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Chapter Text

Loki fell, and fell, and fell.

Twisting and turning through the infinite cosmos, the battered figure of Loki of Asgard, now Loki of No-Fixed-Abode, plummeted down into the darkness. Strange, ineffable constellations and nebulae emerged from the nothingness, blinking past him at speed. Here a purplescent planet, there a gaseous star, another galaxy etc. etc.

Look at his plummeting form, almost winking out of view, and see.

Loki Laufeyson was currently suffering from something of an identity crisis; for the past few thousand years he had been Loki Odinson, Prince of Asgard, Son of the Allfather. Now, however, he had been relegated to a different origin, that of bastard son of a jotun clasped to the bosom of Odin as some war trophy. A change in backstory of this magnitude, Loki mused, necessitated an alteration in his personal motivation. It was only fitting, therefore, that this emotional and mental turmoil should be matched in its physical state. The bottom had dropped out of his world, it seemed, both physically and literally.

Here is Loki, therefore. Black-and-green leather Asgardian armour protecting battered gangly limbs, horned helm perched on raven locks, ice-cold pale skin only matched by the ice-cold Jotun biology that lay within. He is short by Jotun standards, but tall by anyone else’s. Master of magics and yet shunned by society. Battered, bruised, bloody…. but unbowed.

He falls, and falls, and falls.

And lands.

To any inhabitant of that small outcropping of purplish rock- or perhaps any denizen, as the planet was practically designed to be a holiday home for a third-tier villain- the figure of the erstwhile Prince of Asgard plummeting through the stratosphere would have more closely resembled a meteorite than anything human, surrounded as he was by coruscating flames.

Loki looked up, and squinted through the green haze at a tall, attractive looking woman covered in armour. Loki blinked again and realised that there was actually no green haze, but that the woman herself was green. Oh well then. The viridian woman growled threateningly, and unsheathed a sword, pointing it at Loki’s neck.

“State your name and intentions, trespasser, or I shall run you through where you stand.”

She paused, and looked closer at Loki, seemingly only just realising that he was half-in and half-out of the ground. She tactfully amended “--where you lie” to the end of her previous sentence.

“My name,” said Loki, shifting himself around in the purplescent rock, “is Loki of Asgard, and my current intentions are to lie here a bit more. And lie generally, you see, as it is rather in my job description.”

He laconically spread his arms, as if to show that he was innocent of any wrong-doing, a gesture he had tried in the past but which had seldom ever worked.

The green warrior-woman- possibly one of the Falleen, or a K’aitian, or an A’askvarii without any tentacles- took in this circumspect introduction, and mulled it over for a few minutes. Then, suddenly, she reached forward and grabbed him by one arm, hauling him out of the stone. Loki winced at the sudden rush of pain in his soldier.

“All trespassers are to be taken to Thanos,” said the unusually pigmented lady, with the air of someone reciting by rote. “There, you shall be judged on your worthiness, and your future decided.”

Loki’s recent actions on Asgard- breaking the bifrost, trying to kill his brother, almost wiping out an entire planet- had left him somewhat low on the ‘worthiness’ scale. And why was everyone so obsessed with that particular character trait, as if it was some great arbiter of cosmic power? He got enough of the self-important aggrandisement from Mjolnir, thank you very much.

“By all means, my lady. Although--” and here a touch of anger entered his tone- “I would appreciate it if you could help me up. I’m presently a little damaged from my rapid plummeting through whatever stratosphere this little planetoid has.”

The green-skinned woman accordingly yanked him up painfully- Loki hid a groan behind gritted teeth- and, with one smooth motion, handcuffed both hands behind his back. Loki’s mind went momentarily blank as white hot pain filled his vision. His right arm was currently sickeningly out of its socket, and jostled around agonisingly.

The green-skinned lady was good enough to wait as Loki viciously slammed his loose arm into a nearby outcropping, resetting his arm into the socket with a gruesome click. Something a little like pity and a little like anger flickered over her features, and she spoke up.

“You should know with whom you speak, Loki of Asgard. My name is Gamora Zen Whoberi Ben Titan, and I am the daughter of the Great Titan Thanos.”

“I see.” Loki looked Gamora up and down. “And is this Thanos also green?”

Gamora flushed an appealing shade of avocado. “No. I’m adopted.”

“Ah, I’ve danced that dance before, my dear.”

As Gamora and Loki walked through the planet’s cavernous systems, Loki mulled over the events of the previous week. He had been king of Asgard, and then Lord of nothing. He had let go of Gungnir and fallen from the Bifrost with the full expectancy of dying, of taking his own life. And yet here he was, snatched out of the jaws of death by the will of the norns. Loki liked to preserve an outward sign of equanimity in the face of danger, but any apparent calm at this point was the result of an inner numbness. His purpose had already been written out for him for centuries, and that had been taken away from him with the revelation of his birth. Now, he was left with no path to follow, no plan to undertake. He could not remember the last time he had no plan. There was nothing he could do, and so he was merely being buffeted by the winds of fate.

His musings were broken when Loki and his green-skinned captor rounded a particularly large rock to reveal the Master of this particular planet. There, sitting on a floating stone throne with an infuriatingly smug grin on his purple face, was Thanos, the Mad Titan and Destroyer of Worlds. Loki scowled in resentment at the dictator.

“Bow down to me, whelp,” Thanos intoned.

No longer was Loki in a joking, mischievous mood. Gamora he judged as being a possible ally, but Thanos’ malevolence was bone-deep, a powerful, black ague that lurked behind those swollen eyes.

“I do not bow, sir,” said Loki, spitting the words out venomously. “and I am no-one’s whelp. I am Loki Laufeyson, Odinson, and Friggason, Heir to Jotunheim and Prince of Asgard.”

Thanos did nothing but laugh a deep, mocking laugh, sadistic grin curling around his mouth like a scorpion’s tail.

“Asgard, hmmm? That stultifying kingdom of immortals? Oh, how honoured we must be, having a true God in our midst.” The words were said with a deep sarcasm that rankled with Loki. “Shall we set up temple to worship the God of Mischief, or merely recite a poem in his honour? I said BOW , you pathetic creature.”

He clicked his fingers, and Gamora buried a knee into Loki’s back, forcing him painfully onto the floor. Thanos stood from his throne, and leaned closer to the former Odinson.

“Your civilisation, Asgard, is all that I most despise of this agonising universe. You sit there, mired in your gilt castle and your throne of blood, dispensing your own war-hungry judgement on the Realms around you. You hoard those damn golden apples to let your people age into immortality, while those in your colonies starve to death. You live for a thousand years, never dying, while you take, take, take, feeding off the cosmos like a cancer.”

“An undying civilisation sounds like a positive one,” returned Loki. He was rather uneasy, because Thanos made some good points- Asgard was a largely warlike nation, much to Loki’s chagrin. Much of Loki’s role for the past thousand years had been pursuing a diplomatic path, fixing Thor’s mistakes. But Thanos had a fury and rage behind it that spoke of personal experience.

“An undying civilisation is the key to extinction. Nothing moves, nothing advances. Immortality is its own curse. Your people will keep on multiplying until there is no more food or water left, and then they shall die in their golden castles. It will take a truly brave man to do what it takes to stop that decline.”

“And you, I presume, are that man?” said Loki.

“Only I can make the decisions that need to be made.” He returned to his throne, and reclined back into it. “If I am hated for that, than so be it.”

Norns, he believes it, thought Loki. He’s seen this theoretical problem and turned it into a life-altering issue, a Malthusian crisis only solvable by mass genocide. He’s cast himself as hero in the drama of murder. The last time I saw someone so absorbed and self-righteous was in a mirror.

“But perhaps you need evidence of my determination? A show of strength seems necessary. Gamora, bring forth the Sceptre.”

The green-skinned Gamora accordingly scuttled off, returning in a few moments with a long, branch-like sceptre with a glowing blue stone at the tip. The stone had a mesmeric quality, and seemed to warp the space around it; it acted like a tennis ball in a sheet of cloth, distorting the fabric of space-time around it.

“The Mind Stone,” whispered Loki in hushed terms. Indeed, there, resting in the sceptre, was an Infinity Stone, an immensely powerful artefact that could alter the very thoughts and minds of those it touched.

“Ah, so you know it? A fascinating artefact. The remains of a singularity from the dawn of the universe, compressed into the shape of a single orb. This one stone allows the user to access the memories, dreams and thoughts of others, resonating at a different frequency. This stone accesses the realm of thought and minds, and can shape them to its will.”

Loki felt something of a migraine coming on; it was unsafe to be around an Infinity Stone  for too long, as they were older then the universe themselves. They were somehow more real, more immediate than everything around it. An experienced sorcerer like Loki could tell where one of the Stones was in the same way that one could tell where the sun is.

“This stone is one of six, as you should know, Jotun conjuror. When these are assembled, as they shall be, I will wipe out half of all life in the universe, and so restore reality to how it should be. No longer will rats fight over old scraps, or people die of famine. No; instead, this new realm I shall usher in will be one where there is an abundance of resources, with no promise of a future apocalyptic death.”

“Because the apocalypse will have failed. Rest assured, Thanos, your plan will fail. And why? Because no man  in the world would take a global sacrifice now to prevent a hypothetical future death. That is not in the nature of any humanoid species. Your plot will sputter out in its infancy.”

Thanos sneered, and snapped his fingers, signalling for Gamora to come and remove Loki. “You speak in vague threats and empty platitudes, Lie-Smith. Let’s see how effective your so-called godlike immortality is. Take him to the dungeons.”

The dungeons themselves- after Gamora kindly dragged Loki there, and had the foresight to hurl him into a cell- were located within the rocky heart of one of the larger asteroids, and clearly demarcated into separate cells. These were  uncomfortably small, four metres by three, and were a dull tarnished grey. The walls were made of some strange alloy of metal and stone, with steel panels half emerging from the rock walls. Loki himself was stapled to the wall, hands near-fused with two iron brackets that were located uncomfortably high up the walls. The brackets were positioned in such a way that Loki had to painfully stretch and stand on tiptoe to reach the floor.

His jailer was a strange, hooded figure whose name came out as a hoarse growl, but whom was generally referred to as ‘the Other’. From what little Loki could see of his face, Loki determined that his skin was a half-melted, pale, deformed flesh-like substance, although this was largely hidden by the gilt cage that curled around his chin. Regardless, the Other was not shy in torturing the former Asgardian prince.

In years to come, when recounting the events of his imprisonment- once, briefly, to Thor, in a muttered exchange with Frigga, and famously dramatised as The Great Escape of Loki the Magnificent- he would gloss over his torture at the hands of Thanos. There were brief memories of the time spent there- stapled to the wall by a firm iron bracket, while the reptilian face of the Other leered down at him. Still more painful to recollect was the times when his captor, realizing his Jotun ancestry, would artificially heat his cell up, causing him to almost collapse with exhaustion. Then the pokers would come, searing the flesh of his bones. His Asgardian durability would allow a certain amount of regeneration, but this only prompted one of the Other’s sadistic games; how much skin could be flayed off Loki’s back before it regrew. All in all, it was not a time Loki recollected with any fondness.

One element that did help alleviate Loki’s pain- and what pain it was, having his lips sewn together and his hands ritually burnt- were the companions he had with him as cellmates. In the cell to his right was a heavily armoured, pug-faced looking alien, dressed in a silvery neck-brace and a sleek black suit, not unlike a Midgardian astronaut uniform. He introduced himself as Styre, and would frequently talk Loki’s ear off.

“The dastardly Thanos shall fall before the might of the Sontaran Empire!” bellowed Styre, uncomfortably reminding Loki of an Asgardian mead-hall. “I shall rend his body in twain with one sweep of my sword!”

On Loki’s left was a familiar face that acted as something of a balm for the considerable torture he had undergone. Indeed, when Loki had first been ushered into the cell, he had scarce believed who was sitting next to him.

“Magnir? Is that you?”

Magnir had been a loyal friend of Loki’s throughout his life as prince. If Thor had Volstagg, Hogun and Fandral to follow him around, then Loki had Forsung, Brona and Magnir, the Enchanters Three. The four of them would spend countless pleasant days debating the different areas of magic, the importance of runic arrays in illusion, and so forth. Forsung was a druidic type, prone to spending long days in the garden of Asgardian, creating flower crowns and communing with nature. He would create healing poultices and potions, and would voyage into the forests of Vanaheim to protect and cure injured animals. Brona came from the grimy streets of Nornheim, straight from a street gang to the personal retinue of a prince of Asgard. His magic was cheap and dirty, mandalas scratched onto his fingernails and runes carved with a pocket knife onto scrap pieces of wood. Magnir, meanwhile, was an intellectual and academic, immaculately dressed in the latest Asgardian finery. He would often be found in his study, comparing different essays on the properties seidr and furiously highlighting relevant passages in quill. He certainly looked very different trapped in a miserable jail cell.

“Your highness?” queried Magnir, a look of benediction on his face. A few weeks prior, Magnir had disappeared, vanished after a visit to the Library of Dream, a vast, Babel-like library that was reputed to have not only every book written, but also every book that had never been written. The ensuing absence of the Asgardian was therefore to be somewhat expected, but Loki had never expected to find him imprisoned.

“I never actually made it to the Library,” explained Magnir, somewhat shame-faced. “My ship stalled suddenly, and I was drifting through space before I was picked up by Thanos.”

“Rest, friend,” responded Loki, smiling warmly. “I am only pleased that you have returned here, now, at my side. Now, please, tell me about our situation.”

Magnir was one of the more intelligent Asgardians, and so had been able to keep his ear to the ground and find out some valuable information. Under careful probing from Loki, Magnir was able to reveal that they were in the asteroid field known as ‘Sanctuary’, a space that orbited the now-destroyed Rustum planet. Thanos’ people had long ago terraformed the structure, and now it sailed through the stars, honeycombed with a thousand jail cells.

“And what of that foul beast, the Other?”

“Ah! Well, as far as I have discovered, the creature’s real name is Kl’rt, a name largely unpronounceable to most races; hence his nom de plume of ‘the Other’. He once belonged to the Skrull race, a shapeshifting species from Tarnax IV, but extensive genetic modification has meant that he has largely lost his transformative powers in favour of physical and mental strength.”

Loki tried ineffectually to wrap his tongue around the harsh syllables. “Klaw-- Klurt-- Kraut--”

“It’s Kl’rt. The pronunciation of the apostrophe is essential in this case. Also, try the back of your throat; it’s a guttural phrasing. Kl’rt. See?”

Loki gave a wry smirk. “Ah, Magnir. I’ll leave that up to you. You were always better at languages than I.”

“Very true, your Highness.” Magnir suddenly remembered Loki’s position as royal, and blushed furiously at his impertinence. Loki made a forgiving gesture, and Magnir continued.

“Kl’rt was once known by the somewhat self-aggrandizing and boastful title of ‘Super-Skrull’, before he became known as the ‘Other’. Apparently, he did not consider himself one of the Skrulls after the experiment.”

“Experiment?”

According to Magnir, a cult of the Skrull race had decided to practice dangerous eugenics on themselves, changing their bodies to become better warriors. These hideous laboratory experiments had taken place on a planet in the Chi Tauri star system, and so these new aliens were given this patronym. That is what the ‘Sanctuary’ was- an factory disguised in an asteroid designed to turn the shapeshifting Skrulls into the ravenous Chitauri.

“And well they might!” exclaimed Styre from the nearby cell. “To transform oneself into a weapon to smite your enemies- why, is there any nobler cause in the universe?”

Loki was somewhat painfully reminded of his past thousand years of Asgard- trying to conduct intellectual discussions while having warmongering incitements screamed in his ear.

Regardless of Styre’s frequent interruptions (“We shall escape from these cells and rend their bones in twain! They shall rue the day they ever sought to imprison Styre the Sontaran!”) Magnir and Loki were able to have a much-needed reunion. Loki was able to learn much of the realities of his apparent new life, while simultaneously informing his friend of the events of the past few weeks. It was gratifying to the former prince that Magnir recognised the stress he was under. Indeed, the revelation of Loki’s ancestry (“A Jotun? You, sir? Well, I clearly must reevaluate my view on the species, having such a sterling example of their valour and courage before me.”) and that of his crimes on Midgard (“I confess I do not see what else you would have done, after the betrayals of Heimdall, Sif and the Warriors Three”) did much to help him mentally heal from the rigours of his past trial. While the conversation was one of reunification and joy, there was one statement Magnir gave towards the end that chilled Loki immeasurably.  

“And before I forget, your highness; Thanos’ plan of culling half of the universe also applies to the prisoners. Every week Thanos’ daughters, Nebula and Gamora, bring the prisoners up and bid them fight in a large tournament. The winner is allowed to survive; those who die are thrown into the vast emptiness of space. Thus, I am afraid, is the will of Thanos.”

Loki stared at Magnir, dread filling his bones; even the rambunctious Styre stilled in shock. Suddenly, the walls seemed to be much closer and more constraining, and the darkness seemed to grow and grow.

Time, in the cells of the ill-named ‘Sanctuary’, passed strangely; or rather, as there was nothing besides the four walls, the periodic attentions of the deformed Other, and the occasional conversation of Magnir and Styre, it was impossible for Loki to keep track of any self-imposed calendar. It was only an estimated period of several months (weeks? years?) that this dire routine was momentarily lifted, and the green-skinned Gamora and a blue-tinted companion came to visit Loki. The second figure was a stranger to Loki, but was just as striking as Gamora; this figure seemed curiously artificial and inhuman, with different stripes of blue demarcating her face. The entire left side of her body was reinforced with metallic additions, primarily in a smooth curve around her eye and in her arm, which was completely artificial. Apparently, half her body had been effectively removed- presumably in conflict- and replaced with an ill-fitting temporary replacement. The cyborg fixed her furious eyes on the prisoner, and Loki had the strange urge to revert to his blue Jotun form to see her reaction.

“Prisoner Code 3746-Alpha and Prisoner Code 8937-Gamma, be silent. Prisoner Code 9159-Epsilon, this message is addressed at you,” said the cyborg, to which Gamora barely resisted rolling her eyes.

“Protocol is not always necessary, Nebula. Styre and Magnir, your interference is unnecessary. We are here to talk to Loki Laufeyson only,” she paraphrased. Styre made to say something before a signal from the newly-named Nebula sent a bolt of electricity through his cell. Magnir wisely decided that discretion was the better half of valour.

“It is by decree of the Great Titan Thanos, Saviour of the Universe and Hero of the Downtrodden, that the Jotun Loki will face the Asgardian Magnir and the Sontaran Styre in glorious combat to determine who will survive and continue in his grand utopia, and who will be cast out into the depths of space.”

Magnir and Styre, although unable to speak, looked shaken at this news. They had known that they were to be forced into the ring of combat, but they were not aware that Loki would be joining them. Loki himself managed to contain his reaction, but he was incredibly tense internally.

“Having slain the others in armed combat, the victor will then face me on the battlefield, and so ascend to the ranks of heroism, albeit in the posthumous sense.”

Nebula sent a smug smirk at the three assembled prisoners, who were stewing in a heady mix of fear and rage.

“This is all in the service of the Great Thanos, hero of the--”

“You use that word incorrectly, madam,” snarled Loki, interrupting with a savage politeness. “Hero. It peppers your lips like flies over carrion, but methinks you have not the slightest notion of what a true hero is.”

This time it was Gamora’s turn to speak, and she let out a cynical laugh, while Nebula continued to spark angrily at the frost giant. “And I suppose you would take that honour for yourself? You of a thousand titles, but master of none? Are you a hero?”

“Yes. And no.” said Loki, looking intently into Gamora’s widened eyes. “We are all heroes in our own way, but that is in no way a good thing. We are all motivated by doing what is right, but there is no such thing as the right thing. Some hunt down criminals and eradicate evil-doers, while some fight the corrupt system ‘for the people’. Some people work to kill the evil monster lurking under the bed, while others valiantly save the misunderstood creatures of this world. All of us are motivated by doing what is right, but none of us know what that is.”

“So- you’re saying that nobody knows what they should do to become a hero?” asked Gamora, confused and shaken out of her harsh enforcer persona.

“Not quite. Let me tell you a story. My not-brother, Thor Odinson, God of Thunder and Prince of Asgard- regarded as a hero by many. One day, the jotnar Hrungnir was accused of disturbing the Asgardian peace, sewing dissension and dismay wherever he went. The Mighty Thor was tasked with defeating this interloper, and smote him with his hammer Mjolnir. The whetstone he was using shattered and fell to Midgard, and one piece of it stuck in Thor’s forehead, and is still there to this day. Hrungnir’s body trapped Thor for quite a time before he was released by a nearby guard. But, despite the hardship he faced, Hrungnir was vanquished. What say you of that, Gamora of the Zen Whoberi?”

“Thor is the hero, then? He killed the Jotun, and you told me that they were evil creatures, right?”
“I’m afraid that my views of Jotun have changed significantly over the past few days. Let me tell you another story. Hrungnir was in Asgard to oversee the Jotunheim-Asgard treaty, a development that aimed to create peace throughout the Realms. The talks were going well, until, one day, Hrungnir, flushed with triumph, went to one of the local alehouses and began drinking. Odin took his momentary drunken stupor as an excuse to send Thor Odinson, his own personal hammer, to assassinate him and destroy the treaty, shattering into into a million pieces. Hrungnir, himself a peaceful man, wanted to gain some measure of reparation for his planet, but was murdered. Who is the hero there?”

“I don’t know. It’s all so complicated.”

“Life often is. Remember, what appears to be one thing is often another. And there are two sides to every story.”

Nebula, hitherto silent, spoke up. “You babble, prisoner, but I do not see your argument.”

“I am saying, O Gamora of the Green and Nebula of the Blue, that those who call themselves heroes are often the worst kinds of villains- although I acknowledge that, yes, those who call themselves villains are often the worst kinds of heroes. I am saying that your father, Thanos, for all of his claims of the greater good, will see the universe turn to dust with merely a snap of his fingers. I am saying- nay, begging- that if either of you happened to stumble across one of the Infinity Stones, those that Thanos quests for so much, that you take it and run as far away from the Titan as possible. Change from the hero who labours under another’s yoke to the hero who will fight the corrupt system. That is what I am saying.”

There was silence. Loki could not determine the reaction his speech had had; both the failing light and the naturally stoicism of the two aliens prevented that. It was ultimately Nebula who broke the silence.

“I don’t profess to know what you intend with those words, Loki Lie-Smith, but our intentions coming here were not to bandy words of philosophy with a prisoner. They were to tell you that you have been chosen to fight in the arena, to see if you deserve to live or die.”

Gamora then took up Nebula’s speech. “This competition will be to the death. I do not know if you will survive; I fancy not. But, regardless, your place in Thanos’ pantheon will be determined. My only advice is ‘do not lose’. Farewell.”

With this, Gamora turned dramatically, and left the cells. Nebula had flinched at the mention of losing, but had Loki been less eagle-eyed he would not have noticed it. She followed her adopted sister, lost in her own thought, and for a moment Loki felt a powerful kinship with the blue skinned woman, before it disappeared with her around the corner.

Loki sat in silence, contemplating what he had learned. Magnir spoke up, having been silently watching the whole exchange.

“What are you going to do, Loki?” he said, for once foregoing political niceties in the heat of the situation. “How are we going to survive?”

His not-mother, Frigga, had frequently preached the importance of parsing out his personal situation before determining his course of action. “If you do not know where you are,” she would say, eyeing the young Loki through her mirror while she combed and braided her hair, “you will not know what to do, and if you do not know what to do, you will not know where to go. A moment of introspection is often needed in a dangerous situation.” Loki had taken these words to heart, combining frequent bursts of the aforementioned introspection with measures of brooding and portions of plotting, all of which were useful in his current situation.

To summarise, therefore, Loki was trapped in a prison cell deep in the centre of some asteroid-like planet just off the Nine Realms, with several light-years and bad decisions separating him from anyone who could help him. He was presumed dead, had been tortured both physically and psychologically, and was currently manacled to the wall in a way that did not fully suit his body image. He was only a day away before he was forced to fight in an arena to the death, and, when the options left were death or servitude to Thanos, neither exactly suited his purposes. He was in the grip of a mass-murdering psychopath, who possessed one of the most powerful magical artefacts in the universe, and intended to use it to wreak destruction on everything he had ever known.

Not a great position to start from.

What were his goals? Well, escape would be a good start, although he would gladly accept an end to this agonising torment. The destruction of the Nine Realms was also something he did not want, or at least, not unless it was on his own terms. So when escaping- which he still had no idea how to do, as he was currently stapled into the wall sixty feet from the floor- if he could grab the heavily-guarded infinity gem on the way, somehow evading further capture while carrying the galactic equivalent of a nuclear bomb, that would be grand.

Assets. Nothing. He literally had been stripped of everything apart from his name. Any clothes, items, or inlaid runes had been ruthlessly removed by the Other. His position was hopeless. There was no way he could effect his escape, ensure the freedom of two other prisoners, and simultaneously commit the heist of a century---

His name .

In the darkness of Loki’s cell, his smile turned as sharp as a knife.

“Styre, Magnir,” said Loki, mind whirring like a saw, “I have a plan. And you must both do exactly what I say.”

Chapter Text

The Zen Whoberi were now extinct, wiped out by the hand of a mad titan, but two things remained from that once-great civilisation. One was Gamora, the green-skinned daughter of Thanos and recognised as the Most Dangerous Woman in the Universe. The other was a story.

A story about a thief.

Once (goes the story) there was a man named Prefect. He was tall and blue eyed, and always carried a satchel with which he kept his belongings. He would hitchhike around the universe, visiting new places and taking things for his own. One day, he came across the Universal Church of Truth, a galaxy-wide religious cult that saw the decimation of dozens of planets through control of two powerful artefacts: the Little Doctor, a weapon that was able to rend planets open at the molecular level, and the Nova Bomb, a device which could undo the gravitational bonds of the sun itself.

“I’ve got to stop this,” said Prefect, looking at the destruction of the two bombs. “I’ve got to steal the Nova Bomb.”

The news of Prefect’s threat shocked the upper echelons of the Church. Guards were increased, borders tightened, suspicious figures interrogated. The Nova Bomb, an unwieldy device at the best of times, was relocated to the distant planet of Thaf Beta VI for safekeeping. Several attempts by ranging marauders were made on the device, and hysteria grew and grew. There was panic among the High Priests of the Church. It was ultimately decided that an expert policeman, Sergeant Ford of the Galactic Patrol, would be invited in to deal with the danger.

“Oh dear me,” said Sergeant Ford, looking around at the preparations the Universal Church of Truth had made. “This won’t do, this won’t do at all.”

“What won’t do?” demanded the High Lord Papal, leader of the Church. “We have done the best that we can to stop that rascal Prefect from stealing the Nova Bomb.”

“You’ve gone about this the wrong way,” said Ford. “You’ve been trying to hide  the bomb away, but we really need to set a trap. I shall take the Little Doctor, and lie in wait by the Nova Bomb for Prefect’s ship. And when he arrives-- zap! Nothing but component molecules.”

The Church hemmed and hawed about this, of course, but the decision was ultimately reached. Ford waited by the Nova Bomb, the Little Doctor in his hands, for the arrival of the dreaded criminal. And this is where the tale of that scoundrel Prefect and the good man Ford takes an interesting turn, because, after a few weeks guarding the doomsday device, Sergeant Ford left, taking both the Little Doctor and the Nova Bomb away with him. In its place was a note: “ You were wrong to think that I wanted only one bomb away from your hands. You were also wrong not to invest in Terran automobiles. Yours, Ford Prefect.”

Ford Prefect was given one weapon to guard the other, and so walked off with both. There was no need for uncomfortable theatrics or carefully-planned heists, when lies and trickery are on the table. And there was something about Loki Lie-Smith that reminded Gamora, the last of the Zen-Whoberi, of the thief Prefect. And this filled her heart with hope.

The truth was, that for a long time Gamora had been internally hostile towards Thanos. The memory of Thanos’ destruction of her home planet rankled, a kernel of hatred that remained throughout any of her faux father-daughter discussions. And so to see Loki, who seemed collected and calm despite his conditions, was a balm to her bruised soul. Perhaps he had a plan. Regardless, Loki was quickly gaining the title of ‘Prefect’ in her mind.

It was towards Loki- and his cellmates, Magnir and Styre- that Gamora was headed now. She had been tasked to deliver all three to the arena, where they would be forced to fight and kill each other, with only the victor being allowed to survive. It suited Thanos’ beliefs best that way. To him, there was nothing more just than the most able, intelligent and fearsome prisoners continuing on; it was survival of the fittest, with blades and blood substituting for nature’s more gradual threats. Proxima Midnight, one of the Children of Thanos, had been selected for the ‘honour’ from a similar system; she had been tasked to kill both of her cellmates, and now those sorry souls- a Karazian Light Monk named Graf Toren and a Thermian called Quellek- were lost in the vast reaches of space. Proxima, meanwhile, had become one of Thanos’ main enforcers. Winning the tournament and capturing Thanos’ interest was a double-edged sword. Gamora herself often wondered whether she would not have been better off dying with her parents back on Zen-Whoberi.

All three of the prisoners came from warrior cultures, which would make their inevitable conflict in the arena even more interesting. Field Major Styre was a Sontaran, one of the most dangerous species in the galaxy. Armoured to the hilt, and with a strong desire for war and a stronger one for bloodshed, their race had waged a fifteen-thousand year war with the Rutans, spilling throughout the universe with the howling echo of guns and explosions. Legend had it that a Sontaran would never run from danger, and would always faith death with a rebellious smile; it was considered anathema for them to even turn their back on a foe. It was therefore even more unusual that one was denigrated to a prison on some backwater asteroid belt. Sontarans were not imprisoned; they were reserved for glorious death in battle. There was Thanos’ twisted mercy, granting unwanted clemency to a warrior race, barring them from a glorious finish.

Magnir, as an Asgardian, was also from a warrior race, and was also barred from Valhalla due to his dishonest capture. Unlike most individuals from a warrior race, however, Magnir was much slighter than most of his kin; rather than heavy muscles and square jaws, the Enchanter was slim and weedy, with russet-brown hair and no chin to speak of. For his current position, he was severely overdressed in Asgardian formalwear. A light blue cloth tunic was overlaid with the highest quality Aesir chainmail, with heavily inlaid Vanaheim braces crisscrossing around his arms and legs. He took the position of ‘dandy’ to an almost preposterous extreme; hardly the same figure of unrestrained violence and bloodshed as his cellmate. Instead, any violence would come from his poetry; Gamora would often pass by the cells to see him and Loki exchanging ritualised competitive verse in an activity they called ‘flyting’.

When Gamora arrived at the cell, however, Magnir was not his normal foppish self. Instead, he was huddled in a ball, tear tracks lining down his face, whimpering fearfully. His hollow eyes were fixed on Loki, who sat smiling shark-like in his cell. The terrified Asgardian turned at Gamora’s entrance, and scrambled to the bars of his prison.

“Please!” he gibbered. “Please! You’ve got to get me away from him- he’s insane!”

Gamora stepped back slightly at this unexpected display. From what she had seen, Magnir and Loki had been fast friends. What had happened to have turned them so suddenly and violently against each other?

“He’s changed,” Magnir spluttered. “He’s gazed into the abyss and it’s consumed him, made him a shadow of his former self. I have no idea what atrocities he’s capable of now.”

He leaned in close, fixing Gamora with wild, unseeing eyes.

“He directed the full weight of the Bifrost to the planet Jotunheim, just to achieve his own political machinations. He destroyed half of a whole planet, just because he wanted leadership of a seperate realm. Who knows what he could achieve with more resources! He’s a maniac!”

“Oh, a maniac, am I?” sneered Loki, lit with inner derision. “Please, Magnir, illuminate me on how that is the case. As you can see-” and here he lifted a manacled hand- “-I am quite the captive audience.”

Magnir took a deep, grief-filled breath. “You aren’t the friend I knew, Loki. I don’t know what happened in the time we spend apart, but your heart has turned as black as ice. Half a planet, you fiend! I can’t even imagine the worldview and skill-set that would be needed to commit genocide on such a scale. Why, you monster, if there were any other tyrants bent on widespread destruction, I sure you would have a lot to offer--”

Loki hit one balled-up fist savagely on the cell doors, rattling them and shutting him up. “I see you still have much to learn, Magnir, in relation to the ways of the world, not to mention a little thing that I call subtlety. What one person calls bad, I call good. What one person calls a catastrophe, I call an opportunity. And what one person calls genocide, I call a necessity.”

Styre took this opportunity to speak up. “There is no honour in what you do, Lie-Smith,” he said, the deep rumble of his voice reverberating his battle-armour. “I would turn my back on you, but that is forbidden under Sontaran lore. Instead, I shall merely say this: you are capable only of evil deeds and death.”

A bitter laugh came from Loki. “Fools. Imbeciles. You know nothing of the higher purposes that I serve. You see the world in black and white, not in the arching wheels of colour that I perceive. There is more here than what meets the eyes. Magnir, your mind is constrained by dusty books, and you do not know the myriad of options and realities in the wide world. When the future life is on the line, you must see that conventional morality must be dismissed as the friendly lie that it is. Yes, Magnir, a lie- trust me, as I know what I speak of. I am, after all, the God of Lies.”

Magnir attempted to make some small conversational riposte, but was interrupted when Loki turned his attention to his war-like companion.

“And as for you, Styre, your obsession with honour does you no credit. I would rather be an alive traitor than a dead hero. But I believe that our green-skinned jailor wishes to have some words with us?”

Gamora suddenly felt very, very weary and very, very old. She raised her hand and signalled for the guards to take the prisoners to the arena.

“Silence,” she said, trying to not react to the beginnings of a migraine. “I care not what quarrel you three have with each other, nor what your views on comparative morality are. Any quibbles you have may be dealt with in the arena, in bloodshed and violence. I’m sure the victory will come easier in battling enemies, and not friends.”

These words came no easier to her in that moment then they ever had. It tore at her that she was forced to practically execute another group of people, but thus was Thanos’ will. She had almost hoped-- but never mind.

Magnir seemed frightened enough that he had to be dragged, while Styre shrugged off the guards who attempted to manhandle him. Loki smiled, and mockingly presented his hands to be handcuffed, giving an unnecessary flourish.

As Gamora went to join Thanos in the observation room overlooking the arena, she mulled over what she had seen in the cells. There was something else going on here that she wasn’t seeing, some hidden subtext that left her feeling uneasy. The three prisoners had been fast friends, and it seemed unnatural for them to turn on each other in such a manner. If allegiances like that could change in an instant, what was to stop her position on Sanctuary being damaged? And if she ever, God willing, moved on to form stable friendships with Nebula or some other third party, what was to stop those bonds from vanishing like dust in the wind?

The observation room was built in such a manner that it jutted out over the arena, windows enfolded around a sphere to give a full view of the space below. The end result looked rather like a large fishbowl. The arena itself was less impressive, looking more like the black pit of Hel than a reasonable location for fighting. When Gamora arrived, she was not alone; Thanos sat in pride of place on his customary floating throne, but he was joined by two others. Corvus Glaive sat at the Titan’s right hand, his hooded face pale and orc-like, while Ebony Maw sat at his left. The eyes of Glaive were cold, glittering with an inner maliciousness, while Maw appeared more regal, pupils reduced to squinting orbs covered by wrinkled skin. His nose was non-existent, smoothed over by years of interfering surgery. Their names were well-chosen, for when Thanos faced an enemy, he had his glaive to strike them down and his gaping maw to swallow him whole.

Gamora walked in mid-conversation; Maw was debating heavily with Glaive on the merits of forming an army. The warlike Glaive wanted to send the Chi Tauri army like a plague into any world that opposed them; Maw advocated a more gradual scheme. They quietened when Gamora appeared.

“I see my daughter has arrived,” rumbled Thanos. “Have the prisoners been delivered to the armoury?”

Gamora nodded. “Abrella has them now. He’ll prepare them for the tournament.” Agent Abrella was the Sanctuary weaponsmith, principally reduced to giving the damaged and discarded prisoners damaged and discarded weapons. The better guns and swords were given to Thanos’ main army. Abrella had been resistant to this when he first arrived, buffeted by the flows of the solar winds, but a few sessions with the Other had changed that view. Now, he stalked around the corridors of Sanctuary with his absurd cylindrical helmet, the melodramatic cape flapping behind him.

“What is it this time? A Sontaran and two Asgardians?” snarled Glaive.

“One of the Asgardians turned out to be a Jotun, I am told,” said Maw. “Kl’rt relished burning the poor soul. You should hear him talk.”

“I hope the Sontaran wins. No- I hope that they all lose. I hope they all die and are flushed into space to pop like a balloon. Death is the only answer,” Glaive returned, glorying over each murderous syllable.

“Oh, go strangle a Lazoon, won’t you?” sighed the long-suffering Ebony Maw. “That should ease some of the tension you’re apparently feeling. You have to work through these excess emotions.”

They were interrupted by a roar from the crowd, baying at the arrival of the three prisoners. One in particular stood forward, assuming the showman position as he proceeded to showboat with the best of them.

“Is that--?” began Glaive.

“Yes. It is,” sighed Gamora.

Loki stood in the middle of the arena, arms outspread, and gave a delighted grin. “Citizens of Sanctuary!” he exclaimed, “You have come for a display of might and wits above all else, and my word, you shall be repaid in full. Behold, my companions- Magnir the Mighty, age-old sorcerer from the realm of Asgard, expert in necromancy and dark magic! Legend has it that he defeated Fingon the Elf in the Battle of Unnumbered Tears! Gasp in awe as he weaves magic beyond your wildest imagination!”

Magnir, still looking sulkily at Loki, muttered “Never liked necromancy, anyway.”

“And here is Field Major Styre of the Greater Sontaran Army, Head Advisor of the G3 Military Assessment Survey, Vanquisher of the Void of Kobol, and Scourge of the Cetaganda Empire. A hand, gentlemen, for you will not see his like again.”

“This Styre fellow,” murmured Maw to his companions. “Does he remind anyone else of a potato, or is it just me?”

Loki resumed his speech. “And I am Loki Laufeyson, Fallen Prince of Asgard, God of Mischief, Chaos and Terror, Liar and Deceiver, Destroyer of Jotunheim and Killer of Gods. You came here for murder and mayhem, my dear friends, and I am more than happy to oblige.”

Gamora raised her eyebrows at this. He wore the title of Fallen Prince like a proud badge, daring anyone to oppose his claim. I am a villain, he seemed to shout, I am hear to destroy and corrupt, so what are you going to do about it? He was aware of the negative public opinion around him- the story of his destruction of Jotunheim, thanks to Magnir’s loose lips, and spread like wildfire- and instead of attempting a cover-up, he make the looks of hate a rallying cry.

And yet… there was something off here. His cellmates had turned on him almost overnight, buying in to this theatrical version of villainy. The Loki in the arena, arms outspread and daring the audience to turn on him, was not the Loki who had plummeted from the sky, heart hollow and worn from his experiences. Something was going on behind the scenes, and Gamora did not know what it was.

Loki was a strange character. What did it say about him that, in the middle of an arena, he adopted a ringmaster position and turned the whole procedure into a theatrical event?

Thanos stirred slightly in his throne, interested at the words of the God. He leaned over to murmer to Gamora, “Destroyer of Jotunheim?”

“That was what his cellmates were calling him. Apparently, he wanted to be ruler of Asgard, so he destroyed half of Jotunheim to get it,” Gamora dutifully relayed, to Thanos’ growing interest.

There was a hush in the air, the heavy electrical charge that comes before the storm. Magnir’s eyes flickered nervously between Styre and Loki, while Stye remained beadily fixed on the God of Mischief. Loki was nonchalantly leaning against the wall of the arena. It felt like a bad joke; a Sontaran, an Asgardian and a Jotun walked into a bar, although the added promise of bloodshed meant that no-one was laughing. Instead, there was an anticipatory bloodlust among the audience.

Styre, growing tired of parlour tricks, made the first move. He unhooked his firearm from its position on his back, charged it up with a steady pulsing whum whum whum, and sent a plasmoid bolt surging towards Loki. There was a fiery explosion; but when the smoke cleared, there was only a heavily scorched wall.

“Miss me?” quipped Loki, who shimmered into existence at the other side of the arena. The audience oohed appreciatively at the feat.

Styre’s own gun- a standard issue Sontaran Cobalt Blue laser rifle- had been confiscated by the Other, and so the Field Major had been granted access to one of the many weapons from Abrella’s Sanctuary armoury. These all came from previous prisoners, and so were all ramshackle and falling apart in some respects. Styre’s weapon was replaced with a derelict Slammers Powergun, the former possession of a mercenary who had met his demise in the ill-named Sanctuary. It ejected a copper plasmoid that exploded upon impact; had Loki not teleported out of the way, his green armour would have made an effective new wallpaper for the arena walls.

The gunfire had, to Gamora’s eyes, jolted Magnir into action, and he leapt at Styre, conjuring a staff out of thin air. Five inches of suddenly-fabricated rosewood connected with the potato-headed Sontaran skull with a sickening crack, and the armoured warrior skittered back into the dusty ground.

“A worthy hit!” exclaimed Styre. “But one which did not shatter my carapace; a Sontaran can withstand even the heaviest of blows.”

Magnir rolled his eyes, moving his staff into a defensive position. “Oh, give it a rest, will you? You don’t even have a carapace. It’s armour, which you would know if-- aargh!”

The Asgardian wizard jumped to the side as two knives whistled through the air, slicing vicious holes through his cape. Magnir gave a terrified glance at Loki, who already had two knives in his hands, to replace the ones he had thrown.

“Less talking, more fighting, Magnir. We have a show to put on.”

To anyone with military experience- and there were precious few people at the arena that day who did not have military experience- the range of different combat styles shown by the three contestants would have been surprising. Styre was a heavy-built, slow moving fellow, toting his gun around laboriously and dispensing plasmoid justice wherever he went. Magnir had spent several years of his youth exploring the combat of Vanaheim, and it definitely showed; he was able to pull off highly impressive acrobatic stunts, whirling around his quarterstaff like a pinwheel of death. Loki, meanwhile, was tricky, teleporting from place to place like a shadow, throwing his knives and both of the other parties.

Vhooom! Another shot from the Power-Gun barrelled towards Magnir, and he somersaulted over it, as nimble as an Asgardian deer. The three figures were soon engaged in a flurry of fists and blows, making it difficult for the viewing crowds to understand what was happening. Of those in the observation box, Corvus Glaive seemed excited with all the bloodlust; Ebony Maw was viewing the events with an ill-concealed interest. The Power-Gun let out another volley, its golden metallic surface hissing and snapping with the heat emerging from it.

Gamora squinted her eyes at the actions of those in the arena. There was something else going on here, behind Loki’s rapid-fire quips, behind Styre’s jingoistic bellows, behind Magnir’s startled imprecations. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but it reminded her, somehow, of the theatre. Regardless, the violence was typically brutal; Gamora winced as a blast from the Sontaran’s gun grazed Magnir’s arm, causing a wisp of smoke to emerge from his silken Asgardian armour.

Styre let loose another round of ammunition from his Power-Gun, but this time he let out a gurgling groan and dropped his weapon. His gun, a somewhat cobbled-together affair at the best of times, had overheated, causing a red-hot charge to run through it and scald the fingers that were on the trigger. This weapon, making metallic noises as it began to cool, was furiously thrown aside by the rampaging alien.

“A true warrior does not need a weapon,” sneered Styre, “for the greatest weapon is the body!”

Styre resumed attacking with a vengeance, this time without his gun; instead, he used his significant musculature to slam into the two Asgardians, moving like a wrestler to take out his opponent. As Magnir swung his staff, it was grabbed by two potato-like hands and sharply pulled, sending Magnir stumbling off his rhythm. It seemed that the lack of the Power-Gun was not too detrimental for the Sontaran; still, several members of the audience seemed disappointed.

“Bloody Abrella,” spat Corvus Glaive. “I was hoping for something interesting coming out of this fight, not three idiots swinging their fists at each other.”

“I hardly think it’s his fault, Glaive,” responded Gamora, with a certain amount of derision. She did not like the arrogant alien. “Were we to provide him with good weapons, this sort of thing would not happen.”

Styre lunged at Magnir, sending the slender Asgardian flying. A sickening crack signalled that a bone had broken; his left arm seemed to be jutting out at an odd angle. The sorcerer gave a muffled scream, and harsh invectives floated up to the observation room. The Sontaran boomed a hearty laugh, and began to crow about his victory to those around him.

Ebony Maw spoke up. “I rather think that things are becoming interesting, Corvus. Look.” He pointed at a figure materialising at the other end of the arena. It was Loki, and he had the Power-Gun.

“They say a bad workman blames his tools, but I must admit that most of the blame for your failure here can be attributed to this overheating weapon of yours.”

He began walking towards the Sontaran, a cocky smile on his lips. For his part, Styre was frozen in utter shock. He began to mutter something, but no-one present that day could here it.

“Do you honestly believe that I would allow you to continue firing that weapon if that was not exactly what I already desired? Do you have the temerity to suggest that your actions were not precisely what I intended them to be, that you are merely acting out the play-script I have long since devised? Oh no, my dear Styre, that is not the case at all.”

He rubbed a gloved hand gently over the the barrel of the Gun, aiming it at Styre’s head.

“I wanted the gun to fire. I wanted the mechanism to fail. I wanted the gun to overheat. That way, we are in this enviable situation in which I have a gun and you do not. So, what does a member of a warrior civilisation have to say?”

“Only this,” snarled Styre. “Die, foul trickster!” With this statement, Styre ran toward the laughing God of Mischief, altering his body like a bullet to piece Loki’s armour. Styre barrelled forwards like an unstoppable juggernaut, while the Asgardian merely laughed wickedly. Styre charged closer, close enough to touch, and then…

...passed right through.

The Loki that had been holding the Power-Gun flickered into non-existence, only for the actual Loki to emerge from thin air at the other end of the arena like an angel of vengeance. He stepped over the prone figure of Magnir, who was still moaning from his broken arm, and levelled the Power-Gun at the back of the Sontaran.

If there was one thing Loki knew, it was that most traditions had their origin in necessity. It was tradition for Asgardians to bury their dead by means of a burning boat, as it would allow their souls to ascend to Valhalla, the heat of the flames roughly equating to the clash of battle. It was tradition for the amorphous Shoggoths to intone ‘Tekeli-Li’, as a means of remembrance for the horrors that came with their former cruel masters. And it was tradition for the Sontaran race to never turn their back on a battle, as they had a small probic vent in the back of the neck. This proved the only weak-spot of their armour, to the extent that, when Loki fired a charge at Styre’s back, the plasmoid blast sent a powerful shock running through the Sontaran, and he dropped down dead.

There was a moment of shock among the crowd, as they became accustomed to the fact that one of the contestants was dead. Corvus Glaive gave an admiring murmur, but Gamora only felt sick to the stomach.

“I suppose someone more reasonable would follow that up with a duel with the remaining party,” added Loki, his tone artificially light. He laid a mock-parental hand onto Magnir’s head, his brow still specked with sweat. “We would have a magnificent back-and-forth; I would transform into a Cobra, biting and hissing with venomous intent, and he would metamorphose into a mongoose, their natural enemy. A bat to an owl, a tiger to a stag, a crocodile to a gorilla. I’m sure that would be an entertaining sight to see, but I prefer to cut to the chase, as it were. Dentes Albentes!”

A sickly green glow emerged from Loki’s outstretched hand, surrounding Magnir with a coruscating, almost electrical light. Magnir screamed, beating the floor in utter agony. His head snapped back, bones showing against his skin, his unbroken arm trying to quench his groans by covering his mouth. The onlooking audience grew yet more uneasy; even Glaive was momentarily silent, while Ebony Maw, himself something of a magician, muttered the name of the spell to himself, not identifying it.

“ Please no,” thought Gamora to herself. “Not this. Not him. This is a slippery slope, and torture is something I cannot tolerate.”

After what seemed an agonisingly long time, Magnir’s screams grew less and less, until finally he quietened and collapsed. The body- and it was a body now, the spirit had long since left it- shrank down and fell, a broken doll fallen from a dressing table.

Before the crowd could evaluate what had happened, Thanos stood up from his throne, and cleared his throat. Any murmurings of the audience instantly stilled. This was Thanos the Titan, whose mad conquest had sparked the death-knell of a thousand worlds. When he spoke, people automatically listened.

“We have all observed your performance, Loki of Jotunheim, and you have secured your position for your future life. That is to say-” and here he gave a wide, malicious grin, “-you will not be cast out into the empty cosmos. To determine whether you are allowed a place into my personal inner circle, however, there is one more test you must undergo.”

One of the doorways to the arena began to slowly open, discharging dust and soot as it did so.

“I dislike making an easy challenge for my future Children of Thanos, so I shall explain further. If you lose, you shall be die, but not in the cosmos of space; no, you shall of the honour of a special immolation, courtesy of Corvus Glaive here. If you win, then your opponent will be put to death in a similar manner. The balance of the world must be preserved; the coin toss is equal and random, with only the strongest surviving.”

He reached up one large purplescent hand to wipe a crocodile tear theatrically from his eye. “Of course, as this is one of my own children’s life on the line, this fills me with grief; however, life can be cruel and harmful, and so we must do all we can to replicate those positions. Nebula!”

The blue-skinned cyborg entered the arena, to the general adulation of the audience, and Gamora’s heart clenched in her chest. Loki or Nebula. Fifty Fifty. Heads or Tails. One dies, one lives. Exactly half of the universe. Oh God. Oh God, why?

In many ways, Nebula and Loki were very similar. Both adopted by kingly warlords; both struggling with their elder sibling; both wobbling on the edge of a moral dilemma. Both, for fear of being trite, blue. Looking at them standing there, facing each other, in the arena; they looked like two identical reflections, two halves making a whole.

Two sides of the same coin.

The combat, when they did begin, was fast and brutal. Each blow was neatly parried, arm meeting arm and fist meeting fist. They were both too skilled in unarmed combat to fall to the other; instead, the music of perfectly choreographed attacks and feints filled the arena. This was until Loki decided to add a discordant note and remove a knife from a side-holster. This was used to slice thin strips into Nebula’s partially robotic arm, prompting the alien cyborg to snarl viciously, and input a few codes into the buttons on her shoulder.

Suddenly, the fighting stepped up a notch; Loki was moving backwards, knives glinting in the sun, as Nebula’s arm became a mass of whirling daggers and blades. Clearly, several mechanical alterations had been made, increasing her chances of winning the battle. The metal smoothly flowed into a sword, then a shield, then a scalpel, then a scimitar. The arm would separate into different octopus-like tentacles, wrapping around Loki’s hand, crushing it; Loki gave an angered growl and teleported away. Any trace of levity had vanished from his face, dropped as one drops a mask that is no longer useful.

The fighting resumed, but this time it had a slower, more careful feel. Loki was probing Nebula’s defence, using sallies and feints to determine if there were any openings in her form. He soon discovered that her arm had some sort of self-awareness. When he rolled around the back of her and attacked, aiming to create a vicious slice across her shoulders, the arm twisted around and blocked the dagger. This was without her looking, rendering the matter miraculous had it not been explained by her metal defender.

Loki was frozen momentarily by this realisation, leading for the deceptively fast android limb to lash out and rain a painful blow onto his solar plexus, expelling the air from his lungs with a soft whumpph. He staggered backwards, but Nebula had already done her damage; his ribs felt cracked, and he struggled to breathe.

Loki would have made a quip here- insulting one’s opponent, or ‘flyting’, was a respected Asgardian art that the God of Mischief had wholeheartedly embraced- but his throat had a throbbing soreness to it that rendered such a decision unwise. Instead, Loki scythed his arm around-- a quick flash of silver and steel-- Nebula’s hand raised in defence--

The manoeuvre ended with Loki’s dagger embedded in Nebula’s palm, her face flushed with pain and anger. Her fingers twitched ineffectively next to the handle.

And then, in a visually horrifying tableau, her fingers arched backwards like spider-legs, grabbing the handle of the knife in an anatomically impossible fashion. Her hand split apart around the knife and rotated, causing a whirr of cogs and gears until she was holding the knife, with only a ragged scar as any indicator that she had been stabbed.

“Do you think I am out of the game already, Prisoner? You have no idea of my power,” Nebula boasted, and proceeded to input a code into her shoulder. Her face cleared, lines and wrinkles that emerged during her pained rictus disappearing. “This mode prevents me from picking up any pain from that arm. You’ll find, Lie-Smith, that I am far from vulnerable.”

Indeed she was not; this latest upgrade rendered her even more lethal on the battlefield. Although she wanted no death in this match, part of Gamora’s heart burst with pride at Nebula’s abilities. Loki was forced onto the back foot, barely dodging each swipe from the blue cyborg’s bladed arm. The clash of metal filled the air, polished steel crashing against medieval leather vambraces.

The lack of pain in Nebula’s limb allowed her to move with extra speed, and she was able to palm the knife that Loki had stabbed her with to attempt several vicious stabs. In the furor of combat, however, she did not notice what several other members of the observation box noticed; that Loki’s skin was slowly becoming an icy blue.

Gamora realised, with a gasp, that whenever the two combatants clashed, the chill of the innate Jotun biology would send tendrils of ice across Nebula’s forearm. Nebula did not notice, the normal warning that the pain would bring not occuring. The thin, creeping carpet of frost eased around the elbow, causing the metal to crinkle in the bitter cold.

This virus, this parasitic chill, took several moments to have an effect, but eventually the invading frost made its way through the mechanisms of the arm, sending it juddering into an agonising collapse. The screech of metal against metal could be heard, until her arm froze up, unable to move due to the twisted nature of the internal machinery. With a sharp slice, Loki severed the iced appendage at the shoulder, and it landed in pieces on the dusty floor.

“So,” came the sibilant tones of Nebula. “That’s your strategy, is it? Get rid of your opponent’s weapon, and use that time to strike?”

Loki gave an electrifying smirk. “Well, it’s true that I like to disarm my enemies, my dear.”

“Did he just---?” muttered Ebony Maw, under his breath.

“I think he did,” confirmed Gamora, rolling her eyes. “Nebula will be fine, anyway. We can fit her with another limb after this.”

Both Nebula and Loki were considerably fatigued by the conflict at this point; one was missing an arm, and the other was nursing a broken rib and was having trouble breathing. It was to no-one’s great surprise that soon, both bloody and bruised (but unbowed) they collapsed, splayed backwards into the dusty floor of the arena.

Thanos seemed about to speak, but Gamora, sensing an opportunity, spoke up first. “It seems that the contest is a draw; the two have both drawn blood, but neither have succeeded in killing the other. While there is traditionally two outcomes of a match like this one, it seems a third path has been selected, with both participants entering into the Black Order.”

Inwardly, she prayed for this result; a movement away from Thanos’ binary live/die mentality, to a wide field of alternatives. Loki was truly one to not fit into a normal black/white morality system.

“Let the bodies of the vanquished prisoners be cast into space, and let Nebula and Loki- once they have awakened from this slumber- join us in our council rooms. The Will of Thanos Be Done.”

“The Will of Thanos Be Done”, echoed the crowd, and if said Thanos was displeased by Gamora’s declaration, he seemed pacified by this approbation. Loki remained, dead to the world, on the floor of the arena. Two brutish-looking reptilian aliens- a Hork-Bajir and a Drakh, respectively- emerged from an alcove and began to drag the corpses of Magnir and Styre out, in preparation of being thrown out of an airlock.

Styre and Magnir drifted, swallowed up by the dark infinity of space, the cold reaches of the cosmos sending icy tendrils to blacken and bruise their icy skin. Magnir’s cloak billowed out in the nonexistent breeze, while the blue metallic armour of the Sontaran began to crack and distort with the gravitational pressures bearing down on it. The skin greyed, the cheeks hollowing as the oxygen began to slowly leave their lungs. It was a pitiful epitaph to two intergalactic warriors who had been voyaging for years.

“Really Magnir?” came a voice. “ ‘He’s gazed into the abyss and it’s consumed him’? Where did you find that pithy line? The first draft of a Vanaheim opera?”

The voice had come from Loki, but a distilled version of the same; a phantom version of the God of Mischief had appeared, but one worn thin on the tapestry of life. He was vaguely translucent, and the winking stars of the Pleiades could be seen through his silvery form. It was important not to forget that a sorcerer of Loki’s repute was capable of Astral Projection.

There was a shimmer in the air as a band of green coruscated across the two corpses, removing any traces of the icy coldness and restoring the healthy flush to their bodies. With a sudden gasp, Magnir and Styre inhaled life-giving breath, and jerked back to existence. The wounds they had gained in the arena- a broken arm for Magnir, and a bruised neck for Styre- shimmered and vanished. The Asgardian gave a grateful smile to his prince.

“I’m sorry, your Majesty,” said Magnir the Magnificent. “I’m afraid stressful situations like that trigger my fight or flyte reflex.”

“Frankly, I’m surprised we got away with it. What was that you said? ‘If there were any other tyrants bent on widespread destruction, I sure you would have a lot to offer’? I felt like I was at a job interview. I’m surprised she bought it; but then, sometimes subtlety has to be dispensed with,” responded Loki. “It was necessary, however. I had introduced myself as Loki, the God of Mischief, a proud prince of Asgard; I needed to be known as Loki, the God of Evil, and the destroyer of Jotunheim. In order to get into Thanos’ good graces, I needed to change my name.”

“Well, not literally, your Majesty.”

“No; but the power of a name and reputation has a magic greater than any sorcery I can conjure. In the days to come, I will need to don many masks and play many roles- I can only hope that I do not forget which one is mine.”

Styre, never the fastest star in the solar system, spoke up, confusion clouding his voice. “Friend Loki of Asgard! I confess I am somewhat unsure of what has been happening- why are we floating in space? Where are we going, precisely?”

The ghost of Loki gave a wry smirk. “We have already discussed this, Styre, as you well know, but I can recognise an invitation to brag as well as anyone. In short, we are here because it is the only way of escaping this Norns-damned Sanctuary intact; by already being dead. Your ‘corpses’ were discarded out of the airlock and into the depths of space, allowing me access to this particular patch of the cosmos here.”

He waved an illuminating hand at his surroundings, taking in the distant blue swirls of the Smith’s Burst nebula, the twin suns of the legendary Magrathea, and the pearlescent Ormazd planet. There, in the centre of the inky blackness, was a area of space that somehow seemed deeper, more intangibly present than anywhere else.

“Here, in the space behind Rustum, is a passageway, a portal, a knot in the wood of the Yggdrasil tree, a wormhole, an Einstein-Rosen bridge, call it what you like, that will take you from this place to another place. From there, you can return to Asgard- or Sontar, in your case, Styre- under your own energy. Charter a ship, hitch-hike around a bit, I don’t know. This should lead you to Barsoom, if I am correct, although it has been a while since I’ve walked this merry road.

“As for the battle, I thank you for your cooperation there, as well as the staged ‘argument’ in the cells earlier. That, of course, had a definite purpose. A perceived falling out meant that any conflict between us would look more realistic, and your mention of my destruction of Jotunheim, Magnir, should mean that Thanos thinks me a kindred spirit. Hardly a position I enjoy being in, but needs must when the devil drives. Hopefully, my display would mean that I am promoted to his ‘Inner Circle’, allowing me to take the Mind Stone when I leave, on some pretense I shall create at a later date.

Styre’s potato brow wrinkled in further confusion. “But what of the spell you cast on Magnir? He was in agony! I hardly think that befitting of a warrior.”

Magnir chimed in with the solution. “I can explain this, your Majesty. With sorcerers, much of our magic is a mystery to the general public. To the uneducated, one spell looks very much like another. What appeared to be a variant of the pain-causing Cruciatus curse, was, in actuality-” -and here he gave a pearly grin- “-a teeth-whitening charm.”

There was a moment of sheer camaraderie, a feeling of communal relief that they were here, together, having made it out of Thanos’ torture chamber, having escaped the clutches of the vile other. There was a feeling of jubilation, of heady laughter and enjoyment, that touched the hearts of all three unlikely space adventurers. They embraced each other with the pleasure of a difficult battle won, although as Loki was currently nothing more than a wandering spirit that was made somewhat difficult. And then--

“I’m afraid I must leave you now. My body is currently unconscious in the arena back at Sanctuary, and I expect I will be called to Thanos’ council soon. We may not meet each other again, but if, Norns willing, we do, know that I have a bigger challenge for you two.”

There was a significant pause, as the bodies of Styre and Magnir drifted closer to the gap in space, and the coruscating lights that signalled a jump into interdimensional began to corrupt and distort the edges of their vision. The red plains of Barsoom began to ease into the monochrome blackness of space, like two levels of writing overlaid onto each other, a palimpsest of galactic proportions.

“We must find the Infinity Stones, my friends, and we must strike Thanos down for good.”

Chapter Text

Those that loved Loki Odinson, truly loved him, often attributed his actions to fits of pique, or jealousy, or desire for attention. Odin Borson, the All-Father of Asgard, would often pass judgement on his actions in such a manner; “The boy craves the spotlight and the eyes of others,” he would say, or, when he wasn’t feeling so charitable, “He is a creature wracked by jealousy.” Thor would say the same things, although cushioned by an easier affection. “The green eye suits you ill, brother,” he would say after he bested Loki in a fighting competition, or for the heart of a fair maiden. “You have your arena, I have mine.”

Those that knew Loki Odinson knew that his motives were frequently inscrutable. “He’s tricksy, that one,” Sif would say, watching him carefully on one of their many quests. “I don’t think he’s jealous, that’s just a mask; but he is after something, I don’t know what.” It was sad to say that those who knew him the most, who put the time and effort in to learn what made the Prince tick, were frequently his enemies.

Those that both knew and loved Loki Odinson thought differently. They knew that his actions always made sense, but you had to look at them from a different angle. Unfocus your eyes and approach the problem from a slant direction, like a magic-eye puzzle. Then the truth behind his actions would emerge.

The only person who both knew and loved Loki Odinson, however, was Frigga the All-Mother.

So when Loki emerged in New York, crazed with battle and baying for Midgardian blood, those who loved him attributed it to a fit of jealous rage, of a mad desire for the throne. Those who knew him thought it was out of a push to destroy, that the claim to rule was only a smokescreen for wider battles. And it was only Frigga who divined the true reason.

Look past, for the moment, what Loki says is his motive. Look past the blood, the smoke, the rampant destruction, the portal over New York tearing into the city. What do we know of the bare facts?

We know that Thanos began with one Infinity Stone and his eye on a second, and that Loki began cast out of Asgard and in the hands of a madman. And we know that the battle ended with both infinity stones out of Thanos’ reach, and Loki safely restored back to the heart of his ancestral home.

The Battle of New York was never an invasion. It was a very public heist.

But we get ahead of ourselves; Loki was still being held within Thanos’ Sanctuary. And, like ever, he had a plan.

Loki had managed to make his way into Thanos’ inner circle through his display of mathematical ruthlessness in the arena, and so was free to do what he did best- whisper thoughts into someone’s ear, until the ideas that were theirs become interchangeable from the ideas that were his.

The key to manipulation, the way Loki always understood it, was to guide the intended victim to making the decision themselves. It was uncouth to merely state the intended avenue of action bald-faced; instead, one should walk the other through the necessary steps of logic. Cultivate the necessary personality traits that would lead to victory, and dismiss those that would oppose it.

In Thanos’ case, therefore, the first key bit of information to place around was the old Midgardian phrase, ‘set a thief to catch a thief’. It was to that end that Loki, upon seeing the half-machine Nebula contemplating the galaxy out of a spaceship window, moved forward and struck up conversation.

“Enjoying the view?” asked Loki. Nebula had been sitting on an overturned box of scrap parts, gazing through the floor-to-ceiling transparent aluminium wall, and she jumped slightly at Loki’s words. 

“It’s calming,” said Nebula, resuming her sombre position. “We’re all so small next to all these stars. All our puny battles and sorrows mean nothing to this cruel universe.”

“And you find that a positive thing?” asked Loki.

A pause. “It’s.... reassuring.”

They sat in silence for a minute, both looking out into the inky blackness of the cosmos. Loki glanced at Nebula out of the corner of his eye.

“I hope you realise that my… removal of your arm was not based on any personal feelings of ire, but was merely a result of the situation. In battle situations like that, we must all look beyond any dangerous emotions of revenge,” he said.

Nebula gave a sparse, metallic chuckle. “Was that an apology?”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“It wasn’t a very good one.”

“Very well, then.” Loki made a face like he was swallowing a sour lemon. “I am… sorry. For the arm. And anything else.”

“Hmmm. Better. It’s alright, Loki of Asgard. My arm is both a weapon and an extension of myself. I can use it to strike my enemies, but it is, ultimately, something that can be replaced and repaired. It can be destroyed or frozen, but, ultimately, it will always remain with me.”

Loki half-closed his eyes, looking at Nebula through his lashes. “We have an expression, on Asgard. My brother and I sat before Odin’s throne and acted according to his will. Thor was Odin’s right hand, going forth into the realms and enforcing his will on to other subjugated races. I was his left hand, sneaking across Yggdrasil and whispering into the ears of kings and courtiers. The right hand attacks from the front; the left attacks from behind. I see much the same in your relationship with your sister; and your relationship with yourself.”

“Hmmm.”

Nebula looked unnerved, and began to move away slightly, both emotionally and physically. Loki cursed himself for a fool. Never tell the truth, for the truth scars and shrivels away at the heart, leaving it wrinkled and dried in the baking sun of self-reflection. Lies are comforting, lies have a pleasant chill. Loki tried a different tack, before the opportunity left for good.

“When you look out into the stars, what do you see?”

I see the endless expanse of space. I see the stars around Midkemia, where the Nietzscheans of the Witch Head Nebula make constant war with the cat-people of Kzin. I see the black hole at the end of the Alderson flight path, where all who pass are condensed into a single atom, and only the black monoliths that encircle it bear witness. I see the battling tribes of Sky’s Edge, and I see Colony 622, which was wiped out by a malignant spore.”

Loki chuckled. “I’m sensing a running theme, here. Not one for the happier side of intergalactic tourism, are we?”

Nebula did not see the funny side of Loki’s quip.

“Do you know where I was born, Loki of Sanctuary?”

“Not Sanctuary, I am of Asgard. Well, formerly Asgard, at any rate.”

“Do you know where I was born, Lord of Asgard Well Formerly Asgard At Any Rate?”
Loki decided that the issue of names was not a hill he wanted to die on. “No, I can’t say I do.”

“I was born on the icy moon of Andoria to a family of galactic explorers. We were peaceful people, exploring and classifying new lands and new territories. I presume, anyway. Thanos massacred them all when I was seven.”

Loki was sympathetic, but not surprised; it was Thanos’ usual modus operandi, after all.

“He altered my appearance to look more… normal. Our people had thick, white hair and antennae, you know? Thanos removed those. I still find it difficult to hear, sometimes, and it hurts when the wind blows too hard.”

Nebula mimed antennae by placing two fingers by her temples, giving her the appearance of having devil’s horns. Loki was somewhat discomfited to realise that the discolourations on her scalp were metallic plates placed over the gaping wounds.

“All Andorian antennae grow back after six months. Not mine, however. Never mine.”

“I’m sorry, Nebula,” said Loki. The apology came easier this time. “I know it’s meaningless- I don’t know your pain- but I’m sorry.”

“You cannot tell from looking at me now, but I used to want to explore the world with my parents. That’s where I got my name, you know- because I longed to see the nebulas and galaxies and universes that are out there. Not anymore. All I can do is destroy, now.”

“A Nebula to explore the Nebulas, hmm? Rhythmically sound. Like setting a thief to catch a thief.”

The works percolated in her mind, and slowly sunk in. She made no comment about them, however.

“Perhaps,” she said instead. “I merely feel that I merely wish to discover, rather than the cycle of violence I am now in.”

“Then why do you ally yourself with Thanos? Why do you follow his whims, and go forth on a quest that is bound to end with the destruction of all of these planets you value so much?”
“Why do I do it?” clarified Nebula.

“Yes.”

“Where would I go?” she spat out, face distorted in anger. “What options do I have, if not for Thanos’ dubious charity? What other choice do I have?”

“Resist him. Stop him. And help me.”

Nebula went very still. If it wasn’t for the hum of low-level machinery that always happened around her, Loki would have thought she was dead.

“Help you?”

Loki chose his next words with exquisite care. “I’m aiming to… collect the Infinity Stones, of which Thanos already has one, before he can wreak the devastation that he so clearly desires.” 

“What do you need from me? I won’t commit treason.”

“For now? Nothing. Just act as normal.” You will already do what I need you to do. “When I need help, I will contact you. Just remember.”

A hollow laugh came from Nebula- the sound of wind blowing through machinery. “Remembering is one thing that I can do very easily.”

A piercing wail came through the ship, a siren summoning them to Thanos’ side. The Black Order was meeting. Nebula looked at Loki, eyebrows arched; Loki lifted one finger to his lips in a shushing gesture.

They made their way to the meeting room, Loki trailing slightly behind Nebula, to find that the rest of the Order had already assembled. Cull Obsidian, the animalistic Black Dwarf, lurked in the shadows near the back of the room. The goblin-like Corvus Glaive sat sharpening his pike, sneering at the newcomers. Ebony Maw, an alien who had the appearance and manner of a particularly crusty Church of England reverend, was positioned on Thanos’ right side, while Gamora was on his left. Proxima Midnight and Kl’rt, the Other, were standing together, both gazing beadily at Loki and Nebula.

In the centre of this assembly, of course, was the Titan Thanos, his chair floating slightly enough that it was visually impressive but not sufficiently for it to have any practical purpose.

“Let us begin,” boomed Thanos. “What are the deeds of the day? Has anyone uncovered the location of the next Infinity Stone?”

Loki let the conversation run through the opening pleasantries before speaking up. Kl’rt revealed a new stage of genetic development for the Chi Tauri forces; Ebony Maw revealed his studies in the science behind the Stones; and Gamora narrated the deaths of some of the people she had been sent to assassinate. The lull soon came, and Loki stepped forward. Matters like this always worked better within the lull.

“I have uncovered the Space Stone, Lord Thanos. It is currently being studied by scientists in Midgard.”

“Midgard?”

“An Asgardian mistranslation, milord,” smarmed Ebony Maw. “He means the planet known as Terra, or Earth.”

“I see. And what have you found there?” interrogated Thanos.

“Many things, my lord. But perhaps-- perhaps it would be better to show you?”

Loki was nothing if not a showman. The spell he used created an astral projection of events going on lightyears away, but his eye led to a certain cinematic aura settling over the proceedings. His manner changed into that of someone trying to sell you a used car. 

“Observe, oh bold ones. Observe this vision of people from the distant planet that you call Terra.”

The flickering image that Loki had conjured showed an elderly scientists, none other than one Erik Selvig.

To any reasonable outward appearance, Selvig appeared calm and collected; a venerable middle-aged professor, devoted to the field of quantum mechanics. And yet this was the man who roamed around New Mexico searching for an ancient myth, chasing storms in the distant sands. There was a desire for wild adventure lurking in his craggy heart, a need to push the envelope far enough to change the world. In his university days, in the wild years of the early ‘70s, Erik had had an affair with a Swedish girl called Anita, and in many ways the rest of his life had been an attempt to match that same level of reckless abandon. Selvig had thought that had been achieved with his meeting with a thunder god in New Mexico, but his present situation- walking through an underground lair straight out of a James Bond novel- indicated that perhaps his adventurous life was not yet finished.

Loki had done his research about one Erik Selvig. Admittedly, when one was several light years away from your chosen target, it was very difficult to find out anything about anyone; the God of Mischief had been forced into scrying in bowls of water and squinting at tea leaves. Personal details were unnecessary; what was essential was finding out what made the man tick. Selvig was a dreamer who hated dreaming, someone who longed for a wider explanation for the universe and yet believed that one could never exist. His protege, Foster, was more optimistic, squashed down by endless tiresome academic journals and yet bursting up at the hope of life beyond the stars. And then, Darcy Lewis was… Darcy Lewis. What you saw was what you got, which in Loki’s eyes was particularly odd. There was something about her that intrigued him; but Selvig was the main target here.

Erik Selvig was visible in the large bowl of water as he made his way through the darkened corridors. The reflection pooled and rippled, momentarily distorting the image; then it reformed into a vivid depiction of the Swedish scientist. He looked up at a dark-skinned man who emerged from the shadows.

“Dr Selvig?” the man barked, harsh tones shattering the silence of the corridor. The scientist nodded in response. There was a sense of grandeur of the scene, a sense that Selvig was being shown a world beyond his own, that the curtain was to be pulled back on some great revelation. Considering that he had discovered that gods were real less than a week ago, that was quite some claim.

“So you’re the man behind all this?,” said Erik Selvig, gesturing at the darkened room. “Quite a labyrinth.” A labyrinth indeed; the man in the shadows was either Daedalus, the architect of all of this cloak-and-dagger mystery, or the minotaur, about to murder and devour the innocents sent down there.

There was silence from the man with the eyepatch.

Selvig tried to inject an element of humour into the situation. “I was thinking, ‘ Oh, they’re taking me down here to kill me! ’”, he quipped, only half joking. His half-hearted chuckles trailed off under the spymaster’s icy glare. His ill-thought pun was more accurate than he had realised.

The man in the shadows turned his back on Selvig, mind ever on business. “I’ve been hearing about the New Mexico situation,” he said. This referred, no doubt, to Thor’s little jaunt down to Midgard, Loki thought. Loki also noted the euphemistic manner of the man’s speech; the first revelation of the existence of Gods to the Midgardian people since the 10th century was diminished as ‘the New Mexico Situation’.

The one-eyed Midgardian resumed, with a touch of feigned humility. “Your work has impressed a lot of people much smarter than I am.”

Selvig continued the showing of humility by declaiming, “I have a lot to work with.” Why this hollow modesty? Why do the Midgardians creep around with such servility, pretending to be smaller than they are, like jesters crouching, pretending to be children?

“The Foster theory; this notion of a ‘gateway to another dimension’. It’s unprecedented.” There was a pause. Selvig looked up at the single gaze of the spy puppetmaster. “Isn’t it?”

Only a small glimmer of humourous schadenfreude emerged from the man’s stony gaze. Instead, he intoned, “Legend tells us one thing; history, quite another. But every now and then we find something that belongs to both.” He produced a suitcase from a shadowy crevice, and neatly unlocked it in one, flowing movement. Inside, was a glowing blue cube, black wires spiralling out of it like spider-webs. It had a strange, pulsating quality to it; although the sides of the object were flat, they had a curious depth to them, as if they were entering some strange fourth dimension that the normal eye could not see.

“What is it?” queried Selvig. Loki answered the question, turning to Thanos and Corvus Glaive as he did so.

“This is the space stone that you have been seeking, Thanos, here assuming the form of a tesseract; what a cube is to a square, a tesseract is to a cube. With it, why- you could travel anywhere that you wished.”

There was a murmur of curiosity among the assembled aliens. Ebony Maw, himself something an intellectual, raised an eyebrow in sudden interest.

“How does this device, this tesseract, work, exactly?” he asked.

Loki slipped off his showman guise and assumed that of a teacher. “The tesseract is the three-dimensional manifestation of a fifth-dimensional fold in space-time, just as a crease in a piece of paper is a one-dimensional manifestation of a three-dimensional fold. Observe.”

He removed a piece of paper from an inner pocket, and made two marks on it- a point ‘A’ and a point ‘B’.

“The two points are not touching, are they?”

“We can see that they aren’t,” snarked Corvus Glaive. “Get on with it.”

Loki, with a flourish, folded the paper in half and held it up to the light. The two marks could be seen superimposed onto each other.

“The act of tessering can be compared to the act of folding a paper, with the tesseract standing in for the wrinkle in the paper. Find the right frequency- normally a metaphysical thought, or an emotion of some description- and you can go anywhere you so desire. Of course, that’s deeper magic, and far more complex.”

Nebula was looking increasingly curious at Loki’s exposition. “Is that really how it works?”

Loki smiled. “Of course not. But it’s a beautiful lie, isn’t it?”

Thanos rumbled contemplatively. “So tell me, trickster, how do you propose to acquire this object? What trickeries have you devised?”

“No tricks, Thanos. Just power. The infinity stones call to each other, harmonising in a chorus that has been sung for millenia.”

It was Ebony Maw who spoke up next. “My Lord, the Prince may speak the truth, but I sense failure in him. It would take great power to seize this stone, great power indeed.”

Loki raised his eyebrow like a conductor would raise his baton. Right on que, although she did not realise that she was following a script, came Nebula.

“Father, we have great power with us. The mind stone- we use it to catch its brethren. We set a thief to catch a thief, as it were.” She said the words and hurried back into a servile bow, fearing her father’s anger.

“‘Set a thief to catch a thief’? What a ridiculous phrase. I would have thought better of you, my daughter,” said Thanos.

But you don’t think that, do you, thought Loki to himself. Something about the mathematical exactness, the tautology of the phrase, speaks to your cold little logical mind. You feed half a planet by killing the other half, and you use a Stone to capture another Stone. I have you now. You’re dancing to my tune.

“Sorry, father,” muttered a contrite Nebula.

“But I gather your point, little one. You think that the Mind Stone will provide the key, hmmm? What do you think, Maw?”

Loki could almost mime the words coming out of everyone’s lips. He had primed Maw on the metaphysical qualities of the Mind Stone not a week ago.

Ebony Maw spoke up. “As one stone calls to another, I believe it can be done, master. A bridge between the two is possible- the stones naturally wish to draw together, you see.”

“I see that you and I have come to the same conclusion,” said Thanos, who, like all demagogues, tried to present a veneer of omniscience. “An idea has just come to me; we will use the Mind Stone to get the Tesseract, and then we will use the Tesseract to open the way for our armies. A simple plan, but elegant in its simplicity.”

Of course it’s elegant, thought Loki. I placed it in your mind, you petty little fool.

“Yes,” growled Obsidian, monosyllabically. “Elegant. Simple.”

“The best chess moves carry within them a necessary sacrifice,” Thanos exposited. “In this case, by using the resources I have gathered, I will gain treasures beyond your greatest imaginings.”

Of course, it was all a con. A promise that Loki had no intention of fulfilling. Moonshine and fairy-dust. Do this task now, Thanos, and you shall be repaid in full when the time comes.

By that point, however, the con-man usually upped stakes and left, leaving no sign of either money or a forwarding address. It was an old trick, one of the oldest in the book. Send your money to help the Nigerian Prince, for you’ll get it back and more. Pay to free the Spanish Prisoner, and you will know treasure beyond your imagination. Give the Asgardian Prince the Mind Stone, and he’ll bring you back the Space Stone. Lies, of course, but lies make the sea that Loki swims in.

What would you like next, Thanos? Genuine snake oil? Something that has fallen off the back of a truck? A brand-new cart, rarely used?

“Glorious, my Lord,” said Ebony Maw. “With the tesseract, it will take little over a week until the Gauntlet is assembled, and then the Culling can begin.”

“And what a glorious dawn that shall be,” said Thanos, and the rest of the order laughed with sociopathic glee.

Loki found himself in the unenviable position of being the only person standing between Thanos and the destruction of half the universe. His only hope lay in the small magical cube that he could see shifting in and out of focus in the vision.

“Well, I guess that’s worth a look,” the God of Lies whispered.

“Well, I guess that’s worth a look,” Erik Selvig loyally echoed.

Of course, the gap between the plan and the action was a lengthy one, as it always is. Maw worked on creating and maintaining an interdimensional wormhole between the Mind Stone and the Tesseract, while Glaive continued to drill his army of Chi Tauri soldiers in the art of war. 

The alien soldiers congregated like a swarm of bees around a fleet of blocky spaceships, each one doused in a sickly metallic greyness. The Other- or, rather, the alien formerly known as Kl’rt- looked over the mindless eugenically altered slave-race with a glee that left Loki feeling rather sick.

“They have a hive mind, you know,” said the Other. “Each one following the same instructions that are beamed from on high, the rhythmic instructional tattoo that its kin hears and obeys. Beautiful, isn’t it?”

“That wasn’t the word I had in mind,” said Loki, as a Chi Tauri soldier slithered closer, only to reverse and join the stream of its brethren.

“These are the footsoldiers that will mark the first swarm that shall destroy this puny realm of Earth,” pontificated the Other. “The instructions are sent from the central command system- located over there.”

The genetically modified Skrull, still bearing the marks of countless surgeries, pointed to a black ship, its circular mass acting as a planetoid about which all of the other spaceships moved about.

“Think of a race of beings that, through the proliferation of consciousness through thousands of separate organisms, gains true immortality. Immortality, I say, Asgardian, and far superior to your faulty Golden Apples. That is Thanos’ plan, of course- the race can never die out, no matter how low resources get, as each Chitauri soldier is programmed with a desire for cannibalism. Perfect, is it not, Loki? The Immune System of the Universe. We have never seen its like before.”

Loki gave a non-committal hum. He had been around for centuries, and the idea of a hivemind was nothing new. They always had vaguely pretentious names: the Primes, the Unity, the Strangers, the Phalanx. In comparison, ‘Chitauri’ seemed utterly déclassé.

“You shall have the honour of leading the Chitauri’s conquest of Earth. You are ready to lead; our force will follow.”

Of course, Loki’s biggest plans in the future involving the Chitauri were to blow the whole lot of them sky high.

Strangely, the one person who had the barest idea of what he was planning was the green-skinned Gamora, who confronted Loki the day the Invasion was to take place.

“I don’t know what your doing,” said Gamora. “But I have a vague idea that it’s more than meets the eye.”

“I can neither confirm nor deny that,” replied Loki, which was confirmation in itself. 

“Loki,” said Gamora, grabbing his arm. “I want you to know that- this, what you’re doing. You’re a hero. Remember when we were talking about that? That’s you, Loki. A hero.”

Loki gave a bitter little smirk. “I thank you, Gamora of the Zen Whoberi. That may be the first time anyone has ever said that.”

He looked out at the portal to Midgard, pulsing with blue energy.

“And based on what I am about to do, it will probably be the last time anyone ever will. Farewell, Gamora. I have an invasion to undertake.”

Gamora nodded, and retired. The Other and Thanos were the next to arrive, existing in the rocky asteroid belt as if they were born there.

“You have a noble purpose, Loki of Asgard. To spread the word of Thanos among the other realms, and cleave the way to our ultimate goal of saving the universe,” said Thanos.

And if you stopped referring to yourself in the third person, maybe I would think it a better honour than I do, thought Loki.

The God of Mischief looked through the portal, at the flickering emptiness beyond. The tesseract had indeed unfolded, allowing him access to the facility in Midgard that it was currently within. He was just about to undergo the journey, when the Other stopped him, a vicious-looking spear barring the way.

Loki felt a deep sense of dread sliding down his back. His skin prickled.

“Oh, Loki, you did not truly believe you would be going… unsupervised, did you?”

Thanos made a signal of contemptuous command and the skeletal form of the Other stepped forward, a creeping grin appearing on his features. Lifting the sceptre, mind stone burning a bitter shade of blue, Kl’rt placed the blade of the weapon not on Loki’s heart, but on his forehead, between his two eyes. His mind opened up like an oyster.

Oh God Oh God He’s In My Head-- HELLO LOKI, IT’S BUSY IN HERE, ISN’T IT?

The surroundings dulled, and the surrounding figures- Thanos, the Other, Glaive, Maw- took on flickering forms. The Other’s shape sputtered and shifted into Frigga’s, then Amora’s, then Magnir’s, then Sif’s. Ebony Maw became Thor, Thanos became Odin. The unbearable sound of buzzing filled the air, like a thousand furious bees drilling into Loki’s form. Figures from his past filled his eyes; there was Angrboða, holding Jormungandr and Fenrir in her arms. Sigyn was there, as was Sleipnir. Thor, Odin, and Frigga, his not-family, looked on with cold, dead eyes. And still newer faces; Magnir and Brona and Forsung, Verity Willis and Drrf, David Allard and Tim Avery, the Corinthian and Shadow Moon.

GOODNESS, LOKI,  YOU HAVE BEEN BUSY, HAVEN’T YOU? WHAT A LOT OF PEOPLE YOU KNOW. IT’S A SHAME THEY WILL ALL HAVE TO DIE IF YOU FAIL.

His mind felt like it was going to burst. There was a scheme, buried in there somewhere, but he couldn’t get it out. All there was was unbearable pain.

It was with a dull sense of horror that he had been plugged into the Chitauri hivemind; what he was hearing was the mindless chatter of thousands of alien drones, murmuring with an endless beat a chorus of Kill Consume Devour.

What are you doing to me? IS IT NOT OBVIOUS? My mind is my own, you cursed-- I ONLY THOUGHT YOU MIGHT LIKE A LITTLE COMPANY.

Feelings of hatred that were not is own rose up like bile, and he felt himself change. Felt bitterness and despair override him, anger at this brother, at his father, at his mother, until he did not know what feelings were his own, what feelings were the Other’s, and what feelings could be ascribed to the hollow buzzing of the Chitauri.

Loki gasped throatily, coughing up blood and phlegm. His head ached, his eyes were bleeding, his tongue, his neck, his heart, his mind--

This wasn’t the plan, this wasn’t THERE’S BEEN A CHANGE OF PLAN, AND WE’RE DOING THINGS OUR WAY, NOW.

Blue. 

Blue so bright it burnt the retinas, turning into the black emptiness of space.

THE WORLD WILL BE HIS. THE UNIVERSE YOURS. AND THE HUMANS, WHAT CAN THEY DO BUT BURN?

A brief flash of infinite space, impossible enough that the mind would turn into ooze upon comprehending it. Fractals, folding into each other.

Strange creatures lurking in the darkness. A hint of fin. A solitary tentacle. Shadowy forms that hinted at bizarre biologies.

WHERE ARE YOUR TRICKS NOW, LITTLE LIAR?

A flash. A grey room.

“Sir, please put down the spear,” says the spider in his web.

YOU HAVE HEART, LITTLE ONE. LET US DEVOUR THEM ALL.

Chapter Text

“So, what, are you a mutant or something?”

Loki peered closely at the set of documents that were arranged on a table in an underground bunker in Northern Russia. Carrying out a world invasion was a job that required a lot of paperwork, apparently. In hindsight, the agents that he had chosen in that badly-lit science facility in New Mexico were not exactly the stern-faced secret agent men he had heard about in the legends of Midgard. There was the Swedish astrophysicist Erik Selvig, a man fast leaving middle age. There was the archetypical post-retirement spy brought back for one last job, Bob Barnes, a CIA agent with greying hair and a crumpled cream jacket. And there was Clinton Barton , the erstwhile Hawkeye, who was the individual persistently asking Loki inane questions.

“With the X-gene and everything ? Puberty bringing zits and fire out of your eyes?”

Erik Selvig had taken to the Mind Stone with all of the fanaticism of a cult member and none of the personal charm. Loki could see him now, spouting some nonsense about his mind opening up. The Mind Stone affected everyone in different ways, and apparently the revelation that there was so much beyond the realm of science had damaged him greatly. Selvig had delegated himself to opening a wormhole from Earth to Sanctuary.

“No, don’t tell me- it’s radiation. Outer space radiation. Or gamma rays, atom bombs and everything.”

To Loki’s surprise, a decent amount of the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents he’d brainwashed had been drafted in from other spy agencies. There were spies from MI6, MI7 , MI9 , CI5 , the IMF , Section R , CURE , CONTROL , and two different factions of the U.N. called UNIT and UNCLE . It was a regular alphabet soup of a crew. He was particularly impressed by Agent Ecks , a black-clothed spy who went by only an initial. The secret agent had explained that it saved time signing papers.

“Is it the armour? That helmet sends out an electromagnetic pulse that looks like green light, maybe?”

One consultant for S.H.I.E.L.D., Robert Langdon , was a self-proclaimed ‘symbologist’ brought in to comment on the historical/mythical side of the Tesseract. Apparently, the object had been found by lots of different cultures throughout human history, showing up in different mythologies. Langdon had, in a burst of frenetic exposition to Loki, been able to link the Tesseract with the Stone of Giramphiel , the Silmarillion , a house built by Quintus Teal in the forties , and the Weirdstone of Brisingamen , even though the latter was still in Loki’s rooms in Asgard. Privately, the Norse god did not believe that ‘symbologist’ was a real profession.

“My money’s on a scientific experiment gone wrong, really. Come on, boss, I bet you were injected with some form of serum, weren’t you?”

Clint Barton was a fascinating subject, and Loki had enjoyed peeling through his various aliases like the layers of an onion. He had fulfilled every schoolboy’s dream by running away to join the circus at the age of six; ten years at Les Cirque des Reves had provided him with a keen eye, a steady hand and an unusual aptitude at the trapeze, although the latter did not serve him very well in his life as a secret agent. After a while, Barton had entered the world of espionage, working for the Department of Defence’s black ops squad under the name Aaron Cross, and directing field operations for the IMF as William Brandt, before being snapped up by SHIELD. Spying did not normally allow much time for romance, regardless of what the films tell you, so Loki was surprised to glean that the archer had a wife, Laura Weir, and several children. 

“I’ve got it. You’re one of an advanced alien race that everyone thought were Gods, right? Yeah, I feel ya, I read Erich von Däniken in college too.”

Loki turned around violently, losing the edge of his temper. A plate on a nearby table smashed telekinetically into the wall.

“ No, Agent Barton, I am not a mutant,” Loki snarled. “I am not an alien with superior technology, or a time traveller from the future, or someone who was bitten by a radioactive spider. Nor am I a scientist who was bombarded by cosmic rays, or a stuntman who sold his soul to the devil. I am a God, Agent Barton, the Norse God of Mischief and Chaos, so I suggest you spend some time to consider how the existence of deities affects your view of yourself and your place in the world, before shutting up and doing what I say.”

Clint Barton looked surly for a moment, before muttering a quiet “I was just asking….” and slouching into a corner. Loki was quietly furious that the Mind Stone didn’t induce the blank-eyed obedience he had been expecting. He could certainly do without all this talking back. Still, he had a job to do. He had no room for these distractions. 

His plan was a complex one, but like all best plans the kernel of it was simple. Thanos was approaching with his Chitauri army, but Loki could dictate where and how this army could arrive. Therefore, if he bottlenecked the invasion, forcing it through a narrow portal above the most defended Midgard citadel, he could slow the incoming force to a crawl, allowing him to deal with each soldier or ship individually rather than the entire might of the army at once. All he then had to do was muster the might of Midgard, mobilising their own interdimensional army and take the fight to them. This was while he had to resist the invasive scrutiny of Kl’rt, the Other, who would ruthlessly interrogate the holes in whatever plan he had, and prevent any direct rebellion of Thanos. His mind was already burning with a migraine in attempting to shield his inner thoughts from the alien. As long as the weapons capability of Midgard was capable of driving off Thanos, he would be able to escape with two of the Infinity Stones, allowing him to retreat and regroup in the safety of Asgard.

In this, however, he had made one small but fatal mistake.

“So, Agent Barton,” began Loki, tapping on a device that he had been reliably informed was a ‘StarkPhone’. “What defences does the Earth have against alien invasion?”

There was a pregnant pause, nine months of it.

"Aliens are real?" asked Robert Langdon

Loki groaned, nursing away a migraine. "Fine. Show of hands. How many of you knew about the existence of extraterrestrial life?"

Ecks, Selvig and Barton raised their hands.

" Before my brother's ill-conceived weekend jaunt?"

Selvig and Barton lowered their hands.

Agent Ecks, who had hitherto been rather silent, spoke up. “I represent a covert agency known as the Men in Black who keep the knowledge of aliens suppressed from the general public. It’s our role to quietly integrate any alien refugees into society so that they don’t cause widespread alarm.”

The whole story soon came out. The only defence against alien invasion, it seems, was a secretive society that mopped up any solitary aliens that entered the atmosphere. It had a small sister organisation in Cardiff named Torchwood; both were purely defensive, having no military capabilities whatsoever. If Loki was going to muster up a defence against Thanos’ forces with what meagre armies Midgard possessed, he was going to have to look elsewhere.

Aliens had been to Earth, yes, but it was the scant refugees of cosmic wars, shipwrecked in rural American corn fields like an intergalactic Ellis Island. There was the Kree-Skrull War of the 1990s, which had seen a brief skirmish within the planet’s orbit, and a few odd incidents of crop circles and little green men in the 1950s. But Earth had not been visited enough to create a solid defence force, just people like Agent Ecks who policed the scant few Martian or Selenite immigrants. A New York filled with illegal aliens.

The upside of this was that Earth- Midgard- was a culture that had only built weapons for terrestrial threats. An invasion? A true galactic siege, such as the type fought by Asgard in the golden age of Bor? Midgard was a mere babe swaddled in its nursing cloth.

“Norns,” said Loki. “We’re doomed.”

Barton, meanwhile, was an Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., the organisation that seemed to be Loki’s best bet of something approaching planetary defence. They were a spy organisation, but one that preferred the showier elements of the spotlight than the shadowy dealings in the dark. From Barton’s recounting, the average mission ended in explosions and mayhem, rather than the cloak and dagger methods Loki personally preferred. The man they called Hawkeye went into deep anecdotal detail about how he and a Russian agent was able to track arms trafficker Richard Roper to Budapest and blow up the building he was staying in, providing the story with little encouragement from anyone around him. The whole thing seemed faintly tiresome to the God of Mischief.

S.H.I.E.L.D., however, seemed to be his best bet. It defined itself as the Earth’s line of defence, and whispers and reached Barton- and even Agent Ecks, who was only tangentially related to the organisation- that a program to assemble exceptional individuals was in its opening stages. Barton himself was a member of this initiative, although Loki was somewhat concerned about how someone wielding as archaic a weapon as a bow (that had been superseded by guns centuries ago) could do against an alien invasion. Romanoff, the Russian agent whose mission in Budapest Barton waxed lyrical about, was also shortlisted. Banner and Rogers were, apparently, both victims of varying level of radioactive scientific experimentation, with one turning into a Midgard approximation of a berserker rage and the other having a great deal of strength and some form of immortality, if his survival for seventy years under the ice was anything to go by. The last member, and someone whose personality was apparently abrasive enough that he was almost refused membership, was Stark, who had engineered a piece of semi-sentient armour. All in all, it was a motley crew, and not the great defensive force Loki had hoped for when he brought the battle to this backwater planet in the outer spiral arm of the Milky Way. 

To make matters worse, however, Loki had been later approached by Bob McGraw , a British S.H.I.E.L.D. spy who introduced himself as “Bob, Agent of Hydra”, who claimed that the organisation had been infiltrated by a Nazi organisation that had been believed to be terminated some seventy years before. Bob was very blase about working for an evil organisation, saying that the pay was good and that it “came with a good dental plan”. He had been going to join up as one of the supervillain Calendar Man’s goons, but apparently you could declare being a Hydra employee on your tax returns. Loki decided that he didn’t have the time nor the inclination to fix their little Nazi infestation, but it did mean that he couldn’t leave the formation of a superhero team in their hands.

Loki’s plans had rested on the assumption that Midgard’s heroic defences would be in the hands of heroic, good people. Hydra was a wild card. He needed Earth to wipe out Thanos’ armies; apparently, Hydra had a propensity to try to ally with villainous causes. No, if his plan had any chance of working, he was going to have to get his hands dirty.

He was going to have to infiltrate S.H.I.E.L.D. himself.

In some respects, Nick Fury and the God of Mischief were creatures of the same instinct. Both were cold figures, manipulators who had positions of authority that balked at authority being forced on them. They were the spiders in the webs, the whispers in the ears of enemy soldiers. They also enjoyed theatrical demonstrations in front of a crowd to the tactics typically used by their professions. Some people might argue that a covert spy organisation had little use for a massive flying helicarrier. Nick Fury had little use for such people. They lacked imagination. He looked up from his computer as Agent Phil Coulson walked in, eyepatch deeply interfering with his depth perception.

“Coulson,” barked Fury. “Come in and close the door.”

The Agent did so, his normally bright face marked with lines of worry. He had two folders under his arm, one with the phrase ‘Avengers Initiative’ emblazoned in dark-blue ink on it, and the other only with the name ‘Loki’ on it. One folder, Fury couldn’t help but notice, was significantly larger than the other. Coulson placed the thinner of the two onto his desk.

The ‘Loki’ file consisted of the scant pictures that they had been able to scrounge from the Dark Energy Facility in Nevada, an incident report of the events with Thor in New Mexico, and several pages of speculation from some of S.H.I.E.L.D’s agents. Fury paged through this dispassionately.

“Summarise this for me, Coulson,” ordered Fury.

“We don’t know if the one claiming to be Loki is the same one from the Norse Myths,” said Coulson. “We’re working under the assumption that he’s claiming the name as some form of intimidation factor. We’ve cross-referenced with the Air Force operations team SG-1, who say that an alien from the planet Orilla called himself Loki, which might have been a match had it not been for their vastly different appearances.”

“And the rest of it?”

“An overview of any entity calling themselves Loki or a variant of such over the past fifty years, sir.”

Fury had to grudgingly admit that Coulson’s work had been quick and comprehensive. The timeline began in 1975, with a child who encountered an entity called Luke in England; nothing more was noted until 1994, a mask allegedly cursed by Loki caused a bank clerk to go mad. Going into the twenty-first century, the sightings picked up. In 1999, a detective agency in Japan was founded by an individual naming himself after the Norse God; in 2001, a certain “Low Key Lyesmith” was sighted in America, while his name was attached to strange manifestations in a Ohio college campus in 2007. Only last year, a man called Bran Gardiner had infiltrated a coven of witches on Long Island claiming to be the Norse God of Mischief.

Fury sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “So, in other words, we don’t have anything except guesswork and ancient myths?”

“No, sir,” said Coulson.

Fury grunted and gestured at the other folder. “Who do we have in the Avengers Initiative?”he asked. Coulson handed him the file, and he started to flick through it.

“Half of them are loose cannons,” said Coulson, “but they’re the best we can get since Barton’s compromised.”

At the top was the obvious choice of SHIELD agent Natasha Romanoff, the Russian spy who had defected from the KGB half a decade ago. Strictly speaking, she had no super powers exactly, but as a former member (or survivor) of the Soviet Red Room she could run faster, go further, and fight harder than most people Coulson knew. She was the daughter of SMERSH agent Tatiana Romanova , who had defected to MI6 during the fifties. There was a family who knew which way the political wind was blowing, and who weren’t afraid to change allegiances to stay on the right side of history. 

Next was Bruce Banner, a scientist who had been in an horrific accident involving gamma radiation that manifested itself as uncontrollable expansion of his muscles, and accompanying green colouration. The resulting manifestation had been called ‘the Hulk’ by the local newspapers. Banner would only transform into this beast when he became angry; it therefore baffled Fury that he would choose the Indian port city of Calcutta, where the areas of economic poverty would drive anybody to rage. On paper, Fury needed Banner for his ability to track gamma radiation. In actuality, this was only an excuse. Scientists were ten a penny, but not everybody had the muscle power to wreck downtown Harlem. 

The file was below this was World War Two propaganda figure and living legend Steve Rogers, alias Captain America. In this folder, Coulson had abandoned his usual professional writing in favour of gushing about obscure trivia. One page was devoted to a review of his complete set of Captain America trading cards. 

At the bottom was someone who was only tentatively suggested. In neat typewritten font were the words ‘Iron Man Yes, Tony Stark Not Recommended’. Fury had met Stark several times, and the two had clashed severely. The truth was, Stark had intimidating amounts of political power, making him a figure that probably rivalled the Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. himself. If Stark went rogue, they would have precious little power to stop him. Iron Man was dangerous in a fight, but it was Tony Stark who was the true threat.

“There is an alternative,” said Coulson. “A candidate I did not put on file. I know you don’t like a paper trail.”

“You mean…?”

“I think we need extra firepower, sir,” said Coulson. He nodded at the desk drawer, which Fury opened to reveal a now obsolete pager that he had received many years ago. Nick Fury sighed, and gave a light chuckle, memories flooding back.

“I suppose it’s time. You know, Coulson, Captain Danvers gave me this in trust. For when we ever needed assistance, when we were truly in danger, she would come. Heaven knows there have been times in the past seventeen years where I’ve been tempted. Christ, I’ve been tempted. But she has her job and I have mine, and nothing has ever crossed Earth that has needed her presence. Not until now.”

He took a moment to examine the pager, turning the outdated technology over in his hands.

“It was in respect for her that we named the Avengers Initiative what we did. For her sacrifice- and it was a sacrifice, throwing away a life on Earth to protect a refugee race.”

Coulson smiled. “I know, sir. I was there.”

“Of course you were,” said Fury. He seemed lost in memories, but he shook himself and the ruthless spymaster was back. “Still, we need all the help we can get. And I’m sure that no upstart Asgardian prince can match Captain Marvel at her full strength.”

With an air of ceremony, Fury activated the pager. There were a few solitary analogue beeps, and then a message flashed on the screen.

‘OUT OF BATTERY’

Both Fury and Coulson froze, looking at the item with blank incomprehension and mounting anger. With a voice that trembled with suppressed rage, Nick Fury turned to his associate.

“How long will it take to charge a 1995 pager battery, Coulson?”

The Agent had already taken his phone out and was tapping away at it. After a moment he resurfaced. “They’re no longer commercially available, sir. I can order one in, but it will take--” more taps ensued-- “--up to three weeks.”

There was another moment of silence. Then, at a volume that could be heard throughout the helicarrier, a single word:

“MOTHERFUCKER!”

Back in the ill-equipped joint laboratory and abandoned warehouse that Loki had made his base, the God of Chaos and his assembled brainwashed compatriots were mulling over the minutiae of his plan. 

“Now, Barton, I want you to hack into the terminal and infect him with the virus that Ecks has devised. That should temporarily short out the power.”

“Can I shoot the virus in with an arrow?” asked Barton, turning pleading eyes to Loki.

“What? No,” said Loki. “That’s not how viruses are transmitted.” 

“ Please?” asked Barton. “Arrows are kind of my thing. I have a special one here perfect for this situation.”

Loki decided discretion was the better half of valour. “Fine, if you must,” he said, waving his hand dismissively. “With that, I will be able to escape, and reconvene with you at the agreed meeting place.”

There was a chorus of assenting nods.

“Good,” Loki continued. “Now, Ecks and Langdon. Will you be able to access Stark’s tower?”

“The MiB have tools that should be able to short out Stark’s AI for a short time,” said Ecks, explaining what his skill set was.

“I’m good at running and expositing art history,” said Langdon, glad to be involved.

Ecks rolled his eyes. “With the AI removed, we should be able to disguise ourselves as Stark Industry employees and enter the building. With that, we can help Selvig set up the machine that generates the portal.”

Erik Selvig gave a wide grin, eyes glazed with madness. Again, Loki somewhat regretted the damage the Mind Stone had on the scientist. “I have completed my work on the Tesseract, and can now succeed in opening the gateway between worlds. It’s beautiful, sir. There are so many colours, and the stars!-- Oh, the stars!”

The madness of Erik Selvig was perhaps due to the sad necessity of giving two contradictory instructions to the man; one an instruction that the Other would see, if he tried to investigate, and the second a small codicil hidden inside it. Using the Mind Stone was simultaneously easier and harder than Loki’s typical methods of persuading people. It was the equivalent of the difference between using a hammer and a tweezer. It was relatively straightforward to bash Selvig’s thoughts into shape, turning him into a raving maniac that was devoted to one simple cause. It was considerably harder to loosen the Mind Stone’s hold on his brain long enough to nudge it into contemplating light rebellion. Be careful how you structure this, he whispered into Selvig’s mind. Put in a failsafe. Make sure that you can stop the portal. Hopefully, the nascent heroes could follow the trail of breadcrumbs he had placed if things went wrong, if they were not able to retaliate properly. Wheels within wheels. It was always best to weave a get-out clause into any spell, a means to break the curse being essential in high-level enchantment. 

“Now,” said Loki. “What precisely do you need to complete this portal?”

Selvig contemplated for a second. “Iridium,” he said, eventually. “Iridium is the only substance that can crack open the tesseract.”

“Very well,” said Loki. “We shall pursue that goal after we are finished here. And a theft will draw the attention of S.H.I.E.L.D, which will be advantageous for our other plans. Dismissed.”

The group dispersed, bustling off like worker ants. Loki perched on his seat, remaining behind for a few scant moments of peace. If only he had the time to think….

THERE SHOULD BE NO TIME TO THINK,  came a voice, telepathically transmitted from light years away. ARE YOU DOING WHAT I COMMAND, LOKI, OR ARE YOU DISOBEYING ME? THERE WILL BE A RECKONING IF YOU DO NOT DO YOUR DUTY.

As Loki was sitting there, sceptre clutched in hand, his heart dropped as the world melted around him, disappearing into hazy smoke, and the inky blackness of the Sanctuary came into being. The Mind Stone went both ways, it seemed. His head began to ache with a terrible migraine as his thoughts were shifted and distorted against his will. Sometimes he wondered if he was always in that hideous wasteland of asteroids and spacedust, and his escape onto Midgard was nothing more than a fevered dream. 

“Kl’rt,” acknowledged Loki, as the deformed Skrull materialised before him. His face was guarded between a sparse metal mask, and the God momentarily wondered if all that was keeping him together was strips of iron. “Or do you prefer ‘the Other’?”

“You jeer and lash out like the child-prince you are,” rasped the alien. “You know that I go by the name ‘the Other’. It is a title, bestowed upon me by Lord Thanos itself. In your tongue, I am better known as ‘ That-Which-Is-Not-Of-This-Realm’.”

It was true that the syllables of Kl’rt had a lot more depth and nuance that his title portrayed. The All-Speak was effective, but it did result in small issues in translation. 

“Very well, Other,” replied Loki. “May I ask why you have deigned to interrupt my work? Our Lord Thanos grows weary when the tasks are not complete, and I wonder what his reaction would be to your disruption to this goal.”

“You challenge me,” said the Other, “but it is you who are the true traitor in Thanos’ forces, the true worm at his side.” 

He sent a wave of psychic pain at Loki, causing the Norse God to collapse into a heap of moaning agony.

“The Chitauri chitter and grow restless,” continued the Other. “They hunger for the blood of their enemy, as do I.”

“They shall have it. Glorious battle shall emerge, the like never before seen,” said Loki, getting to his feet. He was speaking the truth, but he did not specify which side of the war he would be fighting for.

“The War shall come. But what of your other task? What of that face of the infinity stone, the Tesseract?”

Loki allowed himself a smirk. “Never fear. I shall bring you your trinket.” He was interrupted by the Other’s animalistic snarl. 

“If you fail, if the Tesseract is kept from us, there will be no realm, no barren moon, no crevice where he can't find you,” the Other rasped . His six-fingered hand, the result of countless unpleasant hours of surgery, rested on Loki’s shoulder. “You think you know pain? He will make you long for something as sweet as pain.”

With that, the Other and the strange astral projection of the Sanctuary dissipated from his vision, and Loki was left tired and shaken back in Midgard. He breathed out harshly, his head dizzy and throbbing with a biting pain. 

He checked the clock on the wall. Apparently, half an hour had passed.

Loki did what he often did after a dreadful case of astral projection, and buried himself in plotting and planning. It was necessary that he seize iridium from the gala in Stuttgart, and conclude by overseeing S.H.I.E.L.D. 's battle plans by getting captured by them. 

There was a time for subtlety in every plan. Mostly, back in Asgard, Loki or occasionally Magnir would be the ones sneaking around and stealing precious artefacts while Thor and the Warriors Three would cause a riot in the nearest mead hall. It was refreshing to be the dumb muscle for a change. He was doing this for three reasons: first, because he was the hardiest of the little coterie he had brainwashed; second, because he was the only one who could carry off a Saville Row suit, as Barton’s own dress sense defaulted to 1980s disco neon; and third, because he had to get captured by S.H.I.E.L.D. agents for his plan to work. 

Loki had realised, to his chagrin, that he needed to be as close to the nascent Avengers as possible in order to actually get them working. They seemed broadly incapable by themselves. Stark had brains, true, but Rogers was stuck seventy years in the past. Of all of the group, the only one who could give much of a fight to the Chitauri was Banner’s inner self, who had the intelligence of a Yorkshire terrier. As such, it was up to Loki to micromanage the formation of the team.

They had chosen the German city of Stuttgart to get the Iridium, as opposed to the stockpiles in Morphopolis or Kôr because it would incite the good Captain Rogers into action. Langdon, who was skilled at connecting disparate cultural elements, told Loki that as Rogers, from his perspective, had been fighting less than a month before, the presence of his old German enemy would be like a red rag to a bull. Loki entered the party, making sure to angle his face so that the security camera hiding in the shrubbery caught his best side.

The gala at Stuttgart was, as Loki understood, to celebrate a museum opening that commemorated the work of Heinrich Schafer, the keynote speaker. It was his eyes that would open the electronic lock that provided access to the all-important iridium.

He made his way through the crowd, looking around at the tittering socialites. He intercepted a waiter, grabbing two champagne glasses and draining one. Normally, he would approach this situation subtly, drawing Schafer into a corner in the guise of a beautiful man (or woman, depending on taste). In this scenario, he needed to be noticed. He needed to draw the Avengers, to get a glimpse of their capabilities. 

“So what do you think of Schafer’s work in the field of inorganic chemistry?” asked Sattler , a blandly attractive blonde sidling up to him.

“Gods are real, aliens exist, and your realm was colonised by ice giants several thousand years ago,” said Loki flatly. He pressed a champagne glass into her stunned hand. “Would you hold this? I have somewhere to be.”

He waited until the violins started playing before swaggering out, suit crisp and scarf perfectly matched. It was theatrical to the point of foolish to throw Schafer onto a decorative altar, yanking his head back and scanning his eye with the strange technology Ecks had provided. But this distraction was the actual essence of the plan. An invasion taken in the shadows would succeed before anyone could notice it happening; he must drag Thanos’ plans and expose them to the sun, where they would wither and fail. The whole dramatic episode- the interruption of a gala, the reconstruction of the image of a dictator in a German city- was all bait to tempt Captain America and his band of heroes. He must test their mettle in the field of battle, and hope that they could withstand the oncoming invasion. 

The battle between the God of Mischief and the Star-Spangled Man was more of a spar than a fully-formed fight. Loki was keen to test the man, probing his defences and observing his attacks. He attempted to over-extend his arm in a swing of his staff, realising with disappointment that Rogers missed the clear gap in his defence, preferring instead to retreat. The Captain lacked the ruthless fighting instinct that marked the best warriors, it seemed.

It was as Loki was fighting the good Captain, beating him aside with long swings of the sceptre, almost balletic in his combat, that he realised that Midgard’s defences were not enough. Captain America was stronger than most Midgardians, it was true, but his movements had an edge of sluggishness about them, his reflexes dulled from the years stuck in the ice. If Loki cast out his senses, he can vaguely foretell the slowed, frozen parts of his blood. Loki had given him several openings in the fight, but he was a brawler, relying on his shield overmuch as a form of offense as well as defence. His style was defensive, relying on redirecting his enemy’s attacks. Against an army of Chitauri soldiers? The Captain would be quickly overwhelmed.

Loki’s musings- and his bouts with the Captain- was interrupted by the arrival of Stark, who called him ‘Reindeer Games’ in some vapid reference to Midgardian media and forced him into a S.H.I.E.L.D. distributed quinjet. He was grateful for his ensuing capture, however; it was fully according to his plan, but it also gave him an opportunity to realise something that had been building for several hours now. As they were, the Avengers would not be strong enough to resist against Thanos, much less return the fight to him. This was bad. This was potentially a disaster. 

There was only one remaining gambit that Loki could do.

He did what so many helpless Midgardians had done over the centuries.

He clasped his hands together and prayed.

He allowed the cloak of seidr he had clasped around himself to dissipate, the one that had shielded him from so long from Heimdall’s vision. Suddenly, he was visible throughout the Nine Realms, his magical imprint shining out into the shadows of space. He looked to the skies, and sent the religious message he had up towards the Gods in the heavens.

Hello, Heimdall, came the message. Long time no see. Did you miss me?

Even at such a distance he could picture the Watcher’s mixed confusion and alarm as he received word from the presumed-dead prince. It tasted delicious.

Tell the All-Father that this realm is going to be invaded. Tell him I am coming with armies of up to a thousand fold, set to rain down terror and fear. Tell him to send reinforcements to it, in accordance with the ancient treaty of Bor.

And then, quieter:

Tell him to send Thor.

Chapter Text

Heimdall’s role is the loneliest one in the Asgardian pantheon. He stands there, on the edge of the Bifrost, staring out into the inky blackness with eyes that contain the cosmos. He sees the elves of Alfheim, the fire giants of Muspelheim, the icy wastes of Jotunheim, the living sea of Solaris, the green glowing people of Osnome. He can hear the cry of the eagles as they sweep down from the mountains, and the clash of blades as vast armies do battle under the cover of night. Nothing escapes his sight, but he is only one man, and even he cannot see everything at once.

At the time of this narrative, now eight years passed, he turned his gaze, slow and imponderable, to the backwater realm of Midgard. There, in a darkened German forest, was the lost prince Loki, believed dead and mourned by his family.

It was not within the tasks of Heimdall to pass judgement on the politics of Asgard’s royal court. He does not play favourites, merely follows the duties and tasks given to him by the king, queen or prince. But he has a long memory. He remembered a former child of Odin who fell into their father’s bloodlust, recalling how painful it was for the family to lock her up in the cold prison of Helheim. He remembered this, and he vowed that he will not let it happen again. So it was with a heavy heart that he trudged back to the palace, sparing a single glance at the shattered remains of the rainbow bridge.

The Royal throne room was flanked with guards, but Heimdall’s position allowed him to walk straight in, with only a muffled conversation with the Asgardian, Siegrune, who was standing guard.

“You’re free to go in, Heimdall,” said Siegrune. “I pray you bring fair tidings. The king has been in a foul mood these many days.”

Heimdall inclined his head and entered. While the Watcher immediately knew that all three members of the royal family were on edge, it was only the young and inexperienced Thor who showed his emotions to the extent an outsider could tell. The God of Thunder had a black look in his eyes, hand clutching Mjolnir’s handle as thunder clouds circled his head. Odin, meanwhile, was staring deeply into his goblet of mead; Frigga seemed more placid, but she was absent-mindedly shredding a napkin. She looked up at Heimdall’s arrival.

“Speak, gatekeeper,” said Frigga. “You have news?”

Heimdall was never one for prevarication, and spoke the truth as plainly as he could manage it. “Prince Loki is alive and on Midgard.”

The reaction was immediate.

Frigga gasped, hand raised to her mouth as grateful tears began to brim in her eyes. Odin was never one for visible emotions, but even his solitary eye widened in surprise. Thor, meanwhile erupted in a blended torrent of rage and relief. The young Thor, Heidmall remembered, was one who was quick to anger but slow to forgiveness. In that respect, he was not unlike his brother. 

“He’s alive?” murmured Frigga, half-disbelieving. The rest of the family seemed to echo her joy and happiness. But then, as Heimdall had personally predicted, they began to realise the circumstances of his departure. The fact that, just before he fell of the Bifrost, he had attempted to commit genocide against the frost giants of Jotunheim. Odin in particular had been most alarmed at the event.

“We do not know what his motives will be,” said Odin. “I recommend caution.”

“He may still be feeling the rage he once felt,” said Frigga. “Oh, my poor boy… did we do enough for him?”

Odin’s head bowed with a thousand regrets. “Perhaps the follies of my past have caught up with me. In Loki I see all my sins reflected back; my warmongering past, it seems, has seduced a new generation.”

Thor himself was largely blind to the nuances of confronting a history of imperialism. He had rapidly cycled through the joy of hearing about Loki’s return, and had emerged into anger.

“He left without trial,” Thor said. “It was dishonourable.”

“ Thor,” snapped Frigga, to which the God of Thunder seemed suitably chastened.

“If we return him to Asgard, we can discuss what happened that day,” said Odin. “That is, of course, depending on what his actions on Midgard are.”

Heimdall spoke up, choosing to provide the necessary information. “He says he prepares to invade, your Highness. He taunts us by asking to send the might of Thor after him.”

The reactions of the three are evident; they are shocked, but, and this is a crucial difference, not surprised. They know full well what Loki is capable of. They merely wish for better for their son and brother.

Thor spoke up. “We can’t go, anyway. Not since Loki destroyed the Bifrost. I haven’t even been able to see Jane.”

There was a slight adolescent twang in his voice, and Frigga recalled when Thor would blame Loki for some mishap, his hair wet from one of his brother’s pranks and his features disgruntled. 

Odin One-Eye contemplated the matter, his vaunted wisdom not failing him. He looked at his wife, who was practically singing with relief, and at his son, whose rage had the righteous quality of a concerned brother. 

“There is another way,” he intoned, holding Gungnir as he thought. “Without the Bifrost, our ways of passing between worlds are limited, but we are not left stranded here. There are passages that have been fully charted by Asgard’s sorcerers- and by Loki, of course. Passing to Midgard is more difficult, but not impossible, I think.”

“How, Father?” rumbled Thor. 

“I believe that the solution is one that young Loki divined centuries ago. I would not be at all surprised if he had devised this solution knowing that one day the Bifrost would be unusable. It seems to be the kind of foresight he specialised in,” said Odin.

“You leave us in suspense, husband,” said Frigga. “What is it you suggest?”

Odin, with a twinkle in his one remaining eye that reminded Frigga of his younger years, stood and led the way to the Asgard stables, his mind on older times. “I do not know if you recall this, Thor, but long in the past I wished to reward the few Midgardians who were loyal to my rule, after the war with the frost giants. I decided to grant them each a boon, a gift that would encapsulate all their desires and wishes. This was to be done on the winter solstice, the longest night of the year, as I led the Wild Hunt out for a single night of revelry and merriment. I’m sure I made quite a sight, my fur cloak still stained red and white with the blood of my enemies. But as I was forced to do so in one night- for I must not tarry, as even I know that such enchantment does not last through the morn- I enlisted the help of Loki to make the task done on time.”

“And what did he do, father?” asked Thor. He knew the story, of course, but he always loved hearing words about his family.

“He weaved such enchantment as I know not what, and bred an offspring of my stallion Svaðilfari to create the greatest of all horses, a steed who would encapsulate the whole globe in only one night. He called it Sleipnir, and his eight legs can carry you anywhere in the nine realms.”

They had reached the stables, and there Sleipnir stood, his two additional pairs of legs nestled behind his normal ones, the muscles rippling in strange ways.

“Yes, Loki was once great,” said Odin. “Before he Fell. And now-- he claims invasion. He attempts war on an innocent civilisation. He seems lost to us, lost to the rage and anger of his warmonger bloodline.”

“Yes,” said Thor. “Loki becomes more and more like one of the Jotun everytime I hear of him.”

“That was not the bloodline I was referring to, Thor,” said Odin.

“Father?” asked Thor, but Odin looked off, lost in the memories of his past. In that moment, he looked just like an old, tired man. He eventually stirred himself, and turned to Thor with renewed determination.

“You must go, my son,” said Odin. “Retrieve Loki and bring him back home. Pray that he has not descended further into madness.”

“I will do that, father,” said Thor, and he vaulted up onto Sleipnir’s back, sending the horse out in a slow trot to where the rainbow bridge used to be. 

“One more thing, my son,” said Odin.

Thor turned.

“Tell no one about Sleipnir,” said the All-Father. “He is one of Asgard’s best-kept secrets. Weave some secret instead. I am sure your brother has taught you something of the art of lie-spinning.”

Thor beamed a puppyish grin. “I shall tell them it was Dark Magic, father!”

Odin choked on his saliva, but managed to regain his placid calm. “Perhaps we will have time for such lessons after we receive your brother. Now, go, Thor Odinson, and succeed in your quest.”

The quinjet hummed quietly as it made its way through the sky. Loki sat, strapped to the seat, as he was eyed beadily by the heavily armed figures of Steve Rogers and Tony Stark.

“So, that’s how you get your kicks, is it?” said Stark. “‘Cos let me tell you, there are better ways to rant about how you’re destined to be on top. Say the word and I can get you set up with a YouTube channel.”

Stark was, as Loki garnered from his own research and Barton’s resentful mutterings, something of a leader of men in Midgard. He was alternately respected and vilified by the national press, and his cultivated playboy image did nothing to stop that. Even now, he looked supremely relaxed, despite being stuck in a small plane with someone who had just confessed to a desire for world domination.

“Quiet, Stark,” said Rogers, ever the military man.

“Calm down, grandad, I’m just giving Morticia here some advice,” snarked Stark. “Oh, sorry, you don’t know. ‘YouTube’ is like those black and white films you used to have, but all about cats.”

“This isn’t the time,” said Rogers. He looked like he was going to burst a blood vessel. Being almost defeated by Loki only to be rescued by Stark had clearly wounded the man’s pride. 

Stark laughed. “Jeez, you really are behind, aren’t you? I’ll email you a list. Wait, no, I’ll write you a letter. They had letters back in your day, didn’t they?”

“Stark,” said Rogers, leaning closer. “Something’s not right. Loki’s coming too quietly. Something more is going on.”

Stark had privately been having similar thoughts, but he was nothing if not a contrarian. “Maybe he’s stunned by your all-American mightiness. He might have some comic books for you to sign.”

Their conversation was halted by a sudden change in the weather. There was the crackle of thunder, the bitter scent of ozone filling the air. Loki allowed himself a moment of fond brotherly remembrance, before locking his emotions behind a placid mask.

There was a loud thud as a heavy object landed on the quinjet, and it swerved and shook with a sickening groaning sound. Metal crinkled and lightning burned. Thor (for it was he) dropped down onto the open runway of the quinjet, sending Mjolnir directly into the Man of Iron, causing him to crumple into a heap in the corner. Loki only had time to wonder why the Midgardians had left the quinjet door open, as well as feel a moment of harsh schadenfreude for Stark’s dilemma, before Thor grabbed Loki by the neck in a well-worn gesture and leapt out of the plane.

Thor’s neck grab was his customary way of showing affection for Loki, replacing the one armed hugs that had made up the majority of their childhood. Loki was momentarily pleased and nostalgic that their bond was not wholly broken, before squashing that down. It was not him that Thor needed to ally with, but the band of Midgardians he had just sent forty-two pounds of enchanted Uru hurtled towards. They crashed into some German forest, and Loki was able to get his first glimpse of his brother for over a year.

Thor looked different, a fact that surprised Loki to no small extent. They were Gods, after all, and also immortal; change usually came to humans, whose mayfly lives were spent in constant fear of death. Gods waxed and waned but they took centuries to change, as slow and imponderous as religion itself. Thor was permanent; thunder had no need to change with the tides. Yet Thor was not the same man that Loki had seen on the Bifrost so long ago. He was harsher, his features weighed down by some sadness, his hair and eyes darker. Was that a strand of Loki’s own hair, tied in a braid through Thor’s golden locks?

No, though Loki, chastising himself. You’re not worth that. Don’t even think of it. 

“Brother,” said Thor, expression open with puppy-dog enthusiasm. “You’re alive.”

Loki felt an unpleasant twin shot of bile and relief barrel through him at the filial introduction. His face distorted with venom; beneath that, however, was an even larger sensation of familial warmth.

“I am,” allowed Loki. Frankly, he had thought that he had let go of his brother, of the endless cycle of competition, envy, and love that made up being related to him; he was quite ashamed that all it took were a few words for it all to come flooding back. “Did you mourn?”

Like many of Loki’s statements, the question was bound up so tightly with sarcasm and savage mockery that the inner sincerity almost went unnoticed. Almost, as Thor was familiar with the wide spectrum of his brother’s moods, and knew that the question was important. The question of whether his family had mourned his death had stayed with him throughout his exile, and he knew that if they had shrugged his mortality off with nonchalance than that would be the worst thing he could hear. Misery he desired; jubilation he could handle; but norns spare him from the blank void of apathy. 

When Loki was young, somewhere around his second century as a God, he would fantasize about attending his own funeral. When Sif clipped him with a sword during training, or some member of the Einharjar jeered at him for practising magic, he would imagine his own funeral, the ship with his prized possessions and body on it being pushed out into the sea, before being lit alight by a flaming arrow. Sif and the Warriors Three would weep, wracked by guilt at their cruel actions, while Odin would let a single solitary tear fall before giving a speech about his mightiness and exploits. Then, at the height of proceedings, Loki would leap out from behind whatever tree he had been concealed, and they would all beg him for forgiveness. It was a childish fantasy, but it matched no other for sheer cathartic schadenfreude.

In answer to his question, Thor looked grave. “We all did,” he said, with his customary lack of poetry.

You oaf, snarled Loki internally. I want more details than that.

But he had a job to do, after all. With no small measure of reluctance, he returned to the matter at hand.

“And what, pray tell,” said Loki, “does the golden son of Asgard wish for its traitor prince?”

“You must return with me,” said Thor, reaching out his hand. “Father and Mother are overjoyed that you have returned. Come back. Let us be a family again.”
Loki never loved or hated Thor more than that moment. There was nothing more he wanted than to return to the golden halls of Asgard, to his mother’s warm arms. But to roll back all that had happened? To ignore the festering web of lies that had overtaken, to overlook the fact that he had attempted to take his own life? No. That was more than he could bear.

Besides, he had a job to do. He had a Titan to defeat. He forced all the anger, the bitterness, and the venom he had towards Asgard up and into his voice as he began his tirade. All the best lies were truth painted silver.

“A family?” snarled Loki. “Togetherness? You are as blind as your one-eyed father, Thor, if you think that what we had was anything like a family. I was a jotunn runt, snatched from my crib by an imperial conqueror and set out onto the stage to parade my way to an eventual treaty with the Frost Giant. I was nothing more than a tool to create the All-Father’s blighted ambition of a united Nine Realms. And you think that now, after I have escaped the chains and cruelties of Asgard, I would return to place them back around my own neck? What kind of masochist do you think I am?”

His words were harsh and bleeding and raw, and Thor was momentarily stunned by them; but let no one say that the Son of Odin did not have the arrogance and self-centeredness to bounce back from such slights. 

“They are your home, Loki, and you belong there. Come, give up this poisonous dream. Walk the righteous path with me, to Asgard.”

It was then that Loki realised that Thor, for all of his nobility, did not listen to him. Thor had a black and white view of the world; Asgard was Good and Just, and whatever things Loki was doing that didn’t fit into that narrative was Evil and Wrong. Never mind that Loki had long been aware of the hypocrisy, the imperialism that lurked beneath Asgard’s golden facade. Never mind that Thor and Loki were, technically, on the same side. The two were from different worlds, and, as they were now, they could never truly trust each other.

He loved his brother, he really did, but sometimes, he couldn’t stand the sight of him. 

“No, Thor,” said Loki. “I’ve seen too much in my exile.” Exile was a word dripping in falsehood; if Odin had exiled him, had given him the respect that implied, life would have been better. Instead, he fell off the rainbow bridge.

“The Tesseract has given me knowledge you would not believe,” Loki continued. “I am here to rain war down on this miserable little planet.”

Thor began to gear himself up for a fight, unable to let these insults stand. “Whatever quarrel you have with me, Loki, whatever imagined slights you lay at my feet, do not take your bitterness out on these mortals. They are blameless in this fight.”

Loki’s anger flared up at Thor’s condescension. Imagined slights? That senseless oaf, that idiotic fool.

“Ah, upset because I’m playing around with your little dolls, Thor?” said Loki- or at least, that was what the All Speak rendered the word in English. In their native Asgardian the word was closer to hnefatafl. “The Midgardians aren’t yours to protect, Thor. You were only exiled here for less than a week.”

Thor’s expression grew surlier. “If you truly wish to bring an invading force to this land, Loki, then I will have no choice but to stop you. Our filial bond will not be enough to stop me from doing my duty.”

“ Someone’s been reading a few dictionaries, I see,” said Loki.

“Stop joking, Loki!” Thor snarled. Frigga had made him promise that he would not lose his temper, but he was truly shouting, now. It was almost as if that had flicked a switch in Loki; at the sight of Thor angrily bellowing, all his venom drained out of him, leaving him with a sense of numb peace.

“I always joke, Thor,” said Loki tiredly. “Jokes are lies and mischief, and there is nothing else I know what to do.”

Thor steamrolled past this self-exposed weakness. “Do I look to be in a gaming mood? Where is the Tesseract?!”

“Ah, the tesseract, hmm? Need it to get home, do you?” 

“I cannot use the dark magic Odin used a second time,” Thor bluffed, unsuccessfully. 

“I don’t have it,” said Loki, simply. “I sent it off, I know not where.”

“Listen to me well, brother,” said Thor, pointing Mjolnir at Loki’s chest. “I---”

It was at that point that the God of Thunder was blindsided from the right by the Man of Iron, sending him careening through several trees.

“I’m listening,” snarked Loki, to an audience of no-one. He was sure the forest squirrels were very appreciative of his dry wit.

Loki sat on the hillside as the three putative Avengers fought. It was something he was largely used to; whenever he and Thor used to go on quests, they would often have to grind the whole thing to a halt as the God of Thunder played rough and tumble with any new friends he happened to meet. When they had gone to rescue Freyja from being married to one of the jotnar, Thor had become distracted with wrestling poor Ullr, resulting in the latter’s bow breaking. The whole thing had been very amusing, especially as Thor had been wearing a wedding dress in disguise at the time. 

The fact was, this happened often on their little quests, with Loki waiting patiently while Thor got Fandral in a headlock. Eventually, they would separate, worn out and perspiring, excited by the camaraderie won in battle, any quarrel they had forgotten. It normally took quite a while, however.

He stood up to stretch his legs, walking around until he reached a sign. According to that, they were in the Black Forest, a large stretch of woodland around seventy miles from Stuttgart. Nearby was Falun Fault, the large mining shaft that was the source of much of the iridium that they had stolen from the gala. He had seen it from the quinjet, a large gaping maw eating into the surrounding trees. Also close was Mummelsee, a lake with supernatural qualities that had come up a few times in his readings of the occult locations of Midgard. He radioed his location back to Barton and Ecks, who were waiting on his signal on what to do next.

He turned, and saw Sleipnir, the faithful steed he himself had bred, tethered to a tree. He looked over it, checked its teeth, and conjured up some hay to feed him. Looking after Sleipnir had always calmed him down. 

“There, there, Sleipnir,” said Loki, to which the eight-legged horse neighed merrily. “I can’t believe Thor expected me to believe it was dark magic and not you that brought him here.”

He made sure that the horse had enough food for the next few days, before waving him a fond farewell. He wouldn’t have the opportunity to see Sleipnir again; he would be spending the following week in the warm hospitality of S.H.I.E.L.D

Frankly, after the harried past forty-eight hours in which he had been run ragged from leaving Thanos’ prison cell to warping himself through space and time with the tesseract (always a painful experience), to globe hopping from Nevada to Germany, it was going to be relaxing to stay in one place for a few days. Even if it was a cell. Loki had stayed in a few cells over the years. The key was space; if you had a good few square feet to move around in, they normally weren’t too uncomfortable.

Loki lay down on the grass, deciding to relax. To pass the time before his captors came back, he decided to go through the alphabet and name the places he had been imprisoned. ‘A’ was for Arrakis, a desert planet Loki had been stranded on after trying to smuggle valuable spices back to Asgard. ‘B’ was for Butcher Bay, a maximum security prison that no-one had ever escaped from until Loki had arrived and, shortly after, left. ‘C’ was a bit of a cheat, but that time he had been bound up in entrails and had venom dripped onto his face had been in a Cave, and one with no name for that matter. He was up to ‘W’ for the Wheel of Kharnabar when Stark, Rogers and his brother came trudging back, having apparently resolved their differences through slugging it out.

“Welcome back,” he snarked. “All sorted out, now?”

They seemed surprised that he was still here, but Loki was working on a compressed timeline and he needed to be captured as quickly as possible. If he sacrificed some subtlety to do that then so be it. The two Midgardians seemed to think, preposterously, that the hand-cuffs he had on had restrained him, but Thor gave him a suspicious look as he was dragged back to the quinjet. Thor could not pull off a suspicious look. His face was built for puppy-dog confusion or righteous anger, and Loki privately thought he should just leave the scheming and plotting to the masters.

“Hey, Mister Grinch,” said Stark to Loki, buckling himself in. “If you give up your plan to steal Christmas, maybe your heart will grow three times the size. 

“Heavens,” said Loki, endeavouring to ignore the millionaire inventor. “This vehicle is but one with Álfröðull as it pilots the sun across the sky. Tell me, should we expect to be pursued by the foul wolf Sköll?”

Stark’s expression wrinkled in confusion. “What?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Stark. Not understanding these Asgardian pop culture references?”

Stark sulked for the rest of the journey back to the helicarrier, something Loki was inordinately grateful for. 

Thousands of light-years away from Earth, in a black expanse of space devoid of natural life, the Chi Tauri army waits. Large, brutal ships with harsh angles drift around the central mothership. The hulking black shapes block out the very stars themselves. Around the fleet, mechanical leviathans, half metal and half flesh, twist and turn. 

Looking over it all, the Other smiled, pale deformed lips twitching into a rictus of a grin. In the vast chasm of space in front of him were millions of genetically engineered soldiers ready to descend on Earth like a plague of locusts, and all controlled remotely from the computer in the mothership. What glorious carnage there shall be. 

His thoughts were interrupted by a husky voice from behind him. “Using the entire Chitauri army to collect one stone seems like overkill to me.”

The Other turned to see Nebula using a knife to peel an apple, perched on a stack of crates in the corner. Her mechanical eye whirs to look at him dispassionately. 

He laughs, a harsh, guttural noise that would have made Nebula’s skin crawl had it not been synthetic. “It is so large precisely because Lord Thanos does not wish to merely seize the Tesseract. He wishes to put the planet of Earth to the flame, and send it as a scorched message to anyone who opposes him. Thanos wishes balance, it is true; but on some occasions it is better to destroy his enemies completely. As a symbol to others. The people of Earth thought that they could keep the Space Stone from us, but they will be crushed into nothingness.”

The Other laughed, turning back to the Chi Tauri army. All he needed was to wait for the Asgardian trickster’s signal. Then he would glory in the blood and ash of intergalactic conquest. 

As the Other turned and left, gurning to his subordinates like a villain from a pantomime, Nebula stood and considered the vast army. She hoped for Thanos’ success, of course, as any loyal daughter would. But internally was a creeping desire to be free of his tyrannical hold. She thought of the God Loki, who devised plans as well as spiders created string. In her heart of hearts, she did not truly believe in her father’s crusade. But to resist him so flagrantly? She may be strong enough to do such a thing, but she was smart enough to know that his retribution and anger would be vast.

But if someone else did it first? If another person paved the way, if they proved it was possible to betray Thanos and escape with their life? That was a completely different thing altogether. 

Nebula knew to her chagrin that she was not a great planner. She liked to react, to get caught up in the ebb and flow of a battle, to not know where the next blow came from but to dance away from it, living in the moment. From what she had seen of Loki of Asgard, he planned years ahead. He was like the fortune tellers of her home planet, not because he could read the future, but because he could shape it. He was one to look fate and destiny in the eye and mould it like clay.

She continued to gaze out into the void. After a while, she noticed a faint reflection in the window, a green blur sharply demarcated against the blackness.

“Sister,” said Gamora, her expression warm yet uncertain.

“Gamora,” replied Nebula. With a dramatic flourish, she began filing her fingernails with her knife. Knives were so useful in mild intimidation.

Gamora took a deep breath, and continued. Her voice took on a deeper tone, as if she was suggesting a deeper meaning, a level of doublespeak reminiscent of their various espionage missions. 

“Quite an army, is it not?” she said, looking out over the vast fleet. “Enough to crush any civilization to rubble.”

She was cautious in what she said. Within the Sanctuary of Thanos, anybody could be listening in.

“As it should be. For that is as our Lord Thanos demands,” intoned Nebula, the typical response to a question of that nature.

Gamora nodded. “I may add that the Commander leading it has interesting ideas about galactic warfare and military tactics.”

Gamora and Nebula were by no means the closest pair of siblings in the world, but even they were able to pick up the nuances in each other’s sentences. When Gamora said that, she meant, ‘ Loki has traitorous intentions towards Thanos’.

Nebula nodded. Message received and understood. She made eye contact with her sister through the reflection in the glass.

Nebula’s voice had the timbre of a heavy smoker when she spoke up. “These innovative tactics provide possibilities for other military pursuits elsewhere in the galaxy.”

Meaning, in other words, If Loki could rebel, why not me?

This was the most overtly rebellious statement said so far, and Nebula could see her sister momentarily relax, a spasm of a smile crossing her face. They were on the same page, it seemed. 

“I think we have several options open to us,” said Gamora. “Thanos isn’t our only answer. Loki taught me something, you know….”

“What?” asked Nebula.

“He taught me that sometimes we need to choose our families. His family didn’t suit him, so he left. He hated his father, by the end, but he always talked fondly of his brother,” Gamora continued.

Nebula gave a contemptuous huff. “It’s not all about him, Gamora,” she said. “If I do… leave, it won’t be because some holier-than-thou Asgardian fell through the ceiling and lectured at me for half an hour. It would be my choice.”

There was a long silence, as they both contemplated the future.

“Who would you stand alongside, sister?” asked Gamora eventually, still looking out into the blackness of space. “When the end comes, who will you fight for?”

Nebula felt a stab of anger at Gamora for her refusal to meet her eyes.

“Look at me,” growled Nebula under her breath.

Gamora stopped talking, eyes wide. “What?”

“I said, look at me!” Nebula snarled, grabbing her sister and whirling her around. “You never look at me! You always see what you want to see, what he tells you to see!”

“Nebula,” gasped Gamora, the breath temporarily shaken out of her. “What do you mean? What are you saying?”

“What does it matter?” asked Nebula. “You never listen.”

With that, the cyborg luphomoid stormed out the room. She paused briefly at the edge of the door, however, and looked back, seeming only slightly regretful.

“I’m not doing this for him, ” she said. “I’m doing it for me.”

And thus, the slow ponderous cogs of intergalactic change began to whir. Subtly, invisibly, at a thousand different moments and in a thousand different ways, cracks began to form in Thanos’ empire, in his plan of galactic conquest. The failure of his schemes had begun; not with a bang, but with hundred tiny whispers.

Chapter Text

Loki stood in his prison cell, glass walls on every side, and reflected that it wasn’t the worst place he had ever been kept. They weren’t currently actively torturing him, which was a plus. He would have appreciated a place to sit down, though.

With slow, long-legged strides, he slowly walked around the perimeter of his cell, eyes flickering around. He could see at least three security cameras, small black orbs that vaguely resembled pupil-less eyes. Quickly performing some mental arithmetic, he deduced that there was a small blind spot right next to one of the left-most walls. It was also apparent that this cell had not been built for him. Whispers reached him that it was built for the Hulk; in other words, it could withstand vast amounts of strength, but he would probably be able to pick the lock, the great green beast not having the greatest record of intelligence or manual dexterity. It was also surrounded by a metallic walkway, where a flickering hologram screen provided the controls that would drop it from the sky. How helpful that S.H.I.E.L.D. had provided him with an escape pod. 

He was still musing over the information Agent Bob McGraw of Hydra had told him. In some ways the information didn’t matter- he merely needed to mentally replace one morally dubious paramilitary government espionage organisation with another. In others, however, the information mattered very much. S.H.I.E.L.D., as the brainchild of Nick Fury, had the intention to protect and save the world with the Avengers, and so would be working broadly in Loki’s favour. Within that wider organisation, however, was Hydra, whose motives were inscrutable but probably not benevolent. To borrow one of the metaphors the brainwashed Langdon liked to use, it was like a Russian nesting doll situation, except the interior doll was a Nazi. 

When he was in this prison, therefore, he needed to ensure that the formation of the Avengers was not ruined by the insidious presence of Hydra. That was a task easier said than done. 

Case in point.

Loki looked up as someone cleared their throat. The man on the other side of the glass met nobody’s image of a spy. Like Coulson, he seemed like a mildly depressed civil servant, dressed in a neat (but not well-tailored) black suit and a pair of government prescription glasses. Perhaps it was their nondescript nature that made them so effective in the field of espionage. He spoke softly, in the voice of somebody repeating their coffee order for the sixth time.

“Loki of Asgard,” said the man. “Or do you prefer ‘your majesty?’” 

The man could clearly grovel with the best of them.

“Loki is fine,” the God of Mischief returned, waving the question away.

“My name is Agent Jasper Sitwell,” returned the spy. “I work for an organisation with a invested interest in world domination, and I believe our goals align in this matter.”

Loki raised an apathetic eyebrow. It had taken centuries of training to get the effect precisely right. “Oh yes? Which organisation would that be?”

Sitwell gave an excited flush. “We call ourselves Hydra, after the figure of Greek Mythology, but we have always been fully devoted to the Norse. May I say, sir, it’s an honour to meet you.”

“I see,” said Loki, who didn’t.

“Since it’s very foundations, Hydra has always modelled itself on the view of humanity espoused by the Norse Gods. The Thule Society and Johann Schmidt have always been very interested in the tales of Thor and Loki, particularly you, your highness. Why, the ship stocked with bombs that Captain America foolishly crashed into the ocean was even called the Valkyrie, after the legendary Asgardian warriors .”
Loki did not let a single iota of his disgust for this man show on his face.

“I have a collection of memorabilia relating to the inspirations of our cause,” said Sitwell, “Would you perhaps be able to sign them?”

He began to pull out a variety of small cards, each with a different cultural mark on them. The Vril, Mjolnir, the Ultima Thule… The symbologist Robert Langdon would have had a field day. Loki himself felt a mixture of awkwardness and bile. Norns, he thought to himself. He’s the anti-Coulson. Mild mannered accountant by day, Hydra sleeper agent by night.

“Another time, perhaps,” said Loki. 

Sitwell gave a slimy little servile bow, of all things, like he was auditioning for an episode of a period drama.

“Of course, of course,” he smarmed, filing the cards away. “Now, I believe in this case our goals align. Those known as the Avengers have the potential to provide something of a thorn in the side of our organisation- particularly Rogers and Romanoff. They are also the group who are most likely to oppose your, aheh, ‘glorious purpose’. I have taken some steps to neutralise them, but I believe we could work together to end them once and for all.”

“Is that so?” said Loki. “And, pray tell, what are these steps that you have taken?”

“Division is the root of it all,” replied Sitwell, a smile growing on his mouth. “A six-part campaign to sow dissension and discord, disrupting military tactics and introducing conflict for a future occasion. The plan has been heavily peer-reviewed by various different think-tanks, and has gone through no less than three quality assurance checks.”

“I am all ears,” said Loki.

Sitwell continued. “I am pleased to say that the first stage has been completed, your majesty, even before the Avengers have been fully formed. Already they show distrust- already the careful mechanism established by Fury shows signs of running down. Hail Hydra.”

“Are you going to tell me what you have done, or continue drip feeding me exposition?” replied Loki. Sitwell looked somewhat put-out; as Loki knew from self-analysis, all megalomaniacs loved to monologue. 

“We have already doctored the files of each member of the putative Avengers,” said Sitwell. “‘ Clint Barton Psych. Eval.’ ‘Black Widow Program Brainwashing Extant.’ ‘Hulk Death Count in Harlem’. ‘Steve Rogers Cryopreservation Damage’. ‘Tony Stark Not Recommended’. A hundred little ways to make each individual member look at the other with a modicum of suspicion.”

Loki hmmmed thoughtfully. “Interesting, but how small-minded. Tell me, do you know why they are called ‘the Avengers’?”

Jasper Sitwell seemed put off his rhythm, a used car salesman who suddenly found no cars to sell. “I believe that was named after the call-sign of one Carol Danvers, an early enhanced operative from circa 1995. Fury applied the name to the Initiative due to some… misplaced affection.”

“I see,” said Loki. “I see that despite all of the lip service you give to the Old Ways you still have no sense of the Laws that govern Gods and mortals. Names have power, and some names have enough power to conjure with. The ‘Avengers’ is not a title, but an instruction; they are left powerless without something to avenge. That is the first law of magic, that the part can resemble the whole; it is this law that affects everything from invocations to voodoo dolls. But you wouldn’t know anything about magic, would you, Mr. Sitwell?”

The Hydra agent could feel the conversation rapidly falling away from him. “I feel it important to note, Loki of Asgard, that if you are not for us, you are against us.”

Loki chuckled. “Ah, how quickly the friendly veneer disappears to expose the teeth beneath. I suppose that makes us enemies, then. I am already fighting one paramilitary spy organisation; another will hardly be a hardship.”

Something ugly rested in Sitwell’s face for a moment, and he turned to leave without a word. Just before he left, Loki called out to him.

“I believe I have one of your own- the man they call Agent Robert McGraw. Would you like him back?”

Sitwell snorted. “He’s only a henchman, cannon fodder. Rest assured, Loki of Asgard, we have people in far higher places, such as the World Security Council. They say the Security of the world is a dream, but we at Hydra are the dreamers. There are heads of Hydra everywhere.”

Alexander Pierce, agent of Hydra, looked out into the array of computer screens, each one representing a figure with immense amounts of political power. This meeting of the World Security Council was more impromptu than most. Normally, there was a waiting list, with everyone’s schedules worked out several weeks in advance. This was an emergency, however, and so the various component members of the Council were in some state of disarray. Senator Clayton Davis was still in his pajamas, and as his camera flickered on, a skinny-looking blonde could be seen quickly exiting the scene. 

“What’s the matter?” he asked. “And did it have to interrupt my… political business?”

“Alien invasion,” said Tessa Phillips shortly. Tessa was a high ranking agent of MI5, and had forgotten more about espionage than most people would covertly obtain in a lifetime.

“ Shit,” swore Davis, elongating the syllable into meaningless.

Another screen blinked into existence.

“Is that a spy code for something?” asked Arnold Vinick, Secretary of State .

“No,” said Tessa. “The espionage callsign for an alien invasion is a Lazuli Three. I chose to use the phrase ‘Alien Invasion’ because it gets straight to the point.”

Pierce cleared his throat. “Our course of action is clear. Only an immense show of force will stop the alien threat of an incoming invasion. This is precisely why I felt that Operation: Insight was so important.”

“Now, Alexander, we’ve talked about this,” said Davis. “I’m not sure about the optics of having satellites that can murder people from outer space. This is election year, and we need to think about the popular vote.”

The Director of the CIA, a greying man in a bulky suit, flickered onto one of the monitors. He began frantically yelling into the screen, but no words came out; he was just furiously miming imprecations, earnestly demanding things that went unvoiced.

“Dammit,” said Vinick. “Alan, you’re on mute again.”

CIA director Alan Hunley looked confused, and began making various threatening gestures.

“Press the red microphone at the bottom of the screen,” insisted Tessa. She gestured downwards. Alan swore silently at the camera.

A sixth and final screen flickered into view, and the World Security Council was treated to the sour face of Nick Fury, Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. He glowered cyclopically at the gathered spymasters and politicians. 

“We are gathered today, gentlemen, because we face a grave threat, a threat that threatens the entire world.”

“Not the entire world,” clarified Tessa. “The data you have sent me seems to suggest that he will be focusing his efforts on New York.”

“New York, not Baltimore?” asked Davis. “Well, that’s fine then.”

“It’s not fine,” shrieked Vinick. “ I live in New York!”

Fury (the person, not the concept) cut through the squabbles. 

“This is urgent. The Norse God of Mischief is trying to take over the entire world if we don’t stop him.”

“Or rather, an ancient alien claiming to be the God of Mischief,” clarified Pierce. “Does anyone watch the History Channel?”

“That brings us nicely to an issue I wished to raise, actually,” said Tessa. “I’m here with the Prime Minister of Norway, Jesper Berg, and he has something urgent to bring up.”

The camera panned around to a well-dressed man, hair graying at his temples, who was paging through a thick dossier.

“I’m afraid I can’t allow you to attack the entity known as Loki,” said Jesper Berg, a trace of accent in his voice. “A good portion of Norway still believes in Modern Paganism, and taking any direct action against him will constitute as discrimination against our religion.”

Nick Fury closed his single eye. Sometimes it didn’t pay to wake up in the morning. Vinick let out a high-pitched wail; Davis an elongated swear-word. 

“Fine,” growled Fury, living up to his name. “Any retaliatory action will be focused on the army of motherfuckin’ aliens that are going to attack, and not on the politically immune God. We will try to keep the battle focused on one place, and Vinick, I suggest you leave the city now. Is everyone happy with those arrangements?”

There are five murmurs of assent. Only Alan Hunley said nothing, as his face was locked in a rictus of bemusement.

“Alan’s screen is bloody frozen,” swore Tessa. “Somebody send someone to fix their Wi-Fi.”

It was a strange and unfortunate set of circumstances that Tony Stark was hated more for what he represented than for who he was.

Many hated him for being the public face of Stark Industries, the company that had used America’s War on Terror paranoia to sell weapons on a globally unprecedented scale, before the dramatic shift into clean energy in 2008. Many others hated him as his manifestation of capitalistic ‘Big Business’, his propensity to refer to himself as a self-made engineer while working from his dad’s million pound trust fund. His former gun-toting second amendment supporters hated him for his perceived betrayal of their values, while the military hated his propensity to resist their control and set himself up as an alternative to the Army.

In the dark moments at the bottom of a whiskey glass, Tony Stark hated himself for looking like his father.

“JARVIS,” he said, eyes cataloguing everything in the room. “Have the Mark 3 ready, okay? I want to talk with Ren Faire over here.”

“Right away, sir,” the mechanised voice said. 

In truth, Tony Stark was not who many people thought he was. He was a playboy, admittedly, and a hero to some (although he never described himself as such). But beneath all that was a performer, a con-man, someone who could look his board of investors in the eye and sell them the finest quality bullshit. And when Stark looked at Loki, he saw the best bullshitter he had ever seen. It took one to know one.

“How’s life, Snidely Whiplash?” asked Tony, hands in blazer pockets in a carefully cultivated casual pose. His t-shirt said ‘ All the Good Ones Argon’ , but the dull glow of the arc reactor distorted the text of the punchline.

“Ah,” said Loki, smiling. “You must be the latest one chosen to interrogate the prisoner. The princess sacrificed to the resident dragon.”

“No, actually,” said Stark. “I’m here off the grid, if you must know. The cameras are currently showing a fifteen second loop.” He held his phone up to show off the string of code.

“Well, well, well,” said Loki. “How intriguing. What is it, may I ask, that has provoked one of Midgard’s mightiest defenders into slipping his master’s leash?”

Stark leant back, and scrutinised Loki carefully. “I’m a businessman, you know that? Cut my teeth in stocks and shares for the company, growing up. Most kids got toy trains or action figures; my dad threw a ring-binder with investment tips into my crib and called it a day. Not the greatest guy, was ol’ Howard. Went off the deep-end in his old days, gave up parenting in favour of hunting Captain America and rewatching Ice Station Zebra. But enough of my childhood trauma; from what I hear of your stories, your dad was a bit of a bastard too. The point is, he taught me one important lesson: follow the money.”

Loki felt reluctantly impressed. Only Stark, he felt, would weaponise his own trauma and weaknesses.

“Your point being?” Loki returned.

“My point is that I don’t know what you’re getting from this. And don’t tell me world domination: in my experience, most people who want to conquer the world like to take it out for a spin first, and you’ve just got here. You got captured awfully quickly too- don’t think I didn’t notice you hanging around the Black Forest, waiting for us to finish our little spat. Thor tells me you didn’t leave home with an army in your pocket, so the weapons dealer in me is asking where you got that stuff, and who would be willing to cut a deal with you so easily.”

Stark was not only intelligent, Loki realised with a growing relief, he was smart. Any old fool could milk a few qualifications out of university if they had enough money, but it took a special breed of person to see patterns out of disparate data sets and come to the right conclusion. It was just a shame they had to be on opposite sides for this little game.

“Confident, are you?” said Loki. “In your little assessment?”

“I don’t play the game if I haven’t already won,” said Stark. 

Loki gave a shark’s grin. “Then yes, there is another player on the board. Someone who will bring an army that, unless stopped, will easily ravage your little world. I’ve heard much about you, Man of Iron, and the threat you face is far larger than a disgruntled Russian or a vengeful business partner. You’re going to have to trade up from missiles and energy repulsors if you want to win.”

“See that,” said Stark, wagging a finger at him, “that sounds like advice. I stopped taking advice from people who hate me after my first crazy ex.”

“Not advice, but cold, hard fact,” replied Loki. “The tesseract creates portals, yes? Have you given any thought as to what is at the other side? The cold expanse of space, filled with horrors and alien beings the likes of which you have never seen.”

“Hey, hey, I’ve seen Independence Day. Alien invasion, yada yada. So what are you in all this? The hype man?”

“Don’t think so reductively, Stark. I do not ‘hype’ anyone. I shall pose a riddle for you. If you had the choice between seeing half the universe destroyed, or one measly city, which one would you choose?”

Stark raised his eyebrows. “Oh, like the trolley problem, right?”

“Sorry?”

“Yeah, the trolley problem. You’ve got a bunch of people tied to the track, and you’re piloting a trolley bus towards them. If you want, you can pull the lever and switch lanes onto another track with less people tied to it. So, the question is do you make an active choice and kill fewer people, or not do anything and allow an atrocity to happen?”

Loki gave a hollow laugh. “Not doing anything is still an active choice. What would you do, Stark?”

The inventor winked. “I’m Tony Stark. If it’s technology, I can hack it. A trolley bus is nothing compared to a box of scraps. But what would you do, oh God of Mischief?”

“Oh, I would pull the lever. But I’d make sure that whoever built the trolley bus was tied to the tracks.”

“Was that a threat?” asked Stark.

“No, you buffoon, that was a Socratic dialogue.”

Loki paced closer, eyes level with Stark's.

“But this is about you. Soon, very soon, you will have to make this decision, the same decision I have made, the decision you made in a cave in Afghanistan.”

“Sorry?”

Loki raised his eyebrows. “There will come a time, Stark, when your wealth and your suits won’t save you. When you will be the one tied down on the tracks. When you will have to make a choice. What will you do then, I wonder? Will you send metal armour to do a man’s job? Or will you stand true to your self-imposed vow to stop war and bloodshed? You asked me earlier if I was giving you advice. I wasn’t then, but I will now, if you only have the intelligence to take heed.”

He leaned forward, fingers splayed on the glass.

“After you’ve won, after you’ve saved the day with your so-called ‘Avengers’, I want you to dig deep into your soul, into every scrap of courage and skill you’ve amassed in your years on the planet, and lose.”

The words had shaken Stark, Loki could tell; just for a second, his eyes were shadowed with uncertainty and confusion. Then the mask of the charismatic playboy shuttered over it, and he gave a smirk that was almost entirely perfect.

“Yeah, we’re not gonna lose just because you tell us to,” Stark drawled. “You need to step up your playground tactics if that’s the level you’re working at.”

He gave a mocking salute, and, with a well-practised move, swivelled on his heel to saunter off. Loki was left, as before, in an empty cell.

In truth, it was conversations like the one he had just had that were more important than any military campaign or show of force; placing doubts and concepts within the head of his opponent, in the hope that they would bear fruit on some later occasion. It was far better to fight wars with words than swords; that was why he was called Lie-Smith and Silvertongue and not Thunderstrike or Bloodaxe. He had done his best there; it was left to Stark to see how he would react to the information he had gained. 

Having talked to the majority of figures in the Helicarrier- Stark, Romanoff, Sitwell, Fury- there was little else he could do while trapped inside his cage. The question was, what do you do when you can’t make a move?

The answer was easy. Destroy the board.

“Agent Barton,” Loki murmured into his earpiece. “Move in.”

In this bold and brutal new century, there was only room for two types of people: the heroes, brave figures who believe in truth and justice, and the villains, who skulked and schemed in the darkness. Bob McGraw, Agent of HYDRA, was none of those things. He was a bottom feeder, a little goby fish nipping around the ankles of larger supervillains. As a professional henchman, he was a natural fit for HYDRA’s brand of indentured fanaticism; before working for the Nazi organisation, he had worked for cyberterrorist Raoul Silvia , and before that, he had ran around setting up traps for serial killer John Kramer , and before that, he had interned at Wolfram & Hart . Before that, he had lurked around the school playground, standing back as silent muscle as other bullies beat up kids for their lunch money. The Mind Stone only worked on the weak-minded; for Bob McGraw, Loki had barely needed it at all.

“So, what’s the plan?” asked Bob.

Hawkeye rolled his eyes, and notched another arrow to his bow. “That was Loki’s signal. We fly in and start shooting. I insert a computer virus into the helicarrier system. We cause as much chaos as possible, and make sure that flying circus crashes out of the sky.”

“Like Icarus,” said Robert Langdon. “Flying on wings made of wax too close to the sun, a living monument to man’s hubris.”

Agent Ecks turned around from where he was sitting at the Quinjet’s controls. “Would you three quiet down? I can’t concentrate with you talking all the time.”

The Quinjet moved into cloud cover, the sudden darkness necessitating the removal of Agent Ecks’ sunglasses. The engines whirred with a metallic harshness. Below them lay the Helicarrier, the SHIELD agents scurrying around on its surface like ants.

The comms crackled. “Master Loki?”, said Hawkeye into his mouthpiece. “We’re coming in.”

The Helicarrier was a masterpiece of modern aerial aircraft invention, being a vast improvement of the earlier Spectrum Cloudbase from the sixties. It was propelled through the skies with four enormous fans, a whirring mass of steel and plastic that belched smoke into the air. It was a miracle of modern science, and it folded like a house of cards.

As the quinjet fired on the Helicarrier, disabling the large fans, Loki took the time to leisurely exit his cell. It was a mistake on the Midgardians’ part not to ward it against magic. He briefly encountered his brother on his way out, before tricking him into his recently departed cell (“Are you ever not going to fall for that?”) and sending it plummeting into the Atlantic. Also on his departure, he counted the not-Sitwell, Agent Coulson, threatening him with a large gun forcibly commandeered from the Taelons . Loki had no real anger in his heart for the agent; in truth, he was nothing more than a means to the end, one more final push so that the Avengers would swing back at him, twice as hard. In his original conception, it was going to have been the Eye of the Hawk, but his arrows would be invaluable against the Chi Tauri army. Coulson gasped as the sceptre stabbed through him. He arched back, blood emerging from his lips, as he entered his death throes. Loki’s face was blank; in his mind, he was picturing Sitwell. Loki walked over his bleeding body, and headed for the exit.

Soon after, Nick Fury crouched down to Coulson’s prone form, looking at the wound that was leaking lifeblood through his cotton shirt. It was fatal. He removed some cards from his inside pocket, and looked at them, face blank. They were the Captain America card collection that Coulson had always bragged about. He let them fall into the wound, watching as the blood slowly began to stain them. 

“They just need a push,” he said to himself.

His choice to name the Initiative ‘The Avengers’ was unwittingly prophetic. In truth, the group of superheroes was useless without something to avenge. On this, Nick Fury and Loki were of one accord, although neither party realised. 

Fury closed his eyes, and signalled to some nearby S.H.I.E.L.D. agents to move Coulson to intensive care.

Oh well, Fury sighed to himself. There’ll always be T.A.H.I.T.I.

The sirens of the Helicarrier warbled as the Spymaster of S.H.I.E.L.D., battered and bruised, limped away.

In the end, it turned out that a flying machine was not the most secure base for a secret paramilitary organisation. Who knew?

Loki watched from the Quinjet as the Helicarrier crumbled into itself, crashing in a burning, screeching husk of metal into the ocean. This action was necessary. The Avengers were in their nascent form, barely functional and squabbling amongst themselves; a baptism in fire and chaos would make them rise like the phoenix into an actual army. The weapon had to be forged in flames before being turned against Thanos.

“Where now, boss?” asked Agent Bob of Hydra, channeling every 1930s gangster to have ever existed.

“We go to Stark’s tower,” said Loki. “That is a suitable location for opening the portal. Then the Chitauri army will flood through. The Avengers will try, I am sure, to defeat them.”

Left unspoken, of course, was Loki’s wish that they would succeed in stopping Thanos’ army.

“We lost Barton,” said Langdon.

“What?” asked Loki.

“Barton is back with S.H.I.E.L.D. The mind control broke,” said Robert Langdon, while Agent Ecks mimed a bang on the head.

Good, thought Loki. The more people in the Avengers the better. Out loud, however, he declaimed, “No matter. Our plans will continue uninterrupted.”

All of a sudden, as if summoned by his words, the quinjet began to swirl and fade in front of his eyes, the shadows growing longer and connecting to swirl around him. With a sickening lurch, the comforting firmness of the metal beneath his feet gave way to hard asteroidal rock, the charming buffoonery of Agent Bob and Agent Ecks transforming into the cruelties of the Chi Tauri army. The mind link rippled open, Loki’s surroundings disappearing into the black abyss of space. Kl’rt, the Other, appeared in front of him, lipless mouth contorted into a sneer.

“SNIVELLING WORM,” grunted the Other, his words echoing into the void. They were spoken telepathically as well as vocally, and so rattled about Loki’s head, beating painfully against the sides. Loki winced against the incoming migraine.

“Yes?” Loki drawled, not even attempting the barrage of syllables that made up his name.

“YOU HAVE BEEN ABSENT, LOKI. YOU HAVE BEEN WAITING IN A CELL FOR THREE DAYS, AND NOT PREPARING FOR OUR GLORIOUS MASTER. WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN, LOKI?”

“I was… a little tied up,” replied the God of Mischief.

“THAT IS NOT SUFFICIENT,” came the Other’s sonorous voice. “WE HAVE PLANS FOR YOU, LOKI. PLANS THAT WILL SEE YOU TORN APART WHILE THE CHI TAURI FEAST UPON YOUR INNARDS IF YOU FAIL. YOU THINK YOU KNOW PAIN? YOU THINK YOU KNOW SUFFERING? YOU KNOW NOTHING. HE WILL MAKE YOU LONG FOR THE SWEET EMBRACE OF DEATH.”

“I assure you, the battle that you and the Chitauri long for will come,” said Loki. “The Tesseract will open the doorway to a shining new age, and it will be glorious. But you must be patient.”

“I AM NOT BUILT FOR PATIENCE,” the Other growled, and a searing pain burst in Loki’s forehead. It felt like the cells in his brain were bulging against his skull, throbbing with the force of a migraine.

“COMPLETE YOUR PURPOSE, CHILD OF THANOS,” was the last thing Loki heard before he blacked out.

The first face he saw upon coming to was, dismayingly, Agent Bob McGraw. Fleetingly, Loki thought about taking his chances with the Chitauri.

“You okay, boss?” Agent Bob said, elongating the ‘oss’ syllable.

“Quite fine,” said Loki, wiping his nose. It was bleeding. He lurched to his feet, and stared out of the Quinjet window. “How far until New York?”
“T minus thirty minutes,” said Agent Ecks.

“Very well,” said Loki, eyes drifting closed. “We must prefer for our glorious purpose; for, however this day goes, it will usher in a new age for the world.”

Below the quinjet, the glittering city of New York spread out into the distance, glass skyscrapers and boxy grey buildings. Millions of people walked about their business, unaware of the destruction that would shortly rain down upon them. 

The game was set, the trolley was on the tracks, and whichever way it turned there would be bloodshed.