Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Sir!” Hill shouted over her shoulder as warning lights began to flash. “They’re going out of sync!”

Director Fury stood at his usual calm. Hands behind his back, only his sharp eye moved to take in the readouts as screens tracked the left and right hemispheres of Thunder Frost’s operation.

“Who initiated?” he asked.

Hill’s fingers flew across the console.

“It’s Loki,” she reported. “He’s already forty percent off.”

Fury’s mouth formed a hard line. Though there was really no need, Hill touched the comm unit at her ear, speaking into the mic.

“Thor! It’s your brother. He’s out of alignment.”

There was no need, because Thor could already see.

It was plain on Loki’s face.

“Loki!” he shouted. The sound of his voice felt hollow and trapped inside his helmet. Hot breath fogged the shielding. “Loki! Turn around!”

Loki didn’t hear him. He couldn’t. He had already gone too deep.

His eyes were distant, lost. They lifted upward, emerald clear, at something only he could see. Swept away by a current of the drift in which he knew not how to anchor himself.

His mouth formed a single word.

“Thor,” Fury warned, though he kept his tone level. “Don’t you dare.”

But Thor had already made up his mind. It would do no good to disconnect entirely. Pilots jolted suddenly from the drift when they slipped too deep could wind up in a coma for months. Sometimes longer.

Thor tried shouting once more, though he knew it would not help. Reality, as far as Loki was concerned, had already ceased to be.

So he did the only thing he could.

He followed him, plunging headlong into the rabbit hole, determined to catch his brother before he fell.

***

It was snowing.

Thor thought it strange at first. He hadn’t seen snow since the last time he’d been home.

It never snowed in the Southern Pacific, or around the equator, where they’d been stationed.

He reached out his hand. He caught a handful of flakes on the palm of his glove. He closed his fingers and wiped them away, as though he could feel the cold through the polycarbon of his pilot suit.

The snow smudged. Smeared a dirty gray-black.

Not snow.

Ash.

Thor lifted his eyes as the sky grew light. The memory he’d found himself in formed into sharper focus all around.

A forest. Snowbound, but steadily littered with a growing layer of soot.

One of Loki’s memories.

Thor could hear his breath inside his helmet as he turned.

Was this home?

Then he heard something else. A child. Crying in the distance.

He hurried towards it. His steps left no tracks, made no sound on the snow for as fast as he ran.

He stopped when he came upon the sight, framed between two black trees. The forest all around lay impossibly tall and still. Trees with their gnarled, blackened trunks formed unfriendly faces, their bare branches like claws poised overhead and ready to strike.

It was a scene from a fairy tale.

The way a child would remember it.

Loki – young, he couldn’t have been more than ten – crouched in the snow beside their mother. She lay half propped against a snowbank near the foot of one of the trees, curled small, long coat with its fur lining all but swallowing her in its folds.

It was Loki who was weeping.

Thor stood, numbed into silence, overcome with an unforgivable sense of intrusion as he watched the scene play out before him. One he didn’t recognize, but feared he already knew the end.

In the distance, a city burned: a red halo of light over the black trees.

“Loki,” their mother whispered, touching his face. Doing her best to wipe away his tears. “Shh. It’s alright. It’s alright...”

She was young. As young as Thor remembered her being in the pictures their father still carried with him. As young as the last time he had ever seen her.

Loki would not be comforted. He grabbed onto her wrist with both hands and held her palm against his face, closing his eyes with a brow furrowed in determination. As though he could wish this all away.

“Mother,” he whimpered when she coughed.

Coughed, and tried to hide the red flecks against her coat.

“It’s alright,” she said again, and stroked back his hair. Tried to wipe away the smudges of ash on his face.

She smiled. The crystalline rim of tears around her eyes only made her more beautiful.

Thor felt his throat ache and grow tight.

“You’ve got to get away from here, Loki,” she said. “You need to head away from the coast. Find the city where there are other people.”

“No!” His defiance reared itself, as petulant as ever. “I don’t want to leave you. I won’t!”

“You have to, my love. You have to.” She drew in a raspy breath.

Eruptions sounded in the distance. Thor wished he could believe it was a storm.

Loki looked back over his shoulder, only for an instant. Only long enough to make sure the monster had not found them again.

“It will be alright,” he said, even as his voice caught and broke. “It will be alright. I can help you to the city. Father and Thor will find us there. Then it will be alright...”

Her coughing drew him back.

He scooted close to her side, held her until the spasm eased. There could be no hiding the blood this time, or the toll the kaiju poison was taking on her.

Thor had seen its effects all too often.

“I’m going to miss you,” she whispered, and cupped Loki’s face one last time. “My brave little prince.”

Her hand fell away from him, and she breathed her last.

Loki held onto her wrist. He shook her shoulder and shouted as loud as his tiny voice could manage.

The forest swallowed the sound.

She would not wake.

Loki slumped beside her in the snow, and cried, while in the distance a monster screamed.

Thor felt the burn of tears respond in his eyes. He didn’t understand. When the Norway coastline had been attacked – the Breach may have been located in the Pacific, but that didn’t mean kaiju were limited in where they wandered – he and their father had rushed home as quickly as they could. They’d found Loki in one of the public shelters. He’d said he’d been playing in the woods outside of town when it happened. He didn’t know what happened to their mother.

Had he lied?

Had he been carrying this memory with him all this time?

Thor took his weight from the tree he’d come to lean against, and stepped away from it. Out into plain view, he approached the child he remembered being his brother.

Loki wouldn’t be able to see him. Thor wasn’t a part of this memory.

But he could not just stand and watch.

“Loki...” He heard his own voice come thick. Choked.

He should try to reach him, he knew. He should shout and strain across their connection and try to bring Loki back to the present. He should tell him none of this was real.

But more importantly Thor felt the need to comfort him. To let him know he wasn’t alone.

And Loki...turned.

He turned, and looked up at him, smearing more ash across his cheeks with a wipe of his dirty sleeve.

“Who are you?” he sniffled, his face red and lashes wet.

Thor stopped, shocked. He didn’t question. He didn’t wonder how he came to be as he took off his helmet with bumbling hands, saw his breath in visible clouds upon the cold air.

He knelt down in the snow. Felt its give and heard its soft crunch.

“I’m here,” he said, smiling with a painful need, “to take you home.”

Loki met his eyes. In them Thor saw the light that was his brother, the hint of the man he would one day become.

Loki lifted his arms, and without hesitation Thor swept him up.

He was light. Like he weighed nothing. Loki clung to him and Thor cradled his head, soothed his tears and his cries – though with nowhere near the skill of their mother, he was certain.

He turned and carried him away from that awful place.

***

It was afterward, that night, when Thor found his brother had slipped away from his infirmary assignment.

He found him on the roof of the Shatterdome instead, a blanket drawn around him against the chill night air.

Loki did not look at him as Thor climbed up onto the metal plating. He dropped the bulkhead closed behind him, in case anyone came looking.

“I brought you this,” he offered, extending a cup of hot drink.

Loki slid his glance aside without much interest, but he took the cup. He cradled it in both hands and blew away its steam while Thor settled himself.

It was a clear night. Again, unusual. It had seemed of late the Earth was doing its best to try and wash away the kaiju taint by dumping as much rain onto its surface as it could.

Global warming, the scientists said. Another courtesy of the kaiju and the nuclear bombs dropped on them.

It was a full moon that night. In the glow of the surrounding city, the stars were never visible.

But they could see the moon.

“How long will Fury be grounding me?” Loki murmured at length.

Thor made a pained expression.

“He didn’t use the word ‘grounding,’ so much,” he said, attempting to soften the blow. “More along the lines of...further training.”

“Remedial school.” Loki laughed softly. “I see.”

“It is not that,” Thor mumbled. “Many pilots go through the same thing their first drift. I remember the first time Sif and I—”

“Just because we’re brothers does not mean we’re compatible.”

“Loki...”

Thor looked to him. Loki’s eyes had turned down to stare at his drink, yet untasted.

The light in his eyes – the light Thor remembered seeing in his childhood self – was still there. Though it seemed...darker now. Colder, than what Thor remembered.

He wondered what Loki saw in his reflection.

“The moon is beautiful tonight,” he said instead, diverting the subject upward. Hopeful. “Isn’t it?”

Loki didn’t answer. Not for the stretch of several heartbeats.

When he did, it was only to sigh. He swirled the contents of his cup with no real thirst.

“Aren’t you going to ask me?”

Thor blinked.

“About what?”

“About why I lied.”

Thor bit at the inside of his cheek. His silence spoke an admission of guilt.

“I wish you had told me,” he said, quiet and careful. “You did not have to carry that memory alone. Father and I were there.”

“You were,” Loki breathed. “But you’re wrong. I did have to carry it alone.”

“Why?”

“So you wouldn’t have to.”

Thor looked at him.

Loki looked up at the moon.

A sudden gust of wind rose up over the Shatterdome, born inward from the cooling sea.

Thor shivered, and Loki shrugged off one shoulder of his blanket.

“Here,” he beckoned, holding it open.

Thor thought to protest, a thought killed quickly by Loki’s singular look. He ducked his head sheepishly and scooted in beside him, pulling the blanket back in tight.

It was much warmer that way.

They said nothing. They sat and watched the moon rise over the cityscape. Eventually Loki sipped at his drink, and found the taste tolerable.

He rested his head on Thor’s shoulder once he’d finished, and closed his eyes.

Thor felt him relax with the barest sound of an exhaled breath.

He looked peaceful with his eyes closed, Thor thought. A peacefulness that belied what other things lurked in the darkness of Loki’s psyche.

Their mother’s death hadn’t been the only thing Thor had seen before they re-emerged in the cockpit of their jaeger.

Beneath the blanket, Thor moved his hand. Just enough to reach out and feel across Loki’s back to his other shoulder. There he held him, squeezed tight, settled close in the safety and protection of his warmth.

Chapter Text

“Bruce!”

Bruce didn’t look up.

“Bruce!”

Bruce still didn’t look up.

He counted instead. Silently.

Three...

Two...

One...

“Banner Man!”

Tony Stark stumbled into Bruce’s lab the way he usually did: covered in hydraulic fluid and engine grease. He pushed a pair of work goggles up from his face. The ring it formed around his eyes marked the only clean spot left on his skin.

He didn’t care.

“Guess what I just did.”

“You made a lightsaber,” said Bruce.

Tony stared at him, first in awe.

“How do you do that?”

Bruce looked up from his computer screen long enough to nod towards the open door that marked the partition in their workspace.

His half was the clean side.

“I heard you making sound effects when you were swinging it around.”

“Really?” Tony squinted in that particular way that meant he was confused. He looked back towards the partition, fingers drumming on the top of Bruce’s monitor. “I’ll have to turn the music up.”

Bruce adjusted his glasses and looked back down to the computer screen.

Tony thumped the top of the monitor before he peeled away, all excited energy.

“Let me go get it. I’ll show you.”

“Don’t hit my computer,” Bruce mumbled.

Bruce pushed back his chair while Tony went to crank up the Metallica. He adjusted his glasses again and looked over the monitor read-outs on the ammonia tank for the fifteenth time.

His lab – such as it was: bare concrete floor, unfiltered air, the best jury-rigged equipment a lowest bidder could provide on a military budget – had been all but built around the thing. A portion of kaiju brain that had been brought back more or less intact.

So far the readings were holding steady.

The tissue wasn’t exactly repairing itself, but it wasn’t decomposing either. Electrical signals were still being transmitted between synapses.

It was still alive.

For the past three weeks he’d been running tests and taking samples to see just what sort of things the kaiju cells responded to. How quickly they learned. Reaction times. If his theory was right, and the speed the synapses generated didn’t change, then it wouldn’t be all that hard to—

“Here it is!”

Tony came back, brandishing his latest creation.

Bruce tilted down his glasses to get a look.

It was the size of a keychain.

“More like a lightpen?” he offered.

“Prototype,” said Tony, unaffected. He grabbed a sheet of paper and held it up to demonstrate. “Short range focused plasma beam. You hit something with one of these babies, it cauterizes instantly.”

Bruce winced only a little as Tony sliced a line through the sheet of paper with the red point of light produced from what looked all in the world like a 1950s science fiction movie space pen. Both halves caught fire and burned to nothing before they hit the ground.

Bruce sighed. He didn’t need those notes anyway.

“Bet I can also market it as a toast cutter,” Tony grinned.

“I’m glad you’re finding ways to keep yourself busy, Mr. Stark.” Nick Fury’s voice carried over the sound of stereo and humming equipment with minimal effort as he let himself in.

He never did knock.

“But that’s not why I flew you out here.”

Bruce looked down at his readouts and quietly stayed out of the way as Tony turned to meet him. Unintimidated.

He was fairly certain Tony could stare down a Category Four and not lose his cool. Let alone their boss.

“No worries, Director,” said Tony, gesturing with the pen. “This little guy is going to be your next best weapon.”

He pushed it into Fury’s gloved hand, who turned it over to look with no small amount of dubiousness.

To only have one eye, he was very expressive.

“This is going to help me kill kaiju?”

“No,” Tony laughed. “That at best is a surgical tool. Cauterizes as it cuts. No mess. Easy clean up. Leaves only the fresh scent of ozone. But...” He gestured his hands wide. “Build me a jaeger-sized one and I guarantee you the amount of toxic blood dumped in the oceans will drop ninety percent.”

“No more kaiju blue,” Bruce offered. “It could damage the kaiju without making them bleed.”

Fury didn’t look entirely convinced. But he didn’t look entirely put off, either.

“How much power will something like this need?” he asked.

“About a hundred YBq,” Tony said. “Give or take.”

Then Fury looked put off.

Tony slipped the pen from his hand and reached for the lapel of Fury’s coat, tucking it pointer side up into the inside pocket.

“Tell you what. You keep that. I’ll work on getting that number down a little.” He smiled and patted Fury’s coat smooth again.

Fury’s expression didn’t change. His look said all it needed to as he stepped away from Tony’s grin and turned to Bruce instead.

“Dr. Banner,” he prompted.

Bruce folded his arms in front of himself so he would stop fidgeting with his glasses.

“I’ve been hitting the kaiju’s frontal lobe with different speeds of sensory input,” he said, gesturing to the tank. Active tendrils still writhed and prodded inside. “As far as I can tell, individually, kaiju brains process information just a little bit slower than we do. That’s why they have two of them, to make up for thier size and the distance nerve functions have to travel.”

Tony wandered closer to the tank and poked a finger at the glass where a tendril of the brain was feeling across the surface.

Bruce glanced nonchalantly aside and reached for the keyboard on his computer.

“That’s fascinating, doctor,” Fury said with no inflection. “How does that help me kill them?”

Bruce touched one of the control keys.

“Well, aside from being nearly invincible to all external attacks...” The key sent a jolt of electric stimulus to the kaiju brain, making it jerk and thrash.

It was enough to make Tony jump back.

Bruce smiled a little.

“...it means in certain ways they’re incredibly fragile. Disrupt either of the brains’ inner workings, and half the kaiju suddenly can’t operate at full capacity.”

“You could say that about anything with a brain,” Tony interjected, wiping his hand that had touched the tank off on the front of his shirt.

“Most creatures don’t have two.” Bruce pressed a few more controls on his keyboard, bringing up screens of data. “But it’s more than that. Even without a backup, this brain sample here is generating constant activity. More than should be required to keep what parts it has left functional.”

“Which means?” said Fury.

“It means...” Bruce spread his hands. Bracing himself. He was used to being laughed at by now. “I think kaiju have extrasensory abilities.”

Tony did make a choking sound, but that may have been due to the beef jerky he’d pulled from his pocket to scarf down one mouthful at a time.

Fury remained – as ever – gravely serious.

“You’re telling me kaiju are psychic.”

Bruce shrugged.

“In a sense. It’s the best explanation. Every new kaiju that appears is better equipped to handle our defenses. They get bigger. Tougher. They display new abilities. They adapt. But no kaiju has ever lived long enough to go back through the Breach. So where are they getting their data?”

“Biological remote transmitters,” said Tony, smirking. “Cool.”

Fury turned his gaze suspiciously towards the bit of brain floating in the ammonia tank. His one eye narrowed.

“Is this thing spying on us right now?”

“No,” Bruce answered. “It’s just a brain. No other organs. The only sensory input it’s getting is what I feed it.”

And what AC/DC manages to slip through over the instruments, he thought. But he didn’t say that.

Tony blew a kiss at the brain, then gave it the finger.

“That’s reassuring,” said Fury flatly. “I’ll be sure to include that in my report.”

He turned to leave, boots sounding heavy on the metal floor.

“Keep up the good work, gentlemen.”

He climbed the stairs back to the entry way and ducked out through the bulkhead. Commander Hill trailed behind him.

Bruce and Tony looked at each other once quiet had restored. Bruce pushed up his glasses.

Then they giggled.

“Jerky?” Tony offered.

“Thanks,” said Bruce, and took some.