Chapter 232: Thor, Looking Like an Absolute Fool
S.H.I.E.L.D. Facility, New Mexico.
"Name."
Thor said nothing.
"Age."
Nothing.
"Gender."
The agent across the table looked at the large blond man sitting in the interrogation chair and tried a different approach. "Look, you put six of our people on the ground. That's not amateur work. Someone trained you — where? Give me something to work with here."
Thor stared at the middle distance with the expression of a man who has lost everything and is sitting in a government facility in New Mexico and finds the contrast between those two facts so vast that conversation seems beside the point.
Rumlow leaned back in his chair, sized Thor up with the particular attention of someone who assesses threats professionally, then stood and circled behind him. He put a hand on Thor's shoulder.
"Relax," he said, close to the ear. "We'll find your family. We're good at finding people."
He walked out and let the door close behind him.
Thor's mouth curved, very slightly, with the specific contempt of someone who knows the person making the promise has no idea what they're dealing with. Find my family. He couldn't find his family. He'd been removed from his family. That was rather the whole problem.
The door opened again.
Thor looked up, expecting another agent.
Loki stood in the doorway, dressed in a suit that fit him with the precision of someone who had chosen it very deliberately, his face carrying none of the lightness that usually lived there. Something about him was different. Composed in a way that cost something.
"Loki." Thor straightened. "What are you doing here?"
"I had to see you," Loki said. He closed the door behind him.
"What's happened?" The unease was immediate. Loki's face didn't do this — this careful, weighted stillness.
A pause. Then: "Father is dead."
The room contracted.
Thor heard the words and heard them again inside his head, trying to make them mean something different, and they kept meaning the same thing. He was looking at Loki's face and Loki's face was holding the news like something heavy.
"What?" His voice came out wrong. "What did you—"
"He's gone, Thor."
The color left Thor's face in a way that had nothing to do with anything physical. He'd been exiled and stripped and humiliated and those things had been survivable, in theory, because somewhere at the end of them Odin had still been Odin — still there, still the fixed point around which everything oriented. And now Loki was sitting across from him in a room in New Mexico telling him that fixed point was gone.
Loki continued, his voice carrying a careful weight: "Everything that followed your exile — the strain of it — he couldn't carry it. I tried to explain, tried to argue your case. He wouldn't hear it."
Thor said nothing.
"The throne fell to me." Loki let that sit. "And the terms of peace — the armistice with the other realms — they include your exile as a condition. Permanent." He paused, and something in his voice shifted into something that almost sounded like regret. "Mother agreed to the terms."
Thor's hands were flat on the table. He was very still.
The word mother landed somewhere specific.
"I'm sorry," Loki said. "I fought for you. I want you to know that."
There was a silence that went on for a while.
Then Thor looked up. His eyes were dry but the effort of keeping them that way was visible. "No," he said quietly. "I'm the one who should be sorry. Thank you for coming." He exhaled. "I think you should go."
Loki held his expression for another moment — the portrait of a man delivering unbearable news with great reluctance — and then stood.
"Goodbye, brother," he said. "I'm truly sorry."
He turned and walked out.
The door closed.
In the corridor, where no one could see him, Loki's expression did something entirely different.
He didn't question a single word.
He'd been prepared for pushback. For Thor's instinct to argue, to test the story, to find the seams. There were seams — the timeline was slightly off, the armistice terms were vaguer than Thor would normally accept, and someone sufficiently motivated could have pulled at several threads and unraveled the whole thing in under a minute.
Thor hadn't pulled at anything.
He'd just absorbed it.
Loki walked through the facility using the same illusion that had gotten him in, invisible to cameras and personnel alike, emerging into the open air outside with the light step of a man who has solved a significant problem.
He went directly to the hammer.
The research teams were cataloguing it with the focused energy of people who have found something they don't understand and intend to understand it very thoroughly. None of them registered Loki's presence. He stood over Mjolnir, looked at it, reached down, and lifted — or tried to.
His arms were fully engaged. The hammer did not move.
Not even slightly.
Loki straightened. Looked up at the sky for a moment, privately, with the expression of someone receiving information they already knew and had hoped to be wrong about.
He accepted it. Turned to go.
"Looking for something?"
Loki turned.
Kaito Kumon was leaning against the facility wall with his arms crossed and his expression conveying the mild satisfaction of someone who has been watching a performance and found it adequate. He had, apparently, followed Loki through the dimensional gate. Or arrived separately. With Kaito, the distinction was sometimes academic.
"How," Loki said, "are you seeing through the illusion."
Kaito tilted his head. "I've spent a lot of time around people who do that." He glanced at the hammer, then back at Loki. "Still want it?"
"It's irrelevant," Loki said, with the precision of someone who has decided that the thing they cannot have is irrelevant.
"If you say so." Kaito pushed off the wall. "Your brother looked terrible, by the way. What did you tell him?"
"What was necessary."
Kaito considered this. "He believed you."
"He always does," Loki said. Something in his voice that wasn't quite satisfaction and wasn't quite guilt and occupied the uncomfortable space between them.
Kaito fell into step beside him. "You know," he said, "I've been thinking. The Tablet I picked up—"
"That's mine," Loki said.
"You weren't using it."
"I wasn't—" Loki stopped. "We will discuss this."
"Whenever you're ready," Kaito said pleasantly.
They walked.
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