Avengers Tower
August, 2011
He hadn't expected her to agree so easily.
Loki followed Darcy into her disastrous office, raising an eyebrow at the scribbled notes and reminders that covered the walls. See LJ @3. Trending #avengersneedtopay #avengersareheroes #avengerssavedmylife. State Dept pc Sunday: BE THERE .
"What is that symbol of the four lines crossing?" he asked.
Darcy glanced at the window. "Um–it's called either a pound sign or a hashtag. It can stand as shorthand for the word "number" but on social media you put it before a tag. So like people will write "hashtag tswift1989" when they go to a Taylor Swift concert. I track the trending hashtags that refer to us."
"And what is this… social media?"
Darcy flopped into a blue rotating chair behind the desk. "Oh, boy. Okay. Are you gonna awkwardly stand there while I talk?"
Loki looked down and realized how imbalanced their conversation would be if he remained at his full height. Irritated with himself, he pulled forward a static chair from the corner and settled into it. He should've noticed that on his own.
Darcy Lewis was a distraction.
"Social media's like online platforms for people to meet and talk and interact," Darcy said. "There's tons of them but the most popular are Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram… I should probably mention Pinterest and Tumblr, too. Oh, and Vine. Each of them kind of has a different focus or specialty."
Loki watched her face as she talked. It was animated, lively, but he also suspected that Miss Lewis was mimicking a pattern of behavior to make her sound interested rather than actually feeling engaged by the topic. She was skilled, though; he would allow for that.
"Mmm," he said noncommittally.
Darcy set her phone on a shiny black box to the side of her computer. The phone's screen lit up with a symbol like a dramatically oversimplified lightning bolt. "What else do you wanna know?"
"I understand that Midgard has no centralized government," Loki said.
"Nope. Couple hundred disparate countries. You want to know about the power balance, right?"
"How did you guess?" Loki asked suspiciously.
Darcy laughed. "Wasn't hard. You're a politician and a master strategist. It's the first question I would ask."
Impressive.
"You are correct," Loki admitted.
"I know," she said. "Here." Fingers flying, Darcy manipulated the computer. Loki watched with interest as she used its touch-sensitive solid interface and a series of commands and search boxes to navigate the "Internet". He had not had much opportunity to practice using Midgardian technology, which was so different from Asgard's that it was almost incomprehensible to him, and this was a valuable lesson.
"Bingo." Dary zoomed in on a cartoon map. "Kay. So this area's called Europe. There's a ton of countries in there but the most powerful economically and militarily are France, Germany, and England. There's Spain, up here are the Scandinavian countries, down this way you have Turkey, Greece, Italy, Croatia, and a bunch of others.
"Over to the east more, this is Russia. It's a huge country mostly famous for their epic failure with communism in the last century. They disagree with the US, which is this country over here–the one we're in. The US is more or less the most powerful country on the planet, although it's been on a bit of a decline lately but that's a whole different topic I'm not gonna cover, and anyway the US and Russia hated each other's guts for like seventy years. They're at least not waving nukes in each other's faces anymore but you can bet both of them still have missile silos aimed at the other.
"Down here, Central or Latin America's a bunch of countries mostly speaking localized variants of Spanish because Spain colonized the entire area like four or five hundred years ago. Politically, they're not super influential, but economically a ton of the world's goods come from this area.
"South America's this whole continent. Big parts of it speak Spanish also, or Portuguese, which is similar. It's pretty rocky. I don't know as much about South American politics, except that the Brazilian and Chilean ambassadors to the UN are awesome public speakers, so you're gonna have to do independent research there if you're interested.
"In the far east of the map, you have Japan, China, India, the Philippines, Indonesia, Australia. Asia has its own very complicated set of politics… You know what? I don't have time to go into that. Here." Darcy stood abruptly and pulled six books down off the top shelf above her desk. "These'll give you a pretty good breakdown of the last three hundred years of our history. That one is Asian stuff, China and Japan and India and European imperialism in the area. One on Russia and communism and the Berlin Wall and stuff, one on the American founding, this talks about African history, one on European history, and this last doorstopper covers South and Latin American history pretty well. Good?"
Loki paused, mind spinning. She had certainly given him a lot to process, talking like one of the rapid-fire turrets stationed around Asgard's borders for defense from an invading force. Midgard's power structures were much more complex than he had previously suspected.
"That will be… satisfactory," he said at last. "I appreciate your help." He accepted the stack of books from Darcy.
She tapped the top one in the stack. "Rules for borrowing my books: Don't lose them, don't stain them, don't dog-ear the pages, and you can write notes in the margins as long as you keep it fairly simple and don't obscure any of the text. Capiche?"
"I accept these conditions," Loki said, amused. What, precisely, did she think she could do to him if he were to disfigure one of the books?
Though he would be loathe to do so. Loki had been taught from a young age to revere the written word.
Mother -
He pushed the thought away. She was not his mother.
Darcy hesitated, eyes flicking over Loki's face.
"If you want…" she said slowly. "You could stay here. So you can ask questions while you read."
"I would not wish to impose, or hinder your work," Loki said.
"I wouldn't have offered if I wasn't prepared for you to accept," Darcy said tartly. "Stay or go, makes no difference to me."
He did not believe her.
"I shall stay, then. Thank you," Loki said. Gratitude felt odd on his tongue after so many years refusing to express such sentiment to anyone.
Darcy nodded once and turned back to her computer, but even though she immediately began to enter text into a digital document, he knew her attention was on him.
Smiling faintly, Loki settled back in his chair and opened the book on the top of the stack.
Avengers Tower
August 2011
"We have no way to calculate the quantum displacement," Bruce argued. "Electron trace mapping will never work."
"It would work if we could get the de Leyer formula fixed," Tony countered.
Bruce shook his head. "It's a fantasy. De Leyer's formula's missing way too many pieces."
"If only he hadn't gone nuts before he finished the thing," Tony said irritably.
Bruce shot his (colleague? teammate?) friend a look. Tony was doing better, marginally, but Bruce still had a sneaking suspicion that it wouldn't take much to send Tony into a tailspin. The more they stalled out on the scepter, the grouchier Tony got.
"You do know it was cocaine, right? Not insanity," Bruce said.
"Damn the Dutch and their coffeehouses. Pepper found me in one of those one time," Tony said absently. "Apparently I shouted something about llamas on waterslides and hit her in the face with a syrup waffle."
"Why am I not surprised," Bruce muttered. This was a good sign. Tony could at least talk about Pepper without having a meltdown. Improvement.
They lapsed into silence as the elevator dropped down to their private lab floor. Jane was sleeping (Darcy had discovered that Jane had been up for thirty-four hours and force-marched the astrophysicist up to bed) so Tony and Bruce had the space to themselves at the moment.
The elevator slid to a stop. Bruce stepped out and frowned. "What if we-"
He broke off very abruptly.
Bruce's pulse tripped and accelerated. He very deliberately sucked in a deep breath. "Tony."
"Wh-" Tony's eyes fell on the table by the windows and he froze.
Natasha hopped down off the counter. "Hey, Tony. Miss me?"
"Get away from the window," Tony snapped, glancing outside. "JARVIS, gimme a tint to that glass. What are you doing here?"
"Fury's after you," Bruce said as the windows slowly darkened. "He came to see us a few weeks ago–if he finds out you're here…"
"We didn't have a choice." Now that Bruce was closer, he saw that Natasha was as tense as he'd ever seen her–more so even than when he arrived at New York in the middle of the battle, and the Avengers were outgunned and outnumbered in the middle of a half-wrecked city.
"We?" Tony asked.
Movement to the left made Bruce whip around.
A tall man with haunted eyes and a guarded face stepped out from behind the shadows of one of Jane's massive pieces of machinery. He held up his left arm, a mobile prosthesis of gleaming silver far beyond anything Bruce had ever seen, marred by a massive gouge to the posterior surface of the bicep. It spat a lazy spark.
"I can't fix it myself," the man said quietly.
Tony was the first to speak. "You're the Winter Soldier."
The man nodded once.
Bruce glanced at Natasha.
She nodded once.
The exchange didn't escape Tony or the impossibly dangerous (but interesting) person standing in their lab.
Tony heaved a sigh. "If you're not going to kill me for having seen you here."
"I wouldn't," Natasha said.
"Not even for him?" Bruce asked.
She didn't respond.
"Good thing I don't plan to put you in danger, then," Tony said to the Soldier, and grabbed a pair of rubber gloves. "Is it causing you pain?"
"Some," the Soldier said. "It was damaged in Moscow."
"When you trounced the combined security of half the Ministers of the Russian government and vanished with a room full of mysteriously dead men behind?" Bruce asked, a touch of sarcasm coloring his voice. True, Natasha was part of the team, but she had walked away. Vanished. And only returned when she didn't have anywhere else to go. Bruce was settling into the first place that had felt like home in years, and now here was this new problem threatening the fragile equilibrium he had made. He knew exactly what the consequences would be for all of them if this was discovered.
Natasha looked away.
"We need to bring the rest of the team in on this," Bruce said. "You can't just unilaterally decide to harbor a wanted criminal. Two wanted criminals. Loki was a group decision."
Natasha flinched. " Loki ?"
"We'll explain later," Bruce said.
"Long story short, I'm apparently running a halfway house for supercriminals," Tony said, but he didn't seem upset about that fact. "Here–"
He grabbed a length of grayish canvas from a nearby worktable (Tony's section of the lab was a disorganized mess, much like his mind) and sliced it down the middle until he had a long chunk of fabric. Bruce had to admire the man's ingenuity as he deftly fashioned a usable sling out of the canvas and tied the Soldier's arm up to his ribcage.
"What do you think, doc?" Tony asked, gesturing.
Bruce stepped closer and bent down a bit, examining the elbow angle and the security of the sling. "Hard to tell, since this isn't exactly… normal human anatomy," he said. "But it should be fine."
"Excellent." Tony grinned in a way that said he was strongly looking forward to the chaos this was about to cause. "Time to face the music."