Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

They were on a hunt in Minnesota in the winter.

Minnesota in winter was absurdly cold. It was too cold to run. Sam and his brother Dean didn't have enough clothes with them in their gutless stolen Challenger that smelled like someone else's prescription hand lotion. They'd had to stop in to a charity store for gloves, hats, and a sweater apiece, and on the way to the nearest diner to pick up breakfast burritos and coffee, Sam was still shivering as he walked.

He passed a homeless guy with better gloves than he had. Nothing had even tried to kill him yet, and he was already hating this hunt.

Sam had agreed to the hunt because at least it wasn't Dick Roman; it wasn't revenge. Dean had been interested, Sam was starting to suspect, because the sheer variety and magnitude of their target's trail of mayhem gave him hope that, with a little persuasion, the whatever-it-was might be able to take on the Leviathan, but to Sam, bestowing venomous claws and super-strength for a day on an entire kindergarten class and watching the National Guard and CDC deal with the mass panic and casualties seemed kind of mean-spirited. Anyway, the thing was dangerous, so Sam and Dean were going to hunt it. Even if they had to go North in January to do so.

Dean wanted revenge for their uncle, shot two months ago by one of a new breed of shapeshifting monster impersonating the CEO of Roman Enterprises. Sam got where he was coming from; they'd both driven themselves to death and beyond for revenge in the past. The problem was, in a toe-to-toe between Leviathan-Dick Roman and Tony Stark, Sam's money was on Roman, Iron Man armor or no. Leviathan were un-killable as far as they knew, and the Roman Empire owned Kraft Foods and was looking to purchase PepsiCo. Stark Industries was lucky it stayed out of the food sector, or it would've been absorbed like the rest. Two drifters couldn't exactly fight that.

His stomach growled. The sky was iron-gray, pressing down on the city; the street lights were still glaring down on him. Waist-high berms of grimy plowed snow walled in the side-walk. Blue grains of ice melt sat in little round pocks in yesterday's slush. His long legs ate up the blocks in his haste to arrive somewhere warm, and he wrapped his arms around his chest, stretching his canvas jacket over his shoulders. Sam wished he'd taken the car. He'd needed to get moving after the long drive, but he'd been expecting North America, not Pluto.

An absurd figure strolled down out of the air to walk beside him: a pale thin man with long dark hair, a little taller than Dean and shorter than Sam, dressed in an oddly medieval-looking leather duster and trousers, with ornate bronze vambraces on his forearms and a long green cape flaring over his shoulders. It wasn't one of Sam's usual hallucinations, but it wasn't bothering him, unless he counted staring sidelong at him with pale green eyes alight with menace and hunger. Sam kept his eyes on the diner ahead of him and stripped off his left glove, ready to dig his fingers into the sensitive scar on that palm to snap himself back to reality if the phantasm got too distracting.

After two-hundred years in the core of Hell, Sam figured he'd gotten off pretty lightly, as far as side-effects went.

He could see the diner on the next block. His pace quickened.

The imaginary man in the green cape cocked his head aside like a crow. "What are you?" he wondered aloud, his voice smooth and approximately British. "Some kind of god-slayer?"

Sam watched the man more warily. He and Dean had driven here to hunt something that played games—something smart, vicious, powerful, and arrogant, something that might very well walk down out of the air and strike up a conversation with a Hunter just to creep him out.

Most things slowed down when they'd been shot in the eye. Sam reached for the gun at the small of his back.

The man grabbed him by the jacket collar and flung him thirty feet backward down the sidewalk. Ice cut at Sam's hand and road salt stung the gashes; the image of the man didn't even flicker. Definitely real. Probably a god, certainly more than Sam was ready to handle. Sam rolled to his feet and drew his gun.

By the time he got his bearings, he was looking at five identical angry gods in green capes and bronze vambraces. He froze.

A sixth god in green lunged at him from the side. Sam whirled and fired; the bullet passed right through him and ricocheted off a brick storefront across the street. Sam cursed. The god in front of him smirked. One of the gods he'd turned his back on pounced on him in his distraction, seized his gun arm by the wrist, and ground Sam's tendons together so hard he dropped his weapon.

Lurid green flames coiled strong as rope caught Sam by the throat as he tried to headbutt the attacker, whose hungry eyes sparked with the same green fire. Sam bared his teeth and yanked his phone out of his pants, switching to his bare left hand and dialing Dean from his contacts by touch.

The fiery ropes multiplied and strapped Sam spread-eagle to the wall of the nearby hardware store. A cop car drove right past Sam and the god, the partner's eyes gliding idly over them, and pulled into the diner's parking lot. The rope on Sam's left arm tightened, numbing. He dropped the phone in the snow.

The god smiled crookedly at him as he panted and struggled, and laid a cold slender hand against his face. "Peace, god-slayer," he murmured, a hint of a chuckle in his breath. "I'm only borrowing you."

The god's skin warmed, grew tan. He gained an inch or three. Sam felt his own skin rippling as though riddled with worms; his lungs grew tight and his legs weak. He watched a twin to the mole on his jaw sprout on the god's, and the god's slick black hair warm to brown. In a moment Sam was struggling not to pass out as he stared up into his own face.

The god tapped Sam between the eyes with his finger and shook his head as though he'd gotten water in his ear. He smiled Sam's smile, bent, and picked up the fallen phone. Sam heard Dean's voice, urgent, from the speaker. "Dropped the phone, sorry, dude," the god said, a perfect mimicry. "Hey, this place does pie for breakfast. Want a slice?" Dean's reply was an enthusiastic affirmative, and the god grinned and dragged his borrowed arm, palm up, down through the air. A bag of take-out materialized on it. "Apple it is. Back in five." Dean said something else, warm. "'Course, Dean," said the god, and hung up.

Sam struggled against the brilliant green ropes that immobilized him. The god frowned. "If you would pass out, you'd save my decency and your embarrassment, stubborn mortal," he said, voice drifting back to his own smooth accent. "In fact—pass out. Now."

He snapped his fingers.

God, it was cold.

The sun was high and the sky was clear, but it was relentlessly bitingly cold, numbingly cold, stuporously cold. Sam woke curled around his knees in a ditch between two high board fences painted beige—some housing development. He couldn't feel his hands or feet. His cheeks burned. He was shivering so hard he doubted he could uncurl himself if he tried.

He managed. He staggered to the nearest fence on numb feet, shaking uncontrollably. He had to get indoors. He had to warn Dean about the god.

It was while he was patting his pockets for the cell phone he'd forgotten he'd dropped that he noticed he wasn't wearing his own clothes. He was in some vaguely medieval-looking trousers and a close-fitting jacket under a calf-length duster of exquisitely hand-stitched and embossed black leather with a green wool lining that ran all the way to the edge, over long underwear that might be cashmere—it was hard to tell with his fingers numb and the rest of his skin covered in goose-bumps. A long green cape clasped to a small breastplate anchored in the front of his jacket. There were bronze vambraces on his forearms and long slender throwing knives in little sheathes sewn into the sides of the trousers and arms of the jacket.

The god had left Sam his knives. That showed exactly what he thought of Sam's threat level.

The cape had to go. Sam blew on his fingers and stomped back and forth in the snow until his shivering died down enough that he could work the clasps off. He still looked like he'd wandered out of a Renaissance fair, or maybe Comic Con.

They didn't exactly have those in January in small-town Minnesota.

With the cape gone, Sam found that the duster was held down by a bronze pauldron on his right shoulder that hooked to a strap that ran between the duster's lapels, through a slit in his jacket, and buckled to a belt that didn't actually hold up his pants, but looked like it might be intended to hold a weapon. Apparently the clothes came as a set, and were not meant to be removed.

It was while he was fighting to untangle himself from the contraption that he noticed that the fingers he was using weren't actually his. The hands on the ends of his wrists were slender and neatly groomed. His gun calluses were gone. From what little he could feel of his stinging face, the corner of his jaw was too round, his sideburns were missing, and his hairline was all wrong. His—or he should say, the god's—wisdom teeth were intact.

Noticing when you'd been body-swapped was apparently one of those skills that improved with practice. Sam added it to the ever-expanding list of skills he had, but really didn't want.

Strange clothes, strange body, strange location. Sam hoped he was still in Lakeville, but he couldn't assume. He detached bits and plates and baubles from the god's clothes until they could pass for fashion-forward motorcycle leathers, patted himself down for anything else useful—just more knives—and picked a direction in the maze of shoulder-high residential fencing that looked likely to lead to a road.

After ten minutes shuddering on the side of the road with his thumb out, Sam returned to the development, bashed his way into the nearest unoccupied apartment window, tossed the tenant's belongings for twenty dollars and a wire coat hanger, and stole a Kia Sportage.

The Kia's GPS put him thirty miles north of Lakeville and two days late to get Dean his breakfast burritos. Sam stared into the unfamiliar eyes in the rear-view mirror, blasted the heat, and headed back to his and Dean's motel.

Dean was gone.

The Challenger was gone, the clerk remembered the guys in #17 missing check-out, and the housekeeper was still nauseated at the memory of the pile of bloody towels left on the bathroom floor. Sam picked a bobby pin off the carpet on his way out of the office and used it and the tip of one of the god's knives to jimmy the old-fashioned lock on the room. There was nothing left, no news clippings, no notes, nothing tucked into a corner of the dresser, and nothing smuggled in the box springs.

Sam examined the god's body in the mirror with morbid fascination, and consoled himself that at least he was still tall (though he should have been taller), and at least he still had hair he could tuck behind his ears. He kind of liked the way the god's jacket winged out over his shoulders; it almost disguised the hard-won muscle he'd lost, and it fit. (Of course it fit. He wasn't Sam right now.)

The faint lines in his face didn't fold right when he smiled, though, and the longer Sam examined the closest link he had to the god, the more uneasy he became. The pale green eyes were hollow and wild, aching with exhaustion. Bitterness flowed into this face almost unbidden, as though stamped into the very flesh. There were little hairline scars here and there, on its face and hands, and a worrisome one, old and well-healed, low on the side of its throat. Gods and monsters were always bad, but the suffering ones were the worst. Sam feared for Dean.

He left the motel and drove to the nearest library. Twenty minutes at a computer terminal while examining the embroidery on the sleeve of the jacket and the engraving on the knife handles pointed Sam toward the Norse pantheon, and the modus operandi toward the trickster Loki, who was by all accounts very smart, stupidly impulsive, and goddamn difficult to kill. There had been no trickster chaos in town over the two days Sam had been out of the picture, and no ritualistic murders, mysteriously mummified corpses, museum thefts, missing persons, or fires, either. No evidence the god had caused any more trouble or that Dean had been hunting in the area.

Sam bought a bowl of soup across the street with his stolen twenty and called both Dean's phones from a payphone with the change. The ring, both times, was followed by the scratchy laughter of animatronic clowns in the place of Dean's voicemail. Sam slammed the headset back into the cradle.

So the god was actively keeping him away from Dean. That was good. There was no fun for a trickster in guarding a corpse.

Sam abandoned the Kia after a last look at the GPS, and, fortified by soup and desperation, headed off on foot for the Sheriff's office. A helicopter whup-whupped overhead, the noise somewhat muffled by the deep snow that still smothered the rooftops. It looked military. As it circled, a second, similar, joined it.

Sam stopped on a street corner and watched.

He heard a mechanical whine in the distance and spotted a gleaming streak of red in the corner of his eye before more voltage than a human body should ever conduct struck him unconscious.

Chapter Text

Sam woke chained to a steel ring in the floor of a small concrete cell with a door and a one-way mirror. When he lifted his head to get his bearings, a fan whirred under the door and the air got staler and staler until he passed out again.

The second time Sam woke, he fought past his growing headache to discover he'd been fitted with a tight dog collar whose prongs dug into the back of his neck, his hands had been duck-taped into fists, and the god's clothes had been swapped for a set of powder-blue scrubs with the draw-string removed from the pants.

Whoever had him was scared. They had money, infrastructure, and resources, and they were still scared, cobbling restraints together, urgency driving them to forty-dollar fixes on a fifty-thousand-dollar budget. Probably government, by the mirror. Enlightened government, attacking a supernatural problem, so civilians didn't have to. Apparently the Men in Black were real.

Where had they been all Sam's life?

The door rattled. Sam gritted his teeth, rested his head on the foam mattress on the floor, and tried to look even more harmless than he felt.

A huge blond man in scale mail and a red cape burst into the cell, bouncing the door against the wall in his haste, skidded on his knees to Sam's side, and crushed him to his brawny chest. Sam wheezed.

"Brother!" the man cried. He held Sam at arm's length as though he weighed no more than a small child, and cast worried blue eyes over the shock collar and Sam's duck-taped fists. "What a sad reunion, this, that thou art bound—for the men of Shield still argue the need. My brother, why fledst thou so? Father and Mother mourned thee as the son of their very flesh, and shame on all the House of Odin, have we sown doubt that we thee cherish!" The man—god—pleaded with his eyes.

Sam did not relish this new god's reaction to the fact that he was not his errant brother. He licked his lips.

He was saved from some Shakespearean web of deceit when a second man swept into the room, this time, like Sam had been expecting of his captors, in a black Fed suit.

"I thought we'd agreed you were going to observe the interview," the Fed told the god.

The god rose in a swirl of red and armor. "Son of Coul, forgive my impatience. But to seek my brother so long, and to find him chained like a spy—"

"I understand," said 'Son of Coul.' "But you understand Loki is a serious threat."

"I do." The god slumped. The Fed gestured to the door, and the god left and locked it behind him.

Sam had been interviewed in front of one-way glass before, but he was used to sitting in a chair, cuffed to a table. He scooted back against the wall and sat cross-legged, watching the Fed tense at his every movement. The Fed remained standing. Sam folded his sweaty fists in his lap.

"I'm Agent Coulson, Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division, United States Department of Defense, United States of America, Earth, Midgard," the Fed announced. "I apologize for the accommodations," he continued, sounding about as far from sorry as professionalism could permit, "and I should warn you now that until we obtain a more appropriate restraint system, any time you attempt to escape, assault anyone, or work magic of any kind, you will receive a strong electrical shock. Do you understand?"

Sam nodded, and decided to treat the S.H.I.E.L.D. like a well-organized clan of demon hunters—they were working with a pagan god (and that said volumes about their ethics; he'd have to be extremely careful) so at least they had to be open-minded. "Before we get too far," Sam said cautiously, "I should tell you that I'm not actually . . . Loki."

"You'll forgive me for assuming otherwise," the agent replied. "Keep your hands and face visible from the mirror at all times. The mattress is on the floor; leave it on the floor. Don't fidget. Don't talk to yourself. Meals are provided three times daily. Bathroom breaks are after meals and just before lights out. We will continue to monitor you after lights out, so don't move. Do you understand?"

"What if I have an itch?"

"Warn us before you scratch it."

Sam grimaced. He was more concerned about what he could do to snap himself out of a hallucination if one happened—but he supposed a good taser to the back of the neck would work just fine. "I know I look like Loki," Sam said. "I met him in Lakeville. He grabbed me, and did some kind of—he changed my body so I look like him. And he switched our clothes."

"Again, you'll forgive S.H.I.E.L.D. for assuming otherwise."

"I'm an American citizen," Sam warned him.

"We don't do waterboarding," the agent said. He knelt, hands ever poised to draw some hidden weapon, and looked Sam in the eyes. "You seem to be taking this easily," he remarked.

Sam showed him a self-deprecating grin. "I'm panicking on the inside. Will your superiors understand that I don't know anything Loki knows?"

The agent's face soured. "We know better than to take any information from Loki at face value. You have nothing to worry about."

"Perfect." Sam sighed. He was trapped in the skin of a compulsive scheming liar and master of disguise. At least he hadn't been captured wearing his own face. "Can you explain to your pagan buddy that I'm not actually his brother?" He glanced at the door, then the mirror, and let his worry show.

The agent shrugged. "I'll try but he won't buy it from me. He's a good guy, though. Now because of the threat Loki poses and the difficulty we face in verifying your claims, you should expect to be detained indefinitely. Good behavior will not lower your security level. I understand this is unconstitutional and illegal, but in this case, S.H.I.E.L.D. is willing to shoulder that responsibility for the protection of the American People."

Sam's face twitched, and he looked around the bare room. "Could I get some reading material?"

"We'll consider it," the agent replied. "Probably not."

Sam grimaced. Pencil and paper, he could see being used in some kind of spell by an expert with considerable intrinsic power and a great memory. A book as a weapon or tool stretched the bounds of his considerable imagination.

"Dinner is in three hours," the agent told him, rising. "Don't ask the guards for anything. Don't give yourself a medical emergency. In fact, don't speak unless spoken to and don't look anyone in the eye. If the complex experiences anything unusual for the duration of your stay, you're getting shocked and sedated. Do you understand?"

Sam swallowed and nodded.

The agent turned to the mirror. "Thor, you can come back in if you like."

Thor. Once heavily worshiped as a fertility and weather god; prideful, honest, and impetuous, with a bit of a temper—according to the lore of the peoples who'd worshiped him. Sam narrowed his eyes and against his better judgment, addressed the agent. "You know what he is and you still work with him?"

The agent shot him a warning look. "We do."

"You know what he eats, right?"

The agent's brow wrinkled, but whatever reply he had was stoppered when the god in red and scale mail thundered back into the room. Sam pasted on an awkward smile. The agent patted Thor on the shoulder and left the cell.

Thor gazed down at Sam sadly. "Truly thou art not Loki?" he asked. "Or Loki in truth, lying and willingly captured. Oh my brother, why must thou hide in these games?"

"That thing with the kindergarteners, that killed two people and scarred the kids and teachers for life, that was a game?" Sam demanded, narrowing his eyes.

The god swallowed loudly and sat crosslegged, mirroring Sam. "A harsh game," he said. "My brother's mind is subtle. I confess I'd never troubled to divine the truth of him." He smiled apologetically and searched Sam's changed eyes.

"I'm not him," Sam told the god. "I don't even sound like him, except for the voice."

"My brother is very clever," the god replied wistfully.

Sam took a risk. If S.H.I.E.L.D. caught on to who Sam actually was, and then caught up to Dean, the best they could hope for was a psychiatric facility, otherwise death row. But Sam and Dean had had dealings with a being calling itself Loki before, each of which had ended in humiliation or tragedy or both, and while all the signs implied this Loki was a different person entirely, Sam suspected he would bring more of the same. He'd play with Dean a bit before playfully killing him.

Thor seemed straight-forward from what Sam had seen, and S.H.I.E.L.D.'s control over him seemed tenuous at best. If he was getting free, it would be through Thor. Sam leaned forward and met Thor's eyes, his voice low and urgent. "I have a brother, too," he confided. "When Loki gave me his body, he took mine, and I think he's out there somewhere wearing my face and playing a game with my brother. Now, all I know about Loki is what he did to those kids and me, but it makes me scared what he's doing now."

Thor scowled at him, and Sam had to stop himself from flinching. "My brother would never—" He cut himself off and subsided. "Since we were children—He was ever cunning, canny. His mind grew restless and he made strange amusements. But he was never cruel. He was always fair when we played—though at times it seemed not so." Confusion was raw in Thor's face, a shock still humming there like the thrum of a rung bell, from something recent.

"Could you tell me about your brother?" Sam asked. "Why's he missing? What happened?"

Thor gazed at the floor with anguish on his open face, sighed, and told Sam a story. Sam listened, snatching at every detail, and imagined what the god whose body he wore might be doing right now to Dean.

On returning from the day's excursion to the Astral Plane, Dr. Stephen Strange, Sorcerer Supreme of Earth, joined his wife Clea, Sorceress Supreme of the Dark Dimension, for a dinner of Spanish pork prepared by their talented chef Adelaide, perused the financial section of the New York Times, communed with a few departed souls, and returned the day's phone calls.

The third call, to an unfamiliar number, connected him to the most terrifying man ever entrusted with the security of the United States of America.

"Fury," snapped the man. "S.H.I.E.L.D. Talk."

"Colonel Fury, this is Dr. Stephen Strange, Sorcerer Supreme of Earth," Dr. Strange replied, unfazed. "You called me this afternoon. I believe you consider your problem urgent?"

"Damn right," Fury barked. "You hear of a jumped-up psycho god called Loki? 'Cause we've got him. Thought you might be interested, and you bet your ass it's urgent, 'cause we got no clue how long we'll be able to hold him in custody."

Dr. Strange sighed. "You haven't 'got' Loki."

"Well, my men cuffed someone who looks a hell of a lot like him," Fury shot back.

"I can count on one hand the means that would neutralize a being like Loki," Strange replied, "and they are all beyond your capability. Beyond mine, too, for the time being."

"What do you know about our capabilities?" Fury demanded.

"More than you know of mine." A tense silence cracked on the phone lines. "While I avoid publicity, I don't bury my head in the sand."

"That's fair," Fury replied, after another breath of silence. "So you're saying either Loki's playing us, or it's like the guy says and he's not Loki."

"Or the godling got into trouble and turned himself in to use you for sanctuary," Strange suggested. "Whatever the case, I would consent to see your prisoner."

"Good to hear. I'll send you a jet."

Strange smiled and curled his toes in his silk slippers. "No need. I prefer to transport myself. We couldn't want to endanger your men or your prisoner with your barbaric incompetence any longer than necessary."

He replaced the handset with a satisfying click, stood, and opened his closet. A visit to S.H.I.E.L.D. merited his full regalia. One virtue the government had never mastered was humility, and Fury was a prime example—but in Stephen Strange, any humility would just be false.

Thor's story was long, but Sam, faced with days of sitting on the floor of an empty cell trying not to twitch threateningly, was in no hurry for him to finish. Thor had a linear, factual way of remembering things that forced Sam to read between the lines for hints at Loki's character.

Loki was the younger of the pair—"Though now I think on it, I cannot be certain"—and the more secretive one. He seemed to have tagged along on many of Thor's adventures with his friends. Hunts—they were always killing something dangerous, whether a wolf or a dragon or a mystical boar. Sam didn't know what to do with the notion of gods as Hunters. Perhaps the troublesome gods he and Dean had killed had left gaps in the top of the monster ecosystem, and humans would be paying for their deaths down the road.

The murky picture of Thor and Loki's childhood—brothers? Where did the myths get their information?—cleared a bit when Thor recounted the day of his coronation. Apparently Loki was the second place brother as well as the second born; his quick mind and magical aptitude hadn't earned him any real place in the court. And Loki sounded like the type to let a grudge stew. Thor's story grew more jagged as he recalled more recent events and rawer wrongs—Thor, banished; Loki, thrust to his father's throne; the kind of fist fight that happened when two brothers had a communication breakdown and access to arcane super-weapons; and at last, in a coup de gras of untold schemes, Loki's assassination of an enemy king, near-genocide of an enemy people, strumming of the guy-wires of the entire multiverse, and willing drop into the void of space beneath Asgard's great bridge.

Sam had walked that road. Loki had apparently gotten farther along, what with fleeing his brother's overtures of reconciliation and choosing instead to inflict wanton havoc upon humanity, but Sam knew that road.

"I suspect my brother's mind is still troubled, ever since our father confessed that Loki is, in truth, a son of Jötunheim," Thor remarked in closing, cradling his broad head in his hands, and for Sam, that was the clincher.

"He discovered he's the same kind of monster he was raised to fight all his life?" Sam clarified.

Thor bristled. "My brother is no monster," he boomed. Sam flinched back. "And the people of Jötunheim—but, yes. Ere now, we would both have called them so."

Sam chewed on Thor's story. A revelation like that . . . once you got hit with that bombshell, you couldn't go on as yourself; you couldn't chase your dreams and desires just because they were yours; if you were a monster, you didn't deserve dreams. If you went on living at all, it was because you had a mission.

Sam looked up at Thor and prayed he'd be able to provide a useful answer. "If Loki had a mission," Sam asked, slowly, "what do you think it would be?"

"A mission," Thor echoed. He looked up. "Like a quest?"

Sam grimaced. "Like an obsession," he replied.

Thor's brow furrowed. "I must think on this."

"No, just off the top of your head," Sam protested, unwilling to lose Thor's company. "Whatever comes to mind is fine."

"This is a weighty matter deserving careful thought," Thor rebuked him, and Sam knew better than to argue. Thor rested a heavy callused hand on Sam's shoulder, and Sam tensed. "In case—if thou art Loki," Thor said thickly, "know that I forgive thee thy true and imagined crimes, and wish only that thou wouldst hie home."

Sam opened and closed his mouth, concerned, in spite of himself, for the sincere and affectionate god, who was likely to get his inhuman heart smashed to bits. "Sometimes when people know they've done something wrong," Sam suggested, watching Thor's eyes, "they don't want to go home until they think they've suffered enough."

"Then I shall drag him back by force," Thor declared, and left Sam alone in the cell.

Sam's fists itched. He glared at Loki's face in the mirror, still at a loss for what the god might want with Dean. The talk with Thor had been educational, but he wasn't going anywhere tonight.

Sam's hallucinations were always worse when he was bored and nervous, so after dinner (a hot dog and a sports bottle of water; no, they wouldn't un-tape his hands) and a bathroom break (a bed-pan and four guards, three armed and one with latex gloves) he spent an hour watching Satan's human vessel finger-painting on the walls with his blood. His nose itched. When he lifted his cuffed hands to scratch it against the duck tape, he got his first shock from the collar, which left him choking for air and snapped Lucifer back to the scarred crevices of Sam's brain.

It was good to know that the voltage on the collar wasn't lethal to humans, but he was in no hurry to get zapped again. Sam spent the rest of the hours until lights out rigid with nerves.

They really weren't taking any chances on him getting loose. Sam's best bet was still Thor, who seemed decent and ungovernable enough to help Sam escape, for a good enough reason. An alternative would be to promise S.H.I.E.L.D. a line on the real Loki—he could do it, as long as Loki stuck around with Dean—but that would put Dean and a being that looked like Sam Winchester in the clutches of a law enforcement agency, and things would be worse than when they'd started.

After lights out, Sam lay flat on his back on the mattress, wide awake, trying not to move. It took an hour before he started to relax. Then the lights turned back on.

Agent Coulson came in the door, then stood aside to admit yet another tall man in an elaborate costume complete with cape. This one's neatly cut salt and pepper hair could let him pass for a human corporate executive, but the flowing blue silk shirt, high-collared red cape with brocade trim, and large gold brooch made the conservative grooming moot. He was followed by an imposing black man in an eye-patch and a leather trench coat, bearing a Desert Eagle. Sam figured they meant serious business.

"More gods?" he demanded. He got shocked for startling the guy behind the mirror with the remote, and the visitors reacted: Coulson with a subtle wince, the man with the Desert Eagle by taking aim, and the man in the cape with a sneer of contempt.

"Crude," said the possible god, "and useless against any being of real power. If your organization has the intelligence of an average ten-year-old, you should free this man."

"I decide the level of risk my men live with," the man in the eyepatch retorted. He twitched his mouth and turned to the mirror. "Stand down for now. The expert's on site."

Sam cautiously pushed himself to a seat. "Who—and what—are you?" he grunted, when the movement didn't earn him another shock.

"Colonel Nick Fury," the black man boomed, "director of S.H.I.E.L.D., which takes down threats the rest of the D.O.D. isn't ready to know about. I'm a human. My friend, here, is Stephen Strange, some kind of wizard type. Despite his best efforts, he's still a human."

"And this prisoner," said Strange, waving two fingers through the air and making the duck tape on Sam's hands peel away into two neat rolls, "is either Loki in a severely disabled state, or a United States citizen unlawfully detained."

Fury glared. Sam winced and rubbed the backs of his hands where the hairs had been ripped out. Moving slowly, he unbuckled the dog collar and rubbed the dents the electrodes had left in the back of his neck.

"Do your thing," Fury ordered Strange.

Strange waved his hand and conjured a black velvet cushion onto the floor, then sat in half-lotus on it, facing Sam. Sam tightened his fists and looked sidelong at Fury. Magic did strange things to the brain, and he'd prefer facing the government agent with no oversight to the brusque "wizard type."

Strange's eyes glazed over, and Sam wondered what abnormalities he was seeing. The gold brooch at Strange's throat glowed unnaturally. Looking at it hurt Sam's head.

"There is no great power in this man," Strange murmured, clearly engaged in his unseen work. "Though there are . . . channels for it. Burns and stomata and fistulous tracts—" his brow wrinkled in disgust— "scars and healed breaks, islands and pockets in his psyche—by the Vishanti, I've never seen a live human in such a state."

Sam bared his teeth. "I find a positive attitude helps get me through the day."

Strange raised a bushy eyebrow. "None of which is relevant to the nation's security," he allowed. "This man is not and has never been Loki, and he has no active spellwork on him—"

"It's not a glamour?" Sam interrupted, drawing sharp looks from the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents.

"Not at all; it's a true transmogrification," Strange announced, fascinated. "Much more delicate and draining in the short term, but perpetually stable because the change is as real as matter."

Sam swallowed.

"A novice could glamour you into a fish," Strange continued, oblivious or perhaps dismissive of Sam's growing panic, "but you'd drown in water. Transmogrified, on the other hand, you could be a fish for the rest of your life."

Well, Sam thought hysterically, at least he didn't match his mugshot anymore.

Fury loomed over them. "We already know Loki's bad news. Can you track him?"

"The cords and wave-forms of Asgardian magic are refined and intricate, and Loki's workmanship is such that what few residues remain of his power are fully self-contained," Strange said. "So, no."

Fury growled.

"I can, of course, reverse the entire effect with access to an item the victim owned before the change," Strange added, snatching something out of the air. Sam had a half second to recognize a wad of blood-stained flannel that had been one of his shirts two months ago, before Strange clapped his entire free hand across Sam's face and intoned an incantation in a language Sam didn't recognize that made the room grow hot and blurred. Sam couldn't move away. He had a bad feeling about the whole thing, but the reason escaped him until the spell finished and Strange dropped his hand.

Fury and Coulson both sighted their pistols on Sam's head.

"Coulson," Fury demanded, "is that Sam motherfuckin' Winchester?"

Coulson nodded, his aim steady. "I believe so, sir."

Fury gestured with the muzzle of his Desert Eagle. "Put the shock collar back on."

Strange, securing his place on Sam's list of assholes powerful enough to save the world twice over but too self-absorbed to bother, had vanished quick as a demon after undoing Loki's work. Bored, apparently. Fury had wasted no time in pouncing on Sam.

"The Winchester boys," he gloated, pacing back and forth before the mirror. "Always suspected we'd run into you. You fake your death once or twice, we stop assuming decapitation is gonna take."

"Obviously you don't need the 'truth is out there' speech," Sam replied. "Those shootings weren't us."

"The shootings only fooled the rest of the world because we live on a planet of dumbasses," Fury agreed. "For the rest of your rap sheet—let me guess, you had a good reason."

Sam glared. "We take out the threats the rest of the world isn't ready to know about. Not human, but sometimes the corpses look that way. And we gotta eat."

"You're no good to me unless you start pointing fingers."

"Dick Roman, the Dick Roman of Richard Roman Enterprises, was replaced last year by one of a new species of shapeshifters that escaped to the living world when a gate to Purgatory was opened as part of an angelic civil war. They're called Leviathan. They can blend into society almost perfectly, but they'll go for long-pig whenever they can get away with it. Their skin burns under a weak solution of sodium borate. Decapitation slows them down, but we still don't know how to kill them. Two of them took our faces and did the shootings."

"So you're a vigilante," Fury summarized, "and you and your brother were both framed for mass murder by evil shapeshifters from another dimension."

Sam just glared. If Fury wanted the truth, he could choke on the truth.

Fury snapped his fingers, and Sam twitched, half expecting some elaborate weapon or savage animal to manifest from the force of his will. But Fury was only human, and he was only getting the attention of the personnel behind the mirror. "You got that?" he demanded to the air. "Leviathans. Put 'em on the threat wall."

There was no sound from beyond the cell, but from Fury's assured expression, there was no question his order was being carried out.

"So you believe me?" Sam asked, suspicious.

Fury snorted. "That's what I have fact checkers for. Now, I'm gonna level with you—whether or not you're some wanna-be supervillain who shoulda joined theater club when you had the chance, we don't do murder and torture here. Not even for fellas who are legally dead. Loki, on the other hand, once killed the Norse version of Jesus with a pointy stick for shits and giggles." Fury let himself out the door and paused at the threshold. "Let my men know when you're ready to help us track your brother down."

"Now's fine," Sam said. His blood pounded. Lucifer was laughing in his ear.

Fury raised his eyebrows, then nodded in approval. "Good answer." He left Sam and Coulson staring at each-other across Coulson's gun. Sam tried to control his racing heart.

"I'll need a list of your brother's hide-outs and aliases," Coulson said.

"We don't operate like that anymore," Sam replied. "I'll need a computer with Internet access. The trail's cold; you can't track him, but I might be able to figure out where he's going."

Coulson lowered his weapon. "Send in Voight from Analysis and an escort team," he commanded to whoever watched behind the mirror.

Sam forced himself to relax in the cuffs, ignored Lucifer, and told himself that he knew what he was doing. Four armed guards and a middle-aged woman in khakis arrived to lead him from the interview room five minutes later. Sam went quietly.

S.H.I.E.L.D. pretty much let Sam research whatever he could possibly think of, and what Sam couldn't access without the hacking scripts from his laptop, Agent Voight could retrieve through Patriot Act back-doors in seconds. Once Voight got over the idea of working with a notorious satanist serial killer and got a handle on the kinds of news Sam was looking for, the work went fast. Sam found five new hunts and checked up on several anomalies he'd had his sights on already. A series of unexpected deaths in Lexington looked less like a vengeful spirit than a cursed object, according to a map one of Voight's programs generated from victims' credit card purchases. Something was eating teenagers in Cascade State Park. Voight found a kid in New Mexico, either a warlock, a rogue psychic, or a mutant, who seemed to drive people around him violently insane.

Finding Dean was complicated by the fact that it wasn't just Dean he was looking for—it was Dean hunting with Loki, who they could only assume was still impersonating Sam. If Loki nixed the hunts or sucked Dean into his own games, Sam might never find his brother unless Loki wanted him to.

Assuming Sam would even follow through with leading S.H.I.E.L.D. to Dean. Loki might just be the lesser of the two evils.

S.H.I.E.L.D. was considerate enough, now they knew Sam as just a six-and-a-half-foot mass murderer with combat training instead of a trickster god, to bring him and Agent Voight coffee. They worked through the night, looking for hunts that might catch Dean's attention, and Sam pursuing rabbit trails to keep S.H.I.E.L.D. from zeroing in on him until Sam had made up his mind.

Murderers took years—decades, often—to make it to the chair or the needle, and he and Dean were shoe-ins for the insanity defense. Hell knew they'd both benefit from psychiatric care. They still had a mission out there, ghosts and monsters and curses and demons, but other hunters could do the same jobs. They knew more than anyone else alive about Leviathan, but that really wasn't much. Dean wanted revenge, but he'd most likely die in the attempt—and Sam might just be arrogant enough to take that from him, even if they spent the rest of their lives in separate cells.

Or Sam could find it in himself to let Dean die on his own terms. If he found a hunt he knew would draw Dean in, he honestly didn't know what he'd tell S.H.I.E.L.D.

At 6:00 am, Voight's shift ended, and the escort team dragged Sam away from the computers, through bland white hallways, into an elevator, and down a heavily monitored concrete corridor to leave him in an ordinary prison cell.

Sam meditated himself to sleep on the too-small bunk.

He woke panicked. He was trapped, there were bars all around, and he couldn't hear Dean breathing raggedly across the room. He was imprisoned by some kind of shadow-government and a pagan god with brother issues was playing house with Dean.

Thor was back, looming outside the cell. He was wearing the same red cape and scale mail from yesterday, looking more like the clothes were a natural part of his skin than like he'd rolled out of bed in them. He was frowning.

Sam rolled to his feet and stretched his shoulders. He couldn't kid himself—for all that he could push-start a Dodge Ram, in a fight, he was barely on a par with a demon-possessed fifth-grade girl. Most of Sam's heavily trained muscle served only to protect his spine when he got flung into walls and tombstones, and to spring him to his feet fast enough to retrieve his weapon. Thor could probably smash his skull in by flicking him in the forehead. Looking him in the eye still made Sam feel a little better.

"Hi," Sam said warily.

Thor squinted at him, shifting from foot to foot.

"We talked yesterday," Sam reminded him when the silence got too long.

"Indeed," Thor boomed, as though startled at being caught hesitating. He puffed himself up, and Sam felt himself standing even straighter to match him and shifting his weight onto his toes. There was nowhere to escape in the small cell, but if Thor came in after him, he'd have to get the door open first—Sam assumed. "I shared my brother's woes with thee," Thor announced, "and I see I did so in error."

"I told you I wasn't him," Sam protested, struggling to keep his tone level and calm.

"I took a risk," Thor replied. "And as I hear tell, thou art held outlaw—thou lackst the honor to bind thee to thy word, and may well spread my brother's troubles to the four winds."

Sam blinked and ran Thor's words over in his head. He sat on the small cot and looked up at Thor. "Just because I've broken . . . some laws, doesn't mean I don't have personal honor."

"Fah!" Thor scoffed. "Thou defyest thy sworn liege and ask me to spare thy neck on thy weak word, dog?"

Sam stiffened and checked that the light on the cell's surveillance camera was still blinking. "Your allies wouldn't be happy if you killed me without their permission. And we don't have—I've never sworn 'fealty' to any 'liege'; we don't do that in this country."

Thor blanched. "A nation without oath or lordship?"

"It works on penalties and remuneration," Sam explained. "I mean—me and my brother, we have honor. We can keep secrets," though that depended on whose. "I'd be shocked if these people ever let me go, and if I did get out, the odds of us running into anyone who has a chance against your brother are—" pretty good actually— "negligible." Sam dug deep and pulled out his sincerest face.

Thor looked less thunderous, more stymied. He scratched the back of his neck a gesture that reminded Sam startlingly of Dean caught on the horns of a dilemma.

"You know S.H.I.E.L.D. wants me to lead them to my brother," Sam threw out. "I don't know how much luck I'll have with that."

"Loki is likely still with him," Thor said. "If he caught his fancy enough for him to concoct such an elaborate ruse."

Sam winced. "Yeah."

"If he were finished with this game, he would make it known," Thor mused, pacing in front of Sam's cell. "He always finds an audience when he wants one."

"I've got to ask you about that," Sam cut in. "You've seen him...play games, you've gotta know how they tend to play out."

Thor's eyebrows furled doubtfully.

"I mean, if S.H.I.E.L.D. walked in on him and did their government spook strike force thing—would that make things better or worse? Why's he doing this? What's he want?"

"My brother's motives—" Thor cut himself off and drummed his thumb against the bars. "I think—he is a riddle."

"I just want my brother to get out...okay," Sam said. "Free would be great, even though I doubt S.H.I.E.L.D. would just let him walk. But he's gotta be okay."

Thor bowed his head. "I say this as between lone travelers, without bonds or history—if thou wishest thy brother to be well—though it pains me mightily to say—my comrades had best confront my brother, ere his game begins to bore him."

Sam swallowed, fresh adrenaline flooding his system. "Thanks, Thor."

"You owe me nothing," Thor replied, and left the cell block.

Sam stood and looked the cell's camera in the eye, waving. "I'm ready to get back to work now."

Sleep deprivation set in by noon, when Sam got some funny looks when it turned out he'd been having a conversation with the day shift analyst assigned to him, an Agent Wills, that Agent Wills hadn't actually participated in. Sam hated when the crazy got subtle. Give him a knee-deep flood of blood and intestines, and he wouldn't miss a step, but when it got plausible—or, when gods got involved, when the implausible happened to be true—Sam would wonder for the hundredth time whether it was a net benefit to humanity for him to carry a gun.

Agent Wills had turned away from his computer terminal to stare at him and two of the escort team had drawn stun guns. "I'm sorry," Sam said, keeping his hands on his desk.

"Kieth, hit the vending machine and get the prisoner a Monster," Wills ordered a guard.

"No, no, that won't help," Sam interrupted. Stimulants were the opposite of helpful when this happened. "Let's just get back to the research, all right?"

Wills waved a hand for Kieth to stand down. Sam was positive he'd report his schizo moment. Let him.

He was starting to love working with the S.H.I.E.L.D. analysts. Voight had put out an APB last night reminding police departments to verify the credentials of any Federal agents showing up at crime scenes unannounced, in case Dean had been flashing his F.B.I. badge. S.H.I.E.L.D. data-mining programs easily adapted to search coroner's reports for unusual clusters of deaths. Both Wills and Voight had caught on to Sam's nebulous search criteria that sifted out what Dean called "our kind of crazy," as well as they could without the trivia bank Sam had accumulated from years of hitting dead end after dead end until he finally got a match for the latest supernatural threat. Get S.H.I.E.L.D. on board with ghost-busting, and humanity might be the safest it'd been since the Devil's Gate was first sealed. They even knew not to spill the beans to the public and cause mass panic.

Two hours after a fast-food lunch, they stopped—not because Sam had found Dean, but because breaking news from Reno, Nevada screamed trickster god so loud that S.H.I.E.L.D. didn't really need Sam's help after all. Loki had gotten bored.

Chapter Text

They grabbed Sam out of Analysis, slapped a Kevlar vest and some cuffs on him, jerked a black flannel bag over his head, and bundled him into the back seat of a large sedan with cushy shocks and a newer automatic transmission. The sedan spent about fifteen minutes in stop-and-go city traffic, zoomed up a freeway on-ramp and off again four minutes later down a two-hundred-and-seventy degree loop, climbed a long, gently curving highway, and stopped in a parking lot with two speed bumps at the entrance. Sam guessed they'd traveled about thirty-five miles from headquarters. As he was tugged from the car, he heard doors opening and slamming all around; apparently he'd come along with a caravan.

Someone whipped the bag off his head, and Sam blinked in the snow glare. There were six black cars filling the freshly plowed parking lot of a private airstrip, and around twenty heavily armed S.H.I.E.L.D. operatives swarming an anonymous jet that waited on the runway. Two of the men grabbed Sam by the elbows and escorted him up the ladder and into the warm cabin of the plane. Thor, a red-haired woman, and a couple of guys in less bulky gear occupied the plush forward compartment. Sam was escorted to a seat in the back, surrounded by the rank and file.

Judging by the thinly veiled hostility in the eyes of the operatives around him, none of them were in the mood for friendly conversation. Neither was he. He shut his eyes and did some breathing exercises, ignoring the man occupying the arm rest and blocking him from the aisle, until the plane taxied down the runway and leapt into the air.

It turned out that without Dean in the seat next to him furiously humming heavy metal to soothe his own in-flight panic attack, Sam was a bit of a nervous flier himself. He shut the window on the gleaming white plains flecked with dark pines that dropped steadily away below, and rolled the scar on his palm discretely against a corner of his handcuffs. A tiny nozzle in the lighting panel overhead was blowing air on his face to make him feel like the fuselage was wider and less claustrophobic than it really was, a tiny white lie for his caveman brain. He screwed it shut.

Sam jumped when the man beside him folded down to dig something out from under the seats, a steel-and-rubber laptop that looked sturdy enough to bludgeon a ghoul with. The man started it up and opened some kind of browser with a hideous user interface, probably something proprietary, then called up Google. He brought up a map of Reno, Nevada.

They were on a plane, and they had Internet. Sam raised an eyebrow.

"We have Loki to within ten miles of the city center," the operative announced. "We'd like a smaller grid than that, so now you're going to help us find your brother."

"Assuming Loki's still with him," Sam said, the insanity of the situation smacking him behind the eyes like a hangover. "What happened in Reno?"

The communications operative held up a hand at Sam and spoke into the air. "Sir, what am I cleared to tell the prisoner?" He was silent, watching the middle distance intently, and nodded after a while. "Yessir. Geophysicists detected an earthquake two hours ago; apparently it shouldn't have happened. All cell signals from within the city were blocked at the same time. We're still trying to get a hold of someone on the ground."

"But not having much luck," Sam concluded with a sigh. "We need some news from the city over the past two months, look for unexplained or unusual deaths. If Dean's in charge of where they're staying, he would've come for a hunt."

"A hunt. Right," said the operative speculatively. "Because you're vampire slayers. Analysis is already checking for vampires; we need to find Dean Winchester. That's your contribution."

Sam thought about the incident in Lakeville, the kindergarteners-turned-gremlins that he'd barely had the chance to investigate. He recalled past encounters with gods and trickster gods. No biggie, Sam, said a callous, illusory voice. It hummed. You know freedom's just some people talking. Dean's prison is walking through this world all alone—it's like he's already there.

Sam shook the voice out of his ear. "If you want to find Dean, your best chance is wherever he's holed up. Could be a motel, a cheap one. Bottom of the barrel cheap; he hates chains. Or he could be squatting; we like to squat in houses. Someplace safe to leave our gear out for a while, rooms, light. Check the model homes in housing developments, or places that are up for sale. On the ground, look for the car. If he's out on a case, it could be at the cop-shop, the morgue, or a library where public records are kept. Or it could be anywhere. It's probably a '72 Challenger, yellow, or he could've switched already; if he's switched, he'll pick something American, made between 1960 and 1980, any color but pink or baby blue, usually a sedan. If he's feeling nervous, he might go to a later model, maybe even an import, white."

"Got it," replied the communications operative. Sam slid the window blind back up and watched the screen out of the corner of his eye as the operative efficiently parsed through a selection of motels on Google Maps and began flicking through traffic camera stills in a scary-looking S.H.I.E.L.D. surveillance program. He lost interest when the plane began to cross the Rockies, and the landscape creased up in harsh white tree-flecked wilderness.

"I got a possible," the agent announced to the air, after an hour or two. Sam's knee bounced.

When they touched down an airstrip just north of the city, in the midst of a desert winter of greening sagebrush and patches of thin snow, a small fleet of County PD vehicles were waiting for them. A sheriff in a khaki uniform greeted Agent Coulson when they filed out of the little jet, his eyes wide and his lips tight.

"Once you enter city limits, keep the engines running, whatever you do," Sam heard. "The quake's just the tip of the iceberg. We can't get Reno PD out of the building, most people are still trapped in their homes… I don't even want to think about what that place'd do to a firearm. Radios are touch-and-go. I hope it's true your department is the one to call in on the weird shit, 'cause this is the definition right here."

"We're a highly adaptable team," Coulson replied, and that was the last Sam heard before he was herded into the middle seat of a blue and white SUV. Field operatives, two new and one the man with the computer who had sat beside him on the plane, surrounded him with their bulky Kevlar and holstered weapons. Sam hunched his shoulders forward and rested his elbows on his knees to make room. They sized each-other up before the driver climbed in: Sam was the biggest guy in the car, by at least three inches, and Sam's hands were cuffed in front where he might be able to try a punch or a grab, but the agents beside him were solid, armed, and doubtless highly trained, even the communications officer. Agent Coulson got into the front passenger seat. Sam didn't see any weak links.

The S.H.E.I.L.D. team started their engines with some concern, and caravanned toward the city through rolling scrub, passing a few glittering neon-decked casinos at the city border and detouring briefly into an emerald warren of suburbs. Even on the arterials, still on the tail of what should have been the morning rush hour, they were the only cars in motion. They passed a few wrecks—a sedan with its back crumpled against a brick house, across the street from a garage with the door torn off from the inside; a long row of cars parked parallel, crunched up bumper-to-bumper, alarms shrieking; black rubber marks on a driveway across the street from a house with a ten-foot hole in the living room. There were a few people on the street, not as many as Sam would expect in a supernatural crisis. Coulson motioned for the driver to stop, and they idled while Coulson rolled down his window to talk to the civilians. A tall man in a charcoal suit with a stern face drew near, while tight knots of what Sam assumed were families clustered around to listen in.

"We're from the D.O.D., S.H.I.E.L.D. division. I'm Agent Coulson," Coulson said before the civilians could get a word out. "We understand the city has suffered some unusual incidents and we're here to resolve the problem. Your first-hand accounts of such incidents would be helpful at this time."

The man in the suit rocked back a step, cowed. Another man, clutching a little round-faced girl in his arms, stepped forward. "Water's out, you know about that, right? Power's dead, too. Who—the—whoever it was, terrorists, I dunno, that's what you guys are here for, right? Somebody wired the front door to blow. Took me like fifty tries to get it open, and then it exploded. Guess we're all lucky whoever did it had the explosives pointed wrong so the door blew outward."

"Has anyone been injured?" Coulson asked.

"EMS is MIA," the man in the suit cut in. "Cell phones are down. Land lines are down."

"There's Jim Taylor, down that way," said the other man. The girl was hiding her face in his jacket now. "His truck doesn't have airbags, and he went right through… he's walking and talking. Didn't hit anybody, thank God."

"I'll have a field medic take a look at him," Coulson replied.

The operative with the laptop woke his machine up and tried to make contact with another car. He grimaced. "Coms are down, sir."

"Have group Delta leave a man anyway," Coulson replied, and the operative rolled down his window and flashed hand signals to the car behind them.

"Number 1049 has hot coffee pouring out the front door," said the guy with the daughter. "I kinda doubt they're doing that on purpose."

"Good to know," replied Coulson. "We're not certain yet to what extent utilities have been compromised, so we advise you not to attempt to use water or electricity until communications have been restored and we notify you that the problem has been resolved. Advise others to remain in their homes. Do not attempt to drive anywhere. We have reason to believe all vehicles within the city limits have been tampered with."

The dad paled and the man in the suit nodded grimly.

"Sit tight," Coulson said, rolling up his window. "We hope to have the situation resolved within the day." He waved two fingers at the driver, and they drove off. Well—the driver managed to get the car in gear on the fifth try, and they rabbited forward ten feet when he did, and then they drove off. The car behind them, after it let out the field medic, seemed to be having similar difficulties.

"Avoid shifting gear from now on," Coulson told the driver. "Anything mechanized is suspect. You're familiar with the term Belgian Mule?"

"Bites in the front, kicks in the back, burns in the middle," replied the operative on Sam's right, reciting an old saying about primitive muskets.

"Avoid discharging firearms and stun guns," Coulson told his team. "We're here to do what we can to neutralize Loki with the goal of minimizing civilian casualties. Nobody needs to lose limbs. We may not be able to do as much as we expected. Take any opportunity for reconnaissance. Any additional observations or suggestions before the rendezvous briefing?"

"Lee, Roberts, and Scander failed advanced hand signaling repeatedly," said the communications operative. The man on Sam's right glared at him across Sam's hunched back. "It's true," the communications operative protested.

"Winchester, you have anything to add?" Coulson asked.

Sam raised his eyebrows. "Uh. So, he can do a lot of damage. This is a very broad scale of attack, which might mean he's stretching his limits, but you can't bank on that. He could have performed a powerful spell with a wide range of effects, or interfering with thousands of objects at the same time might just be easy for him. If it's a spell, you can't sneak past it, but you can use loopholes if you figure out the pattern. If he's just doing it all brute force, he could change the game as soon as he knows we're on to him."

Coulson nodded. Sam wasn't sure how much credence he was going to get.

As they drove deeper into the city they saw more cars, more people wandering around outside looking lost. Sam spotted a middle-aged man fruitlessly banging on a glass storefront with a brick. The glass wasn't even cracked—which explained the lack of looting. A parking meter was bleeding change. An elaborate neon venue sign threw blue sparks, bright as an arc welder, over a sidewalk glittering with broken glass. The place was generally haywire. Sam wondered if it was a good thing that most people seemed to be trapped in their homes, or if that just meant there was carnage out of sight.

A fistfight broke out. Three men traded hard blows, and none of them seemed fazed.

They pulled in to a parking lot behind an old warehouse-turned-office building to join the vehicles that had arrived ahead of them. All the engines were still running. Thor was pacing back and forth in the lot, an operative in short sleeves bearing a compound bow and quiver of arrows across his back and a red-haired woman in a sleek black jumpsuit flanking him and herding him back toward the caravan whenever he strayed too near the streets. There was a mechanical whine that made Sam cringe in familiarity, and Iron Man—Iron Man—swooped out of the sky and hovered over the lot, balancing five feet off the ground on his levitation beams.

Tony freaking Stark was working with S.H.E.I.L.D. That was some kind of endorsement for the division—Sam wasn't sure if it meant they knew what they were doing or they were just really exciting to work with.

Someone had apparently told Stark about the problem with starting engines in the area, because he wasn't touching down. He flipped up his signature gold visor with an unseen command, and when Thor and the humans formed into a rough half-circle that Coulson got out of the SUV to address, everyone had to yell to be heard over the tiny, powerful engines.

There was a swift conference that Sam couldn't see much of. Sam's foot bounced uncontrollably. The operatives glared at him. Sam ducked his head and smiled his harmless smile, but they didn't seem to buy it.

The men in Kevlar scattered one way around the office building, the woman another, and the archer scaled the fire escape. Stark flicked down his visor like a knight riding to the joust, and Thor hefted a broad rectangular hammer, swung it into the air, and let it carry him skyward as he clung to its handle as though propelled solely by the momentum of his throw.

For all the vaunted sophistication of the smart weapons once produced by Stark Industries, Iron Man tended to leave a swath of destruction behind whenever he encountered a comparable opponent. There would be property damage. Rubble. Dust. Chaos. Thor didn't seem like the most subtle guy in the world either. Sam figured the motel Loki and Dean occupied sat somewhere within a bow-shot, but out of direct view.

Sam trusted Stark's commitment to minimizing human casualties and Thor's desperation to reconcile with his brother to keep Dean alive, and waited. The whine of Stark's engines rose and fell in the distance. Far away, a chorus of car alarms went off. The operative on Sam's right pulled a packet of peanuts out of his cargo pants and ripped it open.

"Again with the peanuts, Mark?" groaned the communications operative. He was clicking frustratedly on the laptop's touch-pad, trying to start up what Sam guessed was an audio feed, by the grainy microphone icon.

Mark shook a couple peanuts into his palm, rolled the plastic packet closed, and lipped the peanuts out of his hand with his head bowed. It made him look like a rodent. "I'm hungry," he said, chewing. He frowned when he swallowed and poked around his gums with his tongue.

"So," Sam said, watching as the men tensed. "What's the plan here? Your boss is out there somewhere, communications are down for the count, the car's burning gas—I mean, I'm a diversion at best, so—"

"No," interrupted the driver.

Sam frowned. "But you don't—"

"No. No, no, no-no, no. Operational secrets, prisoner. Just—"

A gleaming streak of red plummeted from the sky and gouged a massive crater into the asphalt nearby, flinging chunks of pavement high into the air like lava bombs. The Iron Man armor skidded away over the street, engines still firing, and eventually wobbled upright, like a drunk rising from a bathtub, and rose to disappear again over the crest of the office building. The operatives in the car simultaneously released their grips on their weapons, only to clutch them again when, with a boom and rumble of falling bricks, Thor's back punched a hole in the building. A section of masonry dented the SUV's hood, just a foot from the windscreen. Thor landed on the edge of Iron Man's crater and plowed his own hole in the street before rolling to his feet, spinning his hammer around on its cord and leaning forward suddenly. Instead of towing him into the sky, the hammer swung down like any ordinary weight on a string and hit him in the knee. He tried again, and stared mystified at the engraved steel head. After a third attempt, he roared at the sky and took off around the building on foot.

"Hang on," said the driver, and pulled a donut out of the parking lot to skid to a halt across the street, out of the demolition zone. The rest of the waiting fleet of blue-and-whites followed his example. "Looks like the big boys are having trouble. We could be here a while."

They watched the sky for falling man-gods. Mark unrolled his peanuts, shook a few into his palm, and munched on them. Unroll, reroll, munch. Unroll, reroll, munch. The repetitive crinkling was the kind of thing Dean might do if he wanted to provoke Sam into a wrestling match; it made Sam's teeth itch, and with his nerves already stretched to breaking with Dean at the mercy of an insane pagan god two blocks away, Sam was very close to smacking Mark and getting himself shot for the trouble.

"Could you make an exception and not do that for this one stakeout?" the communications operative demanded, glaring at Mark across Sam's back.

Mark stifled a glare and crunched on the peanuts he still had in his hand. "I did a ten-miler the other day, I'm hungry."

The communications operative poked at the audio icon with ever-increasing ferocity and muttered "whiner" under his breath. Sam wasn't sure if Mark had heard him or not, but Mark didn't react.

The driver tried the radio, but all the stations were static.

Mark unrolled his peanut packet after ten minutes of no further action, shook out more peanuts, and crinkled the plastic back up. The communications operative rolled his eyes. "Okay, that's weird," Mark said, staring down at the nuts in his palm instead of eating them.

"What?" asked the driver.

"I'm half a pack down and I'm still starving."

"Must be the ten-miler," dismissed the communications operative. He clicked on the audio icon again, and swore in Russian and Farsi as the desktop flooded with window after window of a black-and-green user interface displaying a wavy frequency line and a text box. Sound abruptly burst from the machine.

The feed was alive with EMF, sparking and hissing with pulsed noise that Sam itched to analyze, and clearly audible in the gaps between the bursts of static were screams. Not Dean's screams. These were strange—harsh, warbling, unstifled, as though for the joy of it, a mix of despair and aggression—rageful screams. He heard Dean's voice, a soft indecipherable murmur, and then his own name.

"That's Loki screaming," Sam said, nerves buzzing with tension as the communications operative fruitlessly Ctrl+F-4'd the windows of audio program as they multiplied. "Loki's disguised as me. Dean's with him, trying to calm him down."

"The bad guy gets you arrested, infiltrates your double act, sticks around for four days, and all he wants to do is play mind games?" the driver demanded.

Sam took a deep, slow breath. "Apparently." If Thor reminded Sam of Dean, maybe Dean reminded Loki of Thor, and while Freud had placed Mommy and Daddy issues at the root of all emotional wounds, in Sam's experience sibling conflict had a good shot for the title. Loki was role-playing with Dean—well, to Loki it was role-play; to Dean it was a brother who'd gone screaming and flailing off the deep end into psychosis.

Duplicate windows of the audio feed interface continued to mushroom onto the screen. The communications operative mashed Ctrl+Alt+Delete. Task Manager didn't appear, and the cooling fan began to whirr angrily.

The EMF spiked, obliterating the voices. When it died back again, Sam heard a clatter and an animal growl, and Dean yelling "Shit! Shit! Sammy, tone it down! Just whatever you're thinking—let me go, I can't help if you don't let me move! Aw, dammit, are you even seeing me?" Static poured back, died away. Dean spoke again, low and panicked, over breathy snarls from elsewhere in the room. "Sam. Sam, undo it. Just think about something else, stop it, come on, Sammy, please!"

The display screen blinked blue and then black as the laptop let out a defeated whine. The communications operative stabbed at the power button, but it refused to reboot.

The idling engine was the only sound in the car, and the space was close and humid. Sam shifted, tense almost to shaking, and found that his wrists were deeply bruised from straining against the handcuffs. Loki was playing with Dean; he was still having fun with him, and Dean could take it. Dean had taken the worst Sam could dish out, and the worst Hell could dish out, and he could take this. He'd be fine. Sam just had to get to him, or wait for Thor and Iron Man to draw Loki out, fighting through the catastrophe magnet that had once been Reno, the constant equipment failures, the . . . the cursed luck. Like the audio program on the laptop. Like opening doors in the suburbs.

Nothing, and then too much, Sam realized. That was the pattern, that was the rule that had been applied to the city. It was irony—Alanis Morisette irony, not the real kind. It was poetic.

"It's a slot machine," Sam announced, the epiphany bursting from his lips. "That's the curse; he turned the whole city into a slot machine, it all makes sense!"

The operatives stared at him, wary and bemused. Sam sighed and wished Dean were here. Preferably not in cuffs.

Mark unrolled and rerolled his peanuts a couple more times while they waited for something to happen. Maybe Coulson would stroll around the corner and wave them into the combat zone. Maybe Loki would peel Sam out of the SUV like a kid unwrapping a Butterfinger. Maybe the building would fall on them. Sam got a bad feeling, an overlooking feeling, as Mark dumped the last of the peanuts out into his hand, wadded the empty wrapper into a ball, and crunched on them. Mark coughed. His mouth twisted. "Uh," he said, tugging at the collar of his shirt.

Sam glanced over his shoulder at him, then stared. Mark was panting shallowly and his face looked puffy. He flailed stiffly with his arms and feet, and as Mark's breaths rasped and stopped altogether, his tactical jacket swelled drum-tight, and rolls of chin spilled out from under the high neck of his jacket collar, Sam realized that they'd just been sucked into a Roald Dahl novel.

"He's not breathing," Sam realized. The bewildered stares of the other operative tightened into combat-focus. The driver spun in his seat to pay at Mark's Kevlar vest, whose heavy nylon straps were strangling Mark like a python. Mark's face was red and his mouth worked silently. His eyes were wide and bloodshot.

"Let me," Sam snapped, undoing his seat belt. Even with his hands cuffed, he had better access than the driver. He forced himself to focus as he pawed at the unfamiliar equipment, releasing plastic snap buckles strained so tight they were practically locked. The front panel of Kevlar sprung free, bouncing on Mark's supernaturally induced beer gut. The jacket's zipper ran down the topline of a rigid dome; Sam reached under Mark's chin and tugged it down. Mark gasped as the jacket opened. His belly heaved with the breath, and his arms and legs stuck out rigidly, still encased in the unyielding fabric like sausages.

"Fuck," Mark gasped.

The communications operative hopped out of the car, leaving the door wide open. "Hang on, man, I'll cut you out of those."

"Fuck, how'm I supposed to pas the challenge course like this?" Mark groaned. His stun gun hung from the left side of his taut belt and his hand-gun from his right.

As the communications operative swung open Mark's door, tense with concern, Sam grabbed him by his vest and jerked him over Mark and into the foot-well in a powerful heave. He snatched at Sam's cuffs, but Sam simply overpowered him, twisted his wrists down, and buckled him to the middle seat by one of his vest's straps. He flailed in the cramped space, half-in and half-out of the car.

"Oh, you fucker," the driver hissed. Mark pawed at Sam, trying to get a grip on him with his arms squeezed straight, and the driver drew his stun gun, but Sam was out of the car and out of reach, sprinting for the scene of the battle with his hands clasped in front of him. Sam heard shots—he was surprised they'd managed to fire anything. He kept running.

Loki was a god, and by the sense of twisted justice underpinning the spell he'd put on the city, a trickster God. He's have no plans beyond playing mind games with Dean. Stop the mind games and he'd have no reason not to let Dean go—he might be pissed or come up with some symbolic punishment for Dean's supposed pathology, but a trickster's sense of fair play should be enough to give them both a faint chance of escape.

Shots chipped brick off the office building at the level of Sam's knees as he turned the corner and put his babysitters behind him. He might as well have run straight into Fallujah. The pagan god and the human wrecking ball that made up S.H.I.E.L.D.'s shock force had torn the street apart, casting chunks of brick and cinderblock far and wide, blowing out windows and downing telephone poles. As for the demolition team themselves, Sam didn't see them. He saw operatives in Kevlar scurrying around the rubble. Coulson, conspicuous by his calm demeanor and dust-coated black suit, was directing the shepherding of a gaggle of civilians through a Thor-sized hole in the wall of an apartment building.

Everyone looked a bit busy to bother with Sam. He ducked between two parked SUVs and scanned for the motel that had to be nearby. There was a parking garage towering into the skyline the next street over, a mirror-shining nameless block building, a row of charming facades with novelty shops at the street entrances, a convenience store with a slot machine squatting out front under the awning, and an L-shaped seventies cinder-block structure with four rows of balconies overlooking a small full parking lot. A sparking and dented neon sign crawling up one corner of the complex proclaimed it the Queen's Inn, and sported a little fan of playing card pips at the top. Bingo. The 1973 Barracuda in the lot, the oilslick mirage wrapping the top floor, and the Stark-Tech listening device suction-cupped to the window of room 403 were just gravy.

Sam was half-way across the street when he heard the roar of a large object exceeding terminal velocity on its way Earthward. He looked up and saw where the battle had moved.

Thor was plummeting uncontrolled toward the city, just a glittering dot of polished steel trailing scarlet cloth. As Sam watched, Iron Man swooped down from higher in the sky and ducked under him, engines whining at the strain of carrying the god. Thor rolled upright and knelt on Stark's armor's back, and as they picked up speed and elevation, Sam thought he saw Thor brandishing his hammer like a cowboy waving his hat. Before them waited a smoky cloud that snaked unnatural, still contrails out in rays toward the borders of the city. Green chain-lightening flashed as they disappeared into it, and Sam heard wild laughter in the distance.

Thor was keeping Loki busy. Good.

Sam bolted into the shadow of the Queen's Inn and hurled himself up the stairs, flight after flight. Two operatives blocked his path on the fourth floor, and Sam barely stopped himself from bouncing their heads off the wall. Probably wouldn't work, anyway, with everything from starting cars to eating peanuts being turned to a disastrous game of all-or-nothing. One of them made a lightening grab for the chain of his cuffs, but Sam yanked his hands aside. The men split to each side of the balcony, flanking him.

"Coulson sent me," Sam spat, jerking his head at the apartment the agent was busy evacuating. "I'm supposed to go in the room."

"Pull the other one," said an operative, tense for a fight.

Sam rocked onto the balls of his feet and rolled his shoulders, ready to give him one.

"Let him through," said a woman from behind him. Sam startled and turned sideways, trying to watch three people at once. It was the red-haired woman who'd accompanied Thor in the SUV. She looked rumpled, with a bruise on her chin, smoke blackening one side of her face, and chunks and shreds missing from the top layer of her black bodysuit.

The operative shifted, daring silent glances at each-other. Neither of them stopped Sam when he stormed past.

He stopped at 403, backed up to the rail, and kicked the door just at the sweet spot next to the latch. The door held strong, and Sam almost overbalanced when his foot bounced back. The oily distortion of Loki's magic was almost tangible, a sickly enticing taste on the air, a maddening scent. Loki's mimicry of Sam was screaming and raving inside the room, and Dean was muttering urgently in consolation or pleading—Sam couldn't tell. He kicked the door again and staggered back against the rail, then slammed it with his shoulder. He panted and pawed at the locked doorknob. The operatives and the woman were staring at him. He wasn't getting in. He had to think.

Kicking in the door would either fail or blast fragments of plywood into the room at supersonic speeds, by the rules of Reno, and he could tire himself out or injure himself before he got the jackpot.

The rule was that the outcome would massively exceed the effort applied, and the odds of success at each attempt were very low.

Sam laid his palms flat against the door and pushed firmly. Half a second later, he tried again. He built up an urgent rhythm, with a little chant in his head, push and maybe, push and this time, push and please. The red-haired woman has disappeared as silently as she had come, leaving the two operatives watching him dubiously. Below in the street, Agent Coulson had noticed him and was pointing a handful of operatives toward his position.

A soft hysterical laugh escaped him as he kept pushing again and again on the door, as fast as he could move. He couldn't stop. He was a rat in a skinner box, deep in the quagmire of sunk costs; any single attempt could be the one that forced the door open, and Dean was right there on the other side, pleading—oh, god—pleading for Sam to let him go, to stop.

"Sammy, no!" Dean bellowed suddenly, in a gap in the screaming. "Sam, please—we can work with this, please!"

Sam heard bootsteps on the stairs, and a quick conference between the operatives guarding the fourth floor. Sam got the impression that the woman's command authority was ad hoc rather than official. Whatever break she'd seen fit to grant him wouldn't last long.

He pushed frantically at the door, ignoring the snide whisper at his shoulder (that wasn't there, wasn't there) that he was just making shit up—that he was trying to play slots with laundromat tokens.

The door gave way, bouncing off the interior wall and rebounding in his face. Sam stumbled inside.

The air was choked with black smoke and golden light. The ceiling was smoldering, charred from wall to wall, with ragged heat-warped chunks curling down into the room. The bedside table was embedded into the opposite wall as though it had merged with it. As Sam crossed the threshold, a film of glowing gold gas parted around his face like cobwebs, briefly blinding him and leaving his hair standing on end. He could feel power clogging in his nostrils. If he opened his mouth he could drink it from the air.

He clamped his lips and swallowed spit.

He heard Dean gag from deeper in the maelstrom, and pushed further. A chunk of charcoal dropped from the ceiling and bounced against his hair. His shoes stuck to the carpet; he smelled blood and smoke and the tang of power.

He plowed through knot after knot of gold-lacy energy, his eyes stinging, until he spotted Dean, pinned to the hotel wall by twining gold-fire ropes, desperation as obvious as the arterial spray that dotted his face, as his infinite horror. His eyes fixed on another Sam, livid-pale, tense, hulking, with arcane symbols cut into his bare sides and his wrists slit down to the bone. A monster, a willing monster in pain.

"Dean!" Sam bellowed. The other Sam snapped his head around to face him. His eyes flashed black on gold—no demon Sam had ever seen, but a composite of the worst. He looked annoyed and feral. "That's a trickster!"

Dean met his eyes through the smoke and flare. Sam could see relief ripple through him. He raised an arm Sam hadn't known was free, drew a gun Sam hadn't known he held, and shot the monstrous Sam in the back of the head.

Wood chips cut into Sam's face. The other Sam stood, head half-shattered and illusory flesh fading to pine and paint—but still moving. It snapped its fingers and the taste of power went out of the air; the room un-burned, the smoke and flood vanished. Dean flopped to the floor, gasping. "You get arrested without me?" Dean panted, struggling to his feet.

Sam searched the room for an appropriate weapon—a stake for a trickster, but this was some kind of golem, not Loki in disguise. Machete. The weapons duffel was under the window. Sam dove for it.

Fiery ropes snagged him out of the air, green this time, digging and sawing at his skin as they pulled him to the ground. The wood automaton strode over and looked down at him, a strange wild sneer pulling at the carved features. "You are hardly such an obstacle as you suspect, mortal," it snarled, still in Sam's voice, but now with the god's diction.

A roar like a freight train shook the motel and Sam thought of tornado sirens in the Midwest, the chaos and ruin afterward. The ceiling punched open from the inside, plaster to rafters. The wooden Sam golem stared up at the hole. Sam decided that this was probably a real hole, not more of Loki's illusions, when the god himself descended through it, arms crossed and the cape of his black leather and bronze battle-armor fluttering around him. He wore a gleaming helmet with a crest of goat's horns, and a manic snarl. "Odin's blood, will no one stay where they are put," he spat. He gestured at the wooden Sam, which stilled and toppled over, its enchantment lost. "Dean, hello again. I fear I must be somewhat crude, now that your brother has interrupted what would have been a showy but humane little game."

Sam kicked against the phantom ropes. "Don't you touch him!" he roared, hearing Dean across the room yelling something similar. "Dean's got nothing to do with you!" Sam continued, fighting for air as the ropes shifted and began to twine around his throat. Looking up through the hole in the ceiling, Sam saw a red-fringed mote of gleaming steel—Thor, descending, maybe with Iron Man along with. "If you don't have the stones to face your own brother, you think screwing with mine is gonna change anything? Let him go and take a look at yourself!"

Loki smiled faintly—a shallow smile, the grin of a wild wolf with its guts spilling from its belly, all menace and desolation. "Did you just double-dog-dare me?" he asked indulgently, bending down to stroke Sam's hair with his fine pale fingers. "Simple mortals. I like my plan better."

He laid his palm on Sam's forehead, and for an earthly eternity, Sam's world went to Hell.

Chapter Text

The spider-armed smoke cloud that hovered at the center of the mortal city was born of no true storm, but of foul magic, acrid as the fumes of hot springs or decay. Thor's heart quailed to know that Loki could muster such forces, that he had held them coiled and quiescent beneath his skin and done so knowingly, willingly. He had known his brother had strayed, and heard the tales of horror from those trampled in his path, but to hear him laugh over his crimes and taste the vile energies he had stooped to harness, was worse than Thor could bear to imagine. He clung to a seam on the back of Tony Stark's enchanted armor, Mjolnir insensate in his hand. Stark spiraled over the black smoke, and Thor peered between its tendrils, tense to leap at the first glitter of gold.

It was their sixth pass.

When Thor had first joined the battle, he'd flung himself and Mjolnir into the sky, heedless of whether he were facing Loki himself or one of his brother's illusions, so eager was he for reunion—any reunion. Somewhat to his surprise, Loki was there in the flesh to block his strike with an upraised arm. Loki had grinned into his face, his eyes glittering as they always did whenever he'd started some blaze he wasn't quite certain he could put out, then licked his finger and smeared spittle on Mjolnir's head. With a look of triumph, he'd shaken off Thor's grip and kicked him in the stomach. Thor had dropped uncontrolled through thin Midgardian walls, and landed to find Mjolnir an unchanging weight, his mighty birthright hobbled and confused. Stark's flying machinery, save for that in his right glove, had escaped the curse upon the city, though his weapons had not, and he and Thor now fought in close partnership.

The writhing smoke parted for an instant, revealing Loki, beckoning. The Man of Iron swooped toward him, and when they'd gained enough speed, Thor flung himself down at his brother, bellowing his wrath.

Loki was but light and fancy under his hands. It was the first time this day he'd used that trick, and Thor had grown complacent. Thor cursed himself as he dropped through the illusion and into the choking dark vapor. He would drop, and the Man of Iron would wait for him to emerge from the bottom and catch him—wait not out of any distaste Stark held for the smoke, but because he claimed his helm's keen vision could not penetrate the haze. Thor wondered why the mortal always seemed astonished whenever his nascent wizardry failed some challenge.

Something soft but unexpectedly strong snatched Thor, binding his arms to his body and arresting his fall within the cloud. He struggled. No light reached him. When he tried to touch his attacker, he encountered a yielding sludge, coiling round and round, downy at its edges and steely at its core. The bonds tore under his strength, but as soon as they loosened, they renewed themselves, as strong as ever—smoke, animated, as absurd as the answer to a riddle.

He ran out of air. Forced to inhale, he felt the vapor blazing down his lungs, and blood spatter his tongue as he coughed. Worse than that, the coils of smoke had grown in girth and power, crushing the blood and air from his chest like a great serpent. They parted for Mjolnir—the dwarf-forged Uru was not quite muzzled—but Thor could barely swing his arm to wield it.

Something hard clanged against his boot and was gone. Startled, Thor let out a fearsome bellow. A whining drone accompanied the impact, and as it faded in the distance, then regained strength, Thor recognized the noise of the Man of Iron in flight. The coils of smoke weakened in the wake of the repulsors, then tightened again, as though in anger. Thor was pleased, warmed, even, that Tony Stark had braved the toxic vapors blind to locate him.

Stark rammed into him from behind and grabbed hold, but the cloud clutched Thor fast. "Fly on!" Thor grunted, seized by the clarity of battle. "Let thy armor's fiery train dispel the smoke!"

"You crazy?" Stark demanded. "At five feet, I'm running four-hundred degrees and fifty en-see-em-squared!"

"Spare your mortal caution!" Thor gasped back. "Now is for action!"

"Your funeral." Stark released him, and Thor panicked for a shameful instant, alone in the smoke. "I know a guy who makes blonde wigs; ask and I'll hook you up." Then the armor passed over Thor, twisting, catching him in a blast of heat and pressure. The strangling smoke dispelled like mist in the sun. Thor dropped, and passed with relief into the clean bright air below.

He stared up at the belly of the evil cloud, concerned for the Man of Iron; the smoke had an antipathy to the repulsors, but the repulsors were housed in the feet and hands of the fighting armor, leaving the main mass full vulnerable.

The armor burst from the cloud, looking well, so far as Thor could see. Thor rolled in midair, anxious that he not crush some mortal. To his surprise, he saw the fraying remnants of a whirlwind, slowing and flinging plaster and lumber from atop a low mortal building in whose roof a wide hole gaped. He spotted a gleam of green fire from within, and then a glimpse, just as Tony Stark caught him by the back of his jerkin, of Loki.

"Release me!" Thor bellowed as Tony Stark circled over the building. He reached back and gripped the armor's glove, making the mortal metals creak in warning. "Loki has some scheme a-work! I must confront him!"

"You tried confronting him," Stark said. "Hate to say it, but it's time to give Shield a try. A strike team's at the door and Barton's closing in; his normal arrows still hit things." Below, as they circled around the front of the building, Thor saw a band of Shield warriors at the balcony of the room Loki had entered, ramming the door with a steel pipe, and the hawk-eyed archer scaling the roof by a grapnel.

Thor contemplated striking him with Mjolnir, weakened though it was. Their circling had hidden Loki from his sight; he saw only carpet and rubble. "Shrink thou so from every battle?" he spat instead.

"Do you not have brick walls in Asgard?" Stark retorted nonsensically. He reported the sights his helmet revealed. "Okay, it's just three guys with him—no, two. Infrared says two. One's armed; they've both got this weird voodooey energy signature on 'em."

It would be dishonorable indeed for Loki to use hostages, but that had never stopped him from doing so in their quests of old. "Fly near, and let him taste my wrath!"

"Okay, he's doing something," Stark reported, distracted. "The guy on the ground—he's touching him—there's some kind of distortion—"

"Then drop me, that I may disrupt his workings! Loki will not fear death at my hands; release me and let this day be bloodless!"

Stark descended, the wind singing in Thor's ears. "Lemme kill some altitude or you'll go right through the floor. You can punch your brother and talk at the same time, right?" They swooped nearer and nearer to the hole. "Whoa. He's backing away. The guy's getting up, he's—" A horrid howl rose from the building. Thor gripped Stark's gauntlet that dangled him in the air. "—He's charging the guy with the gun," Stark reported, as Thor ripped himself free and dropped. As he fell, he heard Stark yelp, "Shit!"

Thor clipped the edge of the hole with his elbow as he plunged through, and landed kneeling. A small gun spun across the floor toward him, and he turned to its origin. Two men grappled, the upper one wreathed in mage-light, as Loki looked on. He met Thor's eye with a flinch and a smirk—the little sneak, he was making them fight. The winning man wore the cloth armored vest the Shield men favored, and as Thor watched, he let out another frantic, desperate scream—not wounded pride, as Thor might expect of one of Loki's pawns, but terror. "Loki, end this magic!" Thor bellowed, shocked.

"But of course," Loki assented. The mage-fire vanished, and instead of breaking free of his savage state, the screaming man lunged and latched hold of the other's throat, attempting to strangle him and pound his head against the floor.

Thor seized the man by the shoulders, prized his hands away, and flung him clear across the room. He rolled to his feet, his teeth bared and dark hair screening his streaming eyes, with the look of a captive a-frenzy with goading. His hands were chained. Thor recognized by his clothing and features Shield's prisoner Sam Winchester, though all the caution and concern that once marked him were effaced. Sam charged Loki wildly, manacles flashing, and Loki sidestepped and shoved him toward the other mortal, whom Sam attacked as furiously as before. Thor grabbed him again.

"End this magic, or by my Hammer, I will end you!" he demanded, holding the tall mortal fast by the shoulders as he clawed at the steel of Thor's jerkin.

"I doubt you'll end me by your hammer today," Loki tossed back. Thor released Sam Winchester and seized Loki by the breastplate. He heard a low bellow— "Sam, snap out of it!" —from behind him.

"Mind your pet," Loki grunted as Thor pinned him to the wall. Thor twisted, and saw the bewitched man strangling the other mortal with the chain of his manacles. In his distraction, Loki shoved him away with a strike that sent him tumbling end-over-end, using all the skill Thor remembered from their training and a passion that was new. Thor lunged toward him again, then changed direction and saved the mortals from each-other.

"Stark!" Thor bellowed.

"Sammy!" the mortal rasped, leaping up to tackle Thor, attempting to wrest Sam free from his restraining arm.

"Fear not!" Thor reproved him, ignoring his futile grappling. "Loki, whence comes this cruelty? 'Twas thou that once stopped me rending wings from wasps!"

Whatever reply Loki might have made was lost as the room's wall collapsed from the outside, the Man of Iron driving beams and plaster before him. Loki dodged. Warriors of Shield poured in through the breach, and Thor shoved Sam at the nearest two. "Mind this man!" he commanded. "I shall speak to Loki!"

"Speak. Right," Stark echoed. "You got two minutes."

Undistracted now, Thor cornered Loki and pinned against the wall again, lifting his brother-of-heart by his breastplate. Loki let his feet dangle, infuriatingly passive. "I know this man; he is stout of heart, and noble. Free him from this madness! Release him!"

"But I have," said Loki, looking over Thor's shoulder to watch Sam struggle with the mortals who held him.

"How canst thou toy with words while a good man screams like a dying beast?" Thor demanded, searching Loki's darting eyes for a counterpart to the misery in his own. "Loki, what driveth thee?"

Loki sneered at him. "What drives you, Thor? Not a mention of this city? Five thousand mortals brought to their knees—is my work so forgettable? Can you not count?"

Sam screamed again and broke free with heroic strength, drawing shouts of alarm from the Shield men. Thor heard scraping and banging, and a startled cry from the Man of Iron. "Little help!" Stark shouted. Thor chanced a glance behind him. Stark's enchanted armor was hovering, a measure of trickery to spare his flying machinery from the curse, and Sam had hooked the chain of his manacles around its neck to secure himself in place. His fingers scraped and clutched at the helm's visor, perilously close to discovering the catch, smearing the glossy paint with blood. In a sharp strike, he pounded the visor with his forehead. His teeth snapped audibly.

Thor shivered. In this strange madness, Sam Winchester had no care for his person or the strength of his opponent, but his every movement held lethal intent.

The woman in black, widow-of-none, answered Stark's call. Stark lifted Sam by the chain and dropped him to the ground; Natasha, swift and inescapable as the spider she was called for, leapt upon his back, snatched up his chain to rob him of his arms, and tangled her legs about his knee to topple him. Pinned on his belly, with one leg full flexed beneath the Widow's slight weight and his chain held fast behind his own neck, Sam struggled on, rolling and twisting his shoulders as if to draw her in reach of his bared bloody teeth. The mortal who seemed to know him knelt at his head, clutching one of his hands and grasping his face to force him to meet his eyes. Sam's ferocity was undimmed.

Thor turned back to Loki, whose lips were tight in stifled...something—mirth? Was that not always mirth, when Loki had looked so?—and eyes were over-wide. He looked as he always had when glorying in his own cunning. There was no fresh pain, no shame, no self-division, only Loki as Thor had always known him. Had thought he'd known him. Demands and reasoning and reprimand flashed half-formed through Thor's mind, but what passed his lips was a strangled "Why?"

"You ask," Loki hissed, "you bid me speak, but you never listen. Why should I tell you?"

A stern voice from above interrupted them: the archer Clint Barton, perched at the hole in the roof. "Fix reality or you get an arrow through the eye."

Thor tensed, caught between his comrades and his brother. Loki looked upward, unimpressed, and then the distant air he always assumed while story-telling dropped over him like a cloak. "Why, Thor?" he said, addressing the room at large. "Why? Because I want to see. Kill me, and the curse on the city of Reno will remain. Spread, even—I know not." He grabbed Thor's shoulder and shoved himself aside to look across, as though his feet were on the ground and Thor merely standing in his path. "Dean Winchester, brother of Sam—answer my question and save this human city."

All eyes, Thor's included, rested on the drab, stricken man attempting to comfort Sam as he writhed. He looked up at Loki—his face was ashen and fair-featured and heavy with the promise of death and agony. "Last guy messed with Sam died ugly," he snarled, his deep voice quaking with rage. "Guy before that, I know for a fact is still paying for it. Get out of his head and pray I don't track you down, you petty, twisted freak."

Loki smiled at him, in a way Thor cringed to see. "All that fills his mind was already there." A shock crossed Dean Winchester's face, then he rose. Sam yelled, deep, trailing off into a gurgle and the click of searching teeth. Dean opened his mouth when Sam fell silent, but Loki spoke first. "Dean, you paragon, you martyr, loyal beyond death. Tell me, that I may go—what more will you give your brother, now you have seen him, for the first time, in his natural state?"

Dean stared Loki down, the evidence of Loki's power lying fear-crazed and slavering behind him. Loki blinked very rapidly and swallowed, suddenly tense under Thor's hands. "You sonofabitch," Dean snarled to his face.

"Not an answer," said Loki steadily. His sharp gaze was fixed on the mortal.

Sam howled and struggled against his manacles again, and in the din that smothered speech, Thor watched Dean cast about the room—at the fighting men of Shield, at his brother prostrate, at the shape of a man lying against a wall—a wood-carven man as large as life, a curious object. When he faced Loki again, defiance curled his lip. Thor knew his answer before he spoke; by the moments he'd seen of Dean, he saw that he and the mortal were of a kind, and their shared honor would admit but one reply.

"Fine," Dean growled, cursing Loki with his eyes. "You win. I'm done. I'm done with him."

Or perhaps not.

Loki's breath hissed in, a faint noise of distress, but when Thor turned back to look, there was only triumph on his face. "If you do not listen, do you see?" Loki murmured, for Thor's ears alone. "Say it again!" he called to Dean. "Is your brotherhood so cheap, is your shame so slight?" Loki's eyes slitted. Spittle struck Thor's throat. "You would condemn him for a madman? You, who gave your soul, would leave him to those wolves who slaver for him still?"

"Yes!" Dean howled, over Sam's shrieking. "I give up, dammit! You hear me, freak? I give up, they can take him, I don't give a damn anymore!" He stood resolute. His shoulders trembled, but his sure gaze never wavered. Thor felt as though he'd watched the sun die just hours from dawn, such an abomination was this moment, this betrayal.

Loki smiled, vindicated and grim. "So you see love has limits," he announced. "Another time, Thor."

Thor gripped his breastplate harder—even skilled mages were hard-put to transport themselves if one had a sure grip on them—but after a last shuttered glance toward Sam, Loki faded from his grasp like ice in a fire, in a new traveling-magic the like he'd never seen, leaving Thor with nothing but a sickness in his heart and a whiff of the same stench that suffused the moving black cloud overhead.

Mjolnir grew light and animate in his hand; he bade it change its weight, feather-light to leaden and back again, and it responded as swiftly as it always had. The curse had lifted. Thor turned around, and saw that Sam's struggles had slowed, Loki choosing now to be merciful (or perhaps his attention was gone, or this was some new twist of his cruelty; Thor clung to the hope that he'd shown mercy, for the alternatives pained him too sore to dwell upon). Dean, Sam's brother who had betrayed him, knelt at his side to comfort him as though his heart were still unstained.

Thor knew discretion. As the Shield men converged on the brothers Winchester, as hawk-eyed Barton stowed his steel arrow and let himself down from the roof, as Tony Stark finally let his repulsors still and touched the ground again, and as Sam Winchester returned to reason, Thor let Sam be comforted, and said nothing.

Chapter Text

Sam had been in Hell for longer than a human could expect to live. Lucifer, whose prison he'd shared, had had a keen sense of timing, of drama, and many millennia to come to terms with the fact that in Hell, one could never run out of time. He liked a nice long lead-in before starting the hard and fast soul-shredding torment.

Loki had less patience.

Loki made Sam's memory skip right to the good parts.

"I'll do it!" Dean was roaring. "I give up, dammit! You hear me, freak? I give up, they can take him, I don't give a damn anymore!"

It could have been a thousand memories of lies, but this scene didn't match the cold, the tearing chains and artful hooks and twisting that had Sam fighting and gasping with an irrational fear that would never die. It was the wrong scene. Sam felt the fog lift and struggled for awareness. He was out of Hell, and he probably wasn't going back; he wasn't technically hallucinating; he was pressed face-down into the carpet, the chain of his handcuffs hooked over the back of his neck and one of his legs cranked back at the knee until his heel was on his ass. The panic was a surging tide. He bucked and panted. There was blood in his mouth. The chain dug in hard to the base of his skull as he planted his hands on the floor and shoved instinctively—he'd had a hundred hears to learn what chains meant; chains meant forever, chains meant intimate and undivided attention, chains meant there was no way to win, but it would always be worse if he didn't fight.

Sam fought.

"So you see, love has limits," said a cold voice—Loki. Sam tried to concentrate, but the chain was too tight and sharp on the back of his neck; any second and his captor would start playing his spine like a church organ. The memory was vivid and tactile. Sam screamed.

He heard men yelling and saw a flash of light through his eyelids. He cranked his head around to look for Dean; Dean was stumbling toward him, looking a little shaky, but generally all right. Thor leaned down over Dean's shoulder, white-faced and gaping at both of them. Sam wondered when he'd gotten there. He relaxed his arms and tried to unhook his cuffs from the back of his head. "Where'd he go?" he croaked.

"Zapped out," Dean replied.

Thor cast a look of bald horror at Dean's back, then examined the hole in the ceiling. "He took some hidden path of his."

"Well, crap," said a strange man, standing where Sam couldn't see.

Sam spat out the blood in his mouth. His tongue hurt. "I think I'm okay. Can I get up?"

"I dunno, you done being a reaver?" asked a second stranger.

"That was freakish and horrifying," added the first. His voice echoed faintly, like it was coming through speakers. "Thor, I dunno where you get off whining about how unnatural mortal technology is when your psycho brother just turns a guy into a rage zombie by poking him in the face.

"You mortals seldom understand what you do," Thor retorted.

"So Loki did that on purpose?"

Sam's mouth was full of blood again. He figured it was his own, and swallowed. "I'm really okay now."

"Let him up," ordered a third man. Agent Coulson. Whoever was pinning Sam to the ground let go and slid off his back.

His leg and the chain of his cuffs were released. Sam lurched to his feet. The red-haired woman in the black jumpsuit grabbed him by the elbow and helped steady him. Her head barely cleared his shoulder.

Sam looked around the room. The ceiling had been practically gone, last he'd noticed, but now the front wall was mostly gone, too. There was broken glass and scraps of wall-board covering the floor. Thor was pacing around the room, looking lost and punchy. Agent Coulson, the archer, and four operatives in Kevlar had invaded the place and were flanking Dean, and the Iron Man armor stood in the impromptu doorway. He tipped his faceplate back, and, yes, there was Tony Stark from the cover of Fortune.

Dean was still un-restrained, Sam noted. He asked Sam's question for him. "So what now?"

"Unless anyone figures out how to track him," Stark groused, "we wait for Loki to show himself again. I hate playing whack-a-mole with this guy. If we can't take the fight to him, it's all a big game on his end."

"Not even you can know another's mind," Thor growled.

Sam edged toward Dean, and Coulson's men raised their guns at him. Stark tensed, the armored suit whirring softly as it followed his movements. "Hey, Coulson, who are these guys?"

"S.H.E.I.L.D. business," Coulson replied. A smart phone started going off. Dean's phone buzzed in his pocket. The archer patted himself down, and the operatives looked relieved. Coulson pulled a smart-phone out of his breast pocket and checked his messages, holding up a hand to his men. "Your story about the extra-dimensional shape-shifting doppelgangers checks out," he said to Sam.

Dean gaped. "The hell you been telling these clowns, Sammy?"

"The truth," Coulson replied, cutting Sam's explanation off. "At least in part. Now, since both of you are considered dead and the FBI wants a piece of you, it would actually be less convenient for us to hold you for investigation for the many crimes you did commit than to overlook your presence and offer you each a permanent advisory position away from the public eye."

"A job," Dean summarized.

"What do you mean, our story checked out?" Sam demanded. "How did you—what kind of fact-checkers do you have?"

"The kind they need to go toe-to-toe with a guy like Loki," the archer answered him. "Meet the one branch of the government that occasionally takes a peek outside of its own colon."

Tony Stark snapped down the visor of his suit without moving a muscle, as far as Sam could tell, like it was wired into his brain. Agent Coulson winced subtly. There was a moment of quiet.

"The Winchester Brothers?" Stark barked after a moment. "You got me, you got Thor, you got . . . Natalie, but these psychos do not make the cut."

"Hey, what am I?" the archer interrupted.

"An asshole with a great resume. I am not working with people who would hire the Winchester Brothers."

"And yet you work with Thor," Sam interrupted. Thor looked betrayed and gripped his hammer tighter.

"What about Thor?" asked Coulson.

Sam bared his teeth. "Who's in charge of feeding your pet god?"

"I still don't know what you think you're talking about," Coulson said. "Stark, S.H.I.E.L.D. believes the Winchesters are—" He checked his smart-phone again. "Vigilantes removing threats that until now, law enforcement had no comprehension of."

Stark pointed an armored hand at Dean. "That one skinned somebody."

"She was a shapeshifter," Dean explained. "She was probably gonna moult in an hour or two, I pulled too hard, you know the drill."

"And that is the field of expertise that S.H.I.E.L.D. needs now," Coulson interrupted. "My superiors would appreciate an answer as soon as possible—so for new identities, operational support, and seventy-thousand a year before taxes in return for your services as paranormal research and field experts, what do you say?"

Sam felt his eyes bug out of his skull. He shared a numb, bewildered look with Dean, and felt them both reach the same inescapable conclusion at once. "I'm sorry, Agent," Sam said, "but if S.H.I.E.L.D. hasn't been infiltrated by the Leviathan yet, it's only a matter of time."

Dean slapped Sam on the shoulder and smiled grimly. "So it's not that we don't trust you, but we just don't trust you."

Coulson nodded. "Then at least take my card," he said, handing Sam a bland white and blue business card with the S.H.I.E.L.D. logo, but not the name, on it. "We'll let you go as a gesture of good faith."

They sped East on I-80 in a white 2002 Chevy Impala, Dean driving, Sam turning Agent Coulson's card over and over in his fingers as he stared out the window. Sam shifted and checked his face in the side mirror. Still him. A guy got paranoid after a couple body-swaps.

"What the hell was that?" Dean burst out, shattering the quiet of the sealed cabin and modern engine.

Sam looked up at him. "What, the Men In Black letting us go? The trickster holding a major city hostage and then just turning tail? The job offer?"

"The evil clone act," Dean ground out. "He spends three days pretending to go darkside—"

"You're okay?" Sam interrupted. "He didn't do anything—"

"What you saw's as bad as it got. I've had worse," Dean said, not exactly reassuring Sam. "Days messing with me. Trickster, I get it. Trying to teach me everyone has their limit, like I don't already—and then just when the show's heating up, when Carrie's walking into the prom, he switches out for Pinocchio? He hits your crazy switch, and then he just leaves?"

"His brother showed up to fight him," Sam said. "I guess that was more important than some game."

Dean chewed on his lip. "Hammer-dude?"

"Thor."

"Thought Loki was a giant or something—best buds with Odin, got invited to join his little pagan gang in the sky?"

Sam huffed, sardonic. "Yeah, he is, but according to Thor, Loki was adopted by Odin and didn't know that. Makes him the last person in the known universe to find out, and he's not taking it well. It's kind of a soap opera."

"Dad issues?"

"Brother issues."

Dean grunted.

"Dean, why'd he leave?" Sam asked.

"You best buddies with Thor now?" Dean deflected.

"I like the guy, but I'd never forgive him if I wound up on his dinner plate," Sam replied. "Come on. I can't really remember; I was having a flashback or something."

"Or something. You tried to rip out Iron Man's throat with your teeth. You head-butted a suit of armor. You tried to eat that Natalie chick, and not in the good way."

Sam rubbed the rising knot on his forehead, which throbbed worse now that he knew how he'd gotten it.

"Seriously, you good?" Dean asked. "Lucid?"

"I've had worse," Sam echoed. "Why'd he leave, man."

Dean fidgeted. Sam visualized his eyes as infrared lasers burning into the skin above Dean's right ear. "He kept pushing," Dean said after a while. "Kept upping the ante. First it was just—he had that look, like when I got back from Hell and you were blitzed to the eyeballs on demon go-juice."

"I had a look?" Sam winced.

"You had a look. He kept sneaking off. We were following demon-sign, and he'd disappear, come back with blood on his shirt. He got rough with the witnesses. And I did all the tests, man. But nothing came up, so I had to figure it was just you, maybe you went off the deep end or you had some stupid plan."

"I wouldn't," Sam protested.

"That's what you said until you decided to ride the devil down to Hell personally," Dean said. "Anyway. Fake-you, your temporary psychotic pagan god evil twin, he started getting all whiny and melodramatic. Now I was sure it was you. Asked me to kill him, said he was gonna turn evil. Well, the obvious solution was to stop pushing the demonic uppers, but when I pointed that out, he blew up at me and ran off. By this time we're in Reno. I go looking, the city gets all improbable, I come back, and he's gone full-on voodoo necromancer, blood all over the place, no way it's all his, sigils cut into his skin. Once you ran in and spilled the beans, it was pretty obvious he was trying to make me ditch you. So when he switched to messing your brains up . . . I washed my hands of you and sold you to the G-men."

Sam blinked. "Well, good thing the crazy wore off, I guess."

Dean grinned. "Hey, I lied."

"To—you know one of Loki's kennings is Liesmith?"

"Not like he's got a patent on it. Anyhow, once I told the MIBs they could stuff you in a padded room for the rest of your natural life for all I cared—can't believe he bought that." Dean grimaced. "But since his brother was right there . . ."

"He was putting on a show for Thor," Sam finished.

"I'd wondered why the big guy took it so bad."

Sam frowned. "Yeah, he would." He watched the dumb-bumps carved in the asphalt blur past, weeds turn to streaks of green and white, and white reflectors flash. "That coulda been us, man."

Dean snorted. "Sam, even when you're evil, you're the Diet Coke of evil. Tell you what, he comes after us again, you get to stake him. Be therapeutic."

"You're a crap therapist."

"Cause you keep blowing me off!"

Sam huffed. "Anyway. S.H.I.E.L.D. We getting rid of the card? The Black Helicopter thing sounds like a Leviathan's chum-slick."

"Save it for a rainy day," Dean ordered.

Sam stuck it grudgingly in his wallet. "It's always rainy," he muttered.

Dean shrugged, unrepentant, and played with the cruise control. "Hey, Sammy," he said after a while.

There was something in his tone. Sam looked at him warily.

"Never gonna give you up," Dean said, his voice light and sing-songy. "Never gonna let you down. Never gonna—"

"Are you Rick-Rolling me?" Sam demanded, horrified.

"Never gonna bring you down . . . desert you!"

"It's creepy!" Sam protested. "And it doesn't mean what you think it means!"

"Hey, Rick Astley's big with the geeks these days. Thought you'd appreciate it."

Sam pinched the bridge of his nose. "You really shouldn't be allowed on the Internet."

Dean shook his head in mock regret. "I was almost better off with Loki."

Sam ignored him.

"You're both total tsunderes."

"Please. Please shut up."

Dean cackled. The stolen car hummed over the freeway as they disappeared into the Rockies, into the empty snow.

The Man of Iron had no propriety and little honor, but he was an able partner in battle and his furnishings were beyond reproach. Thor reclined before a tall cracking fire that burned without wood, in the most comfortable padded chair he had ever sat in. The archer Clint sat opposite him in a similar chair, sipping at a chilled bottle of fine ale.

Thor wondered at the Midgardians' preoccupation with chilled drink. But his thoughts were snared in thornier matters. His limbs were cooled, now, from the day's weapons drills, and when his drills were done, and no mission came to hand, there was little light to occupy his mind.

The archer pulled a lever on the side of his chair, which unfolded nearly flat, like a bed. Truly Midgard had perfected the arts of sloth. Nonetheless, the archer's eyes, half-hooded, were ever watchful.

"What's going through your head?" Clint asked, swirling the dregs of his ale.

Thor opened his mouth and found his tongue hobbled, flinching—as though the act of speech was as frightful as lancing a boil or leaping unaided from some precipice into the sea. He tried again. "Loki did an evil thing," he said. It was as if the thought was new to him, so surprised he was at speaking it but once he heard the words, he knew them for his own.

Tony Stark, Thor thought, would have congratulated him on this revelation, or mocked him for his delay. Clint raised an eyebrow laconically. "What do you call what he normally does?" he asked.

"Tricks," Thor said, shock making his voice weak as a stripling's. "Tricks and testing. Probing our defenses for weakness, our words for lies, our minds for folly. But what he did to those brothers—"

"He crossed a line," the archer supplied.

Thor felt something swelling in his blood, like the heat of battle would, but cold and slick. Horror. "He drove the elder to betrayal!"

"Everyone snaps eventually," Clint said, doing nothing to warm the chill in Thor's heart.

"They did nothing to him!" Thor protested, rising from Tony Stark's opulent chair. The backs of his greaves caught on a seam of the leather. "He sought them out! Surely Loki knew the sons of Winchester for the monster-slayers they are and not the vermin your rulers take them for—"

"Yeah, the whole time, I'd been hoping for a chance to put a hole in one of those bastards," Clint admitted. "But what I mean is, maybe that's what Loki wanted to prove. Everyone snaps. He's trying to get you to give up."

"I will never give him up," Thor shot back, offended.

"Suit yourself," said Clint. "Personally, I'd love to see you guys be best buds; it'd make everyone's lives way easier. But sometimes, you just gotta let people go."

"Never," Thor protested. "I will never desert him, not in his time of madness. I will never let him go!" Thor kneaded the padded leather of his chair's back in his fists until the wood beneath creaked with the strain. A familiar bloodlust warmed him, and he stormed from the room to spend another session in Tony Stark's training arena. But as he walked a question troubled him—was it truly brotherhood to demand the return of one's own devotion from one who had no wish for such a bond?

Loki might have an answer, Thor supposed. But Loki was mad. And when he harmed the people of Midgard, Thor must needs strike him down.