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.