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“Um, excuse me, villain-of-the-week, Clint’s the only one who’s allowed to have a bird theme here. Only one lame person is invited to the party, social etiquette 1-0-1.”
“What would you know about parties, Stark? Don’t you spend most of yours getting black-out drunk? Also, fuck you.”
“Language.”
“I just said ‘only one lame person invited’! What part of that is so hard to underst- AGH!”
“Bird strike?”
“Fuck you, Katniss.”
“Language.”
“Fuck thee, Katniss.”
“You wish.”
The Captain just sighed over the comms, and Loki didn’t resist the urge to roll his eyes at the team’s antics. Was it anything new? No. Was it annoying? Yes. Was it slightly amusing to listen to? …A more reluctant yes. The day Barton and Stark stopped bickering would be a warm day in Jotunheim.
Keeping their continued conversation in the back of his mind, the Prince of Asgard sent small blasts of magic to the bird-like robots that were currently attacking the city. Honestly, mortals could be so odd sometimes; why in the nine realms would one squander their obviously above-idiot intelligence on building bots to try and take over one singular city? What’s the plan?
Even if you do somehow manage to defeat the Avengers (which, after the Invasion, should already seem a fruitless endeavor to anyone with a functioning brain), you’d need to take out S.H.I.E.L.D and take complete control over the government, and then… make every domesticated fish wear a little hat as a legal requirement? Loki would bet that most of these wanna-be’s hadn’t a clue as to an actual motivation for their crimes.
Then, of course, you had the criminally insane and the ones that just wanted money or something like that, but, honestly, just rob a bank or something. Interestingly, though, a noticeable amount of recent villain attacks had been specifically aimed at Loki himself; revenge and all that. Despite it now being over half a year since it was proven that he’d been mind-controlled at the time, they still occasionally tried to get back at him by… doing almost the exact thing he had done. Hey, nobody claimed that midgardians were particularly bright, except for midgardians themselves, naturally.
Zoning out from the fight almost ended up a fatal mistake when a bot came down from straight above him, almost taking his head off if he hadn’t noticed it at the last moment. By this time in the fight, the god was already beginning to tire, but he ignored the weight pulling down on his muscles.
After almost five months now on the Avengers team, three of which were full-time, he had started to get used to the ins and outs of fighting with them, and Loki would even go so far as to claim that they worked pretty well together. He might even consider them good acquaintances, though he wouldn’t want to get ahead of himself. Thor wasn’t there currently, which didn’t bother him, really, not at all, but when he was there it seemed like even their relationship had improved. Banner and the Hulk were a bit of a touchy subject, but considering they weren’t present in this battle, there was no reason to think about them currently.
Lost in his thoughts as he was, he still noticed one particular birdbot (Stark’s idea, not his) that seemed different from the rest. It was smaller, for one, at maybe only a one to two foot wingspan, and it was more discreetly designed, with gray metal instead of the green that he had now grown accustomed to. This, naturally, set of immediate alarms in his head, especially considering he seemed to have been the only one to see it, with Barton too far away, the Captain busy with a large host of bots, and the Widow and Stark currently focused on a frontal attack on the scientist-villain-possible-other-occupation-as-well.
Blasting himself a path through the bots swarming around him, he went to follow the one that had caught his eye, letting his gut feeling dictate his movements. It was the Captain’s voice coming at him through his earpiece that might have saved his life a few moments later.
“Loki, what are you doing?” He didn’t sound angry or distrusting, which would always come as a surprise to the god of mischief, considering there were not many people that he had ever met that hadn’t spoken to him with one (or both) of those tones in their voice. The Captain just seemed genuinely confused and curious.
“I… believe that I saw something odd. I have a bad feeling about it, so I’m going to investigate.” He slowed his pace a bit, his eyes never leaving the birdbot as it flew through a window into a building, just in case the Captain ordered him to back off it and get back to the main fight.
“Okay, just stay safe and keep us in the loop.” And that was it; no interrogation, no frustration at his vague statement, nothing. Well, it was almost it.
“What he said, Reindeer Games! Don’t stay away too long, though, or Clint might fall off a building again.”
“That was one time, Stark. ONE. TIME.” Just like that, the two were at it again.
His slower pace was what allowed him to have the villain within eyesight when he went to enter the building after the bird, and what also allowed him to put together the pieces in his mind when the bird deposited something at the base of one of the ground floor pillars and the villain took something small and square from his pocket. Despite the discrete look at the bird’s ‘delivery,’ it wouldn’t take a genius to recognise it for what it was; a bomb.
In a fraction of a second, Loki’s mind had taken in all the information and he reacted, surrounding the small contraption with a magical containment field right before the villain set it off with a bang. The god of mischief felt it like an intense blow to his sternum when the bomb went off, pushing against his containment field in a way that would have easily eviscerated most earthen materials. The field expanded slightly, giving way just a bit before he could regain his hold over it but keeping its stability as the pressure within it grew and grew even though the initial blast was over.
Now, he would have, with slight difficulty, removed it from the building and let the pressure out far over the city, had it now been for the fact that, with the intense expanding of the containment field, the pillar that the bomb had been attached to became unstable. How did he know this, you may ask? Well, it probably came to his awareness when the pillar snapped in two and the whole building gave a very unsettling creak, the other pillars in the room also starting to crack. Gods, midgardians and their shoddy architecture.
So now he was holding in an explosion with one hand and holding up a building with the other. Great, just great. At that moment, something must have happened outside, because a tremor went through the building, and it fell in on itself just a teensie bit more. Loki could feel the shifting of the materials as he shouldered them with his magic. He didn’t even notice himself cry out, but he must have, considering the group’s immediate blowing up of the comm system.
“Лисичка?”
“Loki, is everything alright?”
“You good, Reindeer Games?”
Loki tried not to grimace through the effort he was putting out, sweat rolling down his face as his muscles trembled and his magic begged for him to stop gripping on to it as tightly as he was. “Yeah,” he gasped, “Everything’s wonderful. If someone could stop this building from falling on me, though, that would be much appreciated.”
“On my way,” came the immediate response of the Captain, as well as agreement from the others. It seemed like they were still talking, but Loki had to tune them out as he put all of his focus towards keeping his magic (and everything else) steady. He tried deep breaths, but they probably came out more like a fish on land gasping for lack of water, and he didn’t even notice the other Avengers rush into the building until Stark was in front of him, trying to get his attention.
“Loki, what do you need us to do?” he asked, when the genius noticed that he had finally gotten the god’s focus.
“Stabilize… pillar,” was all that the latter managed to get out, and he hoped that the others would be able to recognise that the one he meant was the one that was glowing green and also had most of it laying on the ground. Some amount of time later, they must have achieved this, considering the load of the building was lifted from him almost entirely. With a last burst of strength, he sent all of his energy towards the containment field and shooting it out of a now broken window, as high as he could get it.
Then, he let it go, and he could barely hear the following explosion of released pressure over the gasping of his breath and the relief rushing in his ears.
“Loki, Loki, hey dude, you okay?” Barton’s voice cut through the other noises, and Loki managed a brief nod.
“Yes,” he replied, still breathing heavily, his hands on his knees, “I’ll be fine. Just give me a moment… to catch my breath.”
They didn’t seem convinced by his statement, which was valid considering he wasn’t being completely truthful, but they let it slide, for which he was grateful.
The Captain, naturally, was the first to speak up. “While you were here, we took out the villain and the rest of his bots, so no need to worry about those.”
Stark also joined in. “Yeah and hey, good job on noticing and taking care of the bomb. I would have done it, of course, but I didn’t even notice anything until that guy took out his remote.”
“None of us did,” said Barton, nodding.
“Anytime,” Loki responded, waving it away. By this point, he could stand up almost completely straight, and his lungs didn’t feel like they were being crushed by a bilgesnipe anymore.
“Are you feeling well enough to head back to the quinjet?” asked the Widow, concern in her voice. Damn those spies for being so observant.
Loki scoffed through his fatigue and rolled his eyes. “Obviously. Now let us get the next few hours of debriefing over with.
This shared sentiment thankfully had everyone nodding in agreement and sparked more conversation as they started to make their way to the jet, which Loki tried to follow as best he could through the bone-deep exhaustion weighing down his every step. As amazing and effortless as he made it seem, using magic could actually be a very draining affair, especially after a performance such as that a few minutes ago.
What many failed to understand in this regard was the fact that his magic was a part of him, woven into every fiber of his being, and which he was able to control and bend to his will. It was like a particularly fancy muscle, and just like with any muscle, strain was a very real possibility. After using it a large amount, he also found it harder to continue afterwards, even with something as simple as, say, knocking a glass off a table, just like how a person might not be able to run again for a while after a marathon. There was, naturally, much more to it, the whole study and works of magic being as fascinating as they were complex, but that was the general idea of what using magic might be like.
This meant, of course, a grueling trek back to the quinjet. Loki did his best to invest in the post-battle conversation, ignoring the headache building behind his eyes, but after a while, his occasional remarks fell off into uninterested humming. Even that stopped as they neared the quinjet and Loki was overwhelmed by a bout of lightheadedness, which, coupled with his fatigue, caused him to stumble, and the Captain’s large hand catching him around his bicep was the only thing that stopped him from ending up on the pavement.
“Are you sure you’re okay, Loki? That was a lot back there,” he questioned, the worry he was obviously feeling still an unexplainable enigma in the god’s mind.
In an attempt to save face, he shrugged the hand off and replied with a semi-casual-totally-not-about-to-pass-out, “I’m perfectly alright, thank you, Captain. I merely stumbled and apologize for the undue worry.” The norns must really have had it out for him, though, because just as he went to continue on, the sudden movement sent another wave of dizziness over him, and he would have most likely been knocked to the ground by it, had Stark not caught him this time.
“Alright my ass, princy. You look like you’re actually about to die.”
And maybe it was some deep, buried part of his self, but laying there, being supported by people who genuinely seemed concerned about his well-being, Loki let himself give in to the overpowering temptation of sweet unconsciousness. Not before a mumbled, “Already did that, thanks,” though.
It was only hours later when he awoke from his slumber, aching, wrapped in a blanket and laying on a couch in the Avenger’s common room. The sheer oddness of the situation made it take a few moments before everything could process correctly, though that could also have been due to the still-powerful exhaustion weighing down his body and mind.
He didn’t even notice that the Captain was there until he spoke up with a soft, “Gave us quite a fright back there, kid. Don’t worry, Nick allowed us to do the debrief tomorrow instead of today, so you just rest now, okay?”
And, to the sounds of Roger's pencil scratching on paper, Stark’s coffee machine in the kitchen, Clint’s tv show, and Banner and Romanoff’s quiet discussion in the background, Loki did.