full year. Most of us gave up hope that you had survived somehow, but never Mother." Thor paused and forced his hands open from the fists they had become. "I don't know what the Titan did to you, but the son of his old enemy with knowledge of the secret paths of Yggdrasil must have been a prize indeed to him. The next time I saw you, you were not yourself." He met Loki's eyes. "You had come to Earth to make way for the Chitauri invasion."

Loki's legs folded beneath him and his seat made a creaking sound of protest when he landed back on it. And here he'd thought it couldn't get worse than attempted suicide, nearly dying on the battlefield, and then being helpless to prevent his own murder, all in less than a decade. He laughed. He couldn't help it, even though he felt ill.

Thor gave him an upset, quizzical look. "This is funny to you?"

"Why wouldn't it be? Even Hela refused Thanos, and invading Midgard? It seems I do take after Laufey." And to think that he'd half-wanted Odin to banish him just for bringing three Jotnar into the Vault.

"That's not true!" said Thor. "Thanos had the Mind Stone and other terrible servants besides Maw and Cull. They got hold of you when you were already full of despair and convinced that your place on Asgard and in our family was false. You know what Maw was capable of alone, and he only had you for two days. How much worse must that have been?"

Loki swallowed. His flesh crawled at the reminder of Maw's needles piercing it. He would rather not contemplate what it would be like to have that treatment multiplied across a year, even without adding in the other factors. He looked at his brother and was suddenly on the verge of laughter again, though for quite a different reason this time. "You've put all this effort into seeing me become not just an ally but a friend to these mortals even though I could have been their enemy?"

The heavy aura of gloom vanished from around Thor in an instant and he smiled in a way that made him look like a young boy. "Yes, and it has worked, has it not?"

Loki wasn't certain he would yet classify them as friends. (With the possible exception of Stark, if the man did not come to regret the challenge he'd laid out the previous day.) He supposed he liked them all well enough that he could not say he would be sorry to count them his friends one day. "Working, perhaps," he conceded. "Oaf."

Thor was getting the ominous look of wanting to come around the table and hug the breath out of him, but luckily Barton, Romanoff, and Banner chose that moment to join them. Thor greeted them with his usual exuberance, but Loki was distracted by another faint sound from that corner.

"The building's secure," said Barton. "Stark and Rogers should be here any minute."

X

"Taste of Lebanon?" said Steve, climbing out of Stark's bizarre future car, feeling bemused. He was vaguely aware that Lebanon had gained independence from France in '43 (Dernier had had some opinions about that), but didn't know much else about it. He wouldn't have expected to see a restaurant like this in the capital.

"Thor said it had to be here," said Stark, shutting the driver's side door behind him. "No idea why. I mean, 'Taste of Norway' isn't really a thing, but I thought maybe a Medieval Times..."

Right, Thor. Steve was apparently about to meet a couple of space princes who'd been around long enough to inspire an entire ancient culture's mythology. Fury had given him more files after he returned to the Triskelion. Instead of yet more information on everything he'd missed, these were dossiers on the people Fury was angling to have on his Avengers team, Thor and his brother Loki included. Fury hadn't been too happy to learn that Stark had already filled Steve in on that, but he'd approved this meeting, so it couldn't have put too big of a dent in his plans.

They went inside and were hit by a strong, warm aroma of cooked meats and exotic spices. The mystery of how a Lebanese restaurant had ended up in Washington D.C. was already solved, as far as Steve was concerned. It wasn't like anything he had ever smelled before, but he would gladly try it.

A waitress scurried over to them, clutching a pile of menus tight to her chest, her round eyes on Stark. "Right this way, M-Mr. Stark," she stammered. "The rest of your party is waiting for you in the private room. What drinks can we bring you while you look at the menu? We have fountain drinks, Turkish coffee, Ayran, mango and guava juice..."

"That last one sounds good," said Stark, who was obviously used to being treated with ridiculous deference wherever he went, like Howard had been around civilians. Except that unlike Howard, his son didn't seem to revel in it. "Rogers?"

"Coffee, please, ma'am," said Steve.

She dashed off into the kitchen, then reappeared with flaming red cheeks a few seconds later. "Sorry," she told their shoes. "I should probably take you all the way to the room and give you the menus before I get those."

"Good plan," said Stark, not unkindly. She showed them to a room at the back of the dining floor, where five of the seven seats around the circular table were already occupied. Steve quickly looked at each of the people in the room and reminded himself of their names from the dossiers. He might be playing catch-up about most things, but he wasn't going to add to that pile if he didn't have to. Clint Barton, Natasha Romanoff, Bruce Banner, and Thor and Loki Odinson. He expected to find the last two in their space royalty armor like in their photographs, but if he hadn't already been briefed on them, he would've thought they were just a couple more maybe-not-quite-average joes from 2011.

The first one to react to their arrival was Thor, whose face lit up as he jumped to his feet. "Stark, Rogers! At last, there you are!" And then Steve was getting hugged with so much force that it made him nostalgic for asthma. It sure felt like Thor was wearing space royalty armor.

"Missed you too, Thunderstruck," Stark gasped.

By the time Thor let them go and stepped back, the waitress had laid out the menus in front of all their seats and retreated to the doorway. "Come, sit!" said Thor. "We have been assured it will take but moments for them to prepare our feast once we have made our selections."

"Yeah, that's how restaurants work," said Stark. "Do you have those on Asgard?"

"Of course!" said Thor. "But things are often done strangely here; I can never be sure. Rogers, allow me to introduce my brother Loki."

Steve didn't know why one guy he'd never met was in a position to introduce another guy he'd never met, but his plan for now was to just roll with everything and endeavor not to look too confused, so he stuck out a hand to Loki and tried not to make a weird face when Loki grabbed his forearm instead of his palm.

"Well met, Captain Rogers," said Loki.

"Thanks," said Steve. "You too."

Steve took one of the available seats, which put him between Thor and Romanoff. Stark's put him between Loki and Dr. Banner. The waitress wrote down everyone else's drink orders and left the room.

"Why do you sound like you're from England?" said Steve.

"Allspeak," said Loki. "In addition to sounding like your language to you, it tends to apply certain connotations to the particular way it sounds."

"Like imperialism," said Dr. Banner, who hastily coughed when several pairs of eyes turned his way. Stark gave Loki's shoulder a sardonic pat. Steve thought he saw something hidden in his hand when he did it, but decided not to point it out.

The waitress returned with the drinks after about thirty more seconds, and they all told her their orders. Steve didn't recognize the names of any of the items on the menu, but Thor kept giving everyone pointed looks and touting the merits of the shawarma entree. Steve decided to take his word for it.

Once the waitress left again with all the menus, Stark turned to Thor. "So, this place was your idea? Kinda random."

"Certainly not!" said Thor, frowning. "It would be better if we could eat it after fighting a battle together, but shawarma is quite delicious on its own."

Loki rolled his eyes.

"Is the food the only reason we're not doing this in a SHIELD briefing room?" said Stark. "'Cause if so, I gotta say, kinda underwhelmed." There was a pause in which Barton, Romanoff, and Thor all exchanged glances (while Loki for some reason was squinting at the corner). The three of them seemed to come to a silent agreement, and then they looked at Steve and Stark.

"SHIELD is compromised," said Romanoff.

"What?" said Steve, all his attention now focused on her. "Compromised how?"

"Hydra," said Barton. "We thought they were gone after you finished off Johann Schmidt. Instead they got subtle, rebuilt inside SHIELD. We don't know exactly how powerful they are, but there's a lot of them and it goes all the way up to Secretary Pierce."

"So this has been going on for decades and you guys didn't notice?" said Stark.

"Isn't SHIELD supposed to be an intelligence agency?" said Banner.

Steve was struck with the vivid recollection of his first encounter with a Hydra operative. "Cut off one head, two more shall take its place." It shouldn't come as a surprise, really. After all, he'd been fighting Hydra until a few days ago; now he could just pick up where he left off. Anger boiled up in him at the thought that Peggy and Howard's life's work had been tainted before he got the chance to do something about it...but maybe he wouldn't have seen it coming either.

"Then that's what we're here for," he said. "We're stopping them."

"Fury needs time to gather more intel," said Romanoff, "but that's the idea." She looked at Stark. "If you can get in without leaving a trace, we'd be glad to have your help there."

"Or perhaps we could start right now," said Loki. And then he simply disappeared in a ripple of greenish-gold light. It seemed the others were already somewhat used to him doing that, because nobody else jumped out of their chairs, and Stark for some reason looked...disappointed?

The sound of scuffling came from the corner, and then Loki reappeared, accompanied by a blare of loud and very bizarre music.

"Uh oh, it's magic!"

Loki actually was in his weird armor now, and appeared to be wrestling with thin air. At this point, everyone else leapt up too.

"Just a little magic."

There was a huge grin on Stark's face now, and he said something like "Ha! I knew it!" but he seemed to be the only one not taking this seriously. Thor was standing close to Dr. Banner with his hands out in a soothing sort of gesture, and Barton and Romanoff were both poised in fighting stances.

"You know it's true."

Steve thought he saw a flash of something thrashing in Loki's grip, but it hurt to look at it. With a snarl, Loki spun towards the table, bringing his arms down in an arc like he was throwing someone.

"I got a hold on you."

Something solid but invisible collided with the surface, sending all the drinks flying to the floor, and then a slender form in a very odd hooded gray tactical suit flickered into view.

I got mad writer's block on this chapter, yo. Finally cured it by trying on Steve's PoV for the second part, until a problem with Loki's antics occurred to me, which got me stuck again, but my baby bro came to the rescue (as he so often does) with a brilliant idea for how Loki's cloaking spell might interact with a certain item Steve caught the briefest glimpse of.

The way this ends was very deliberately intended to evoke a sense of pandemonium, but what do you guys think just happened?

Any last-minute guesses on the identity of the sometimes-invisible interloper? Quite a few of you got that one right, but I was pleasantly surprised to see people guessing a variety of names. I was sure it was so obvious that not just saying her name straight off was completely pointless, so that made me happy.

I sort of regretted not having Brunnhilde come to Earth for this meeting when I realized that she's basically the Asgardian version of Steve, so I gave a nod to that in Loki's PoV. Hopefully they'll still have a chance to meet and be bros sometime.