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Stephen Strange had pretty much given up keeping Loki out of the Sanctum. As quickly as he’d dispatched the alien magic user during their first encounter, Loki had been nowhere near his best, as made abundantly clear to Stephen the first time Loki broke in.
By the time Stephen noticed him, Loki was strolling through the Hall of Artifacts, hmming and oohing, casually phasing his arm through the spelled glass and touching the more dangerous artifacts. For any human, and many magic users of other species, merely touching the glass would be fatal, much less the items within. Yet Loki was handling them like toys, their innate magic doing little beyond a static shock.
After Stephen chased him out (to be completely honest, Loki simply left, cackling) Loki began showing up every week or so.
Stephen liked to think they had formed at least a truce if not a mild friendship. Enough for Loki to drop some of his wards and let Stephen magically scan him. It was then that Stephen realized Loki’s body was literally made of magic. Some of it was how steeped in it he’d been since birth (and, Stephen privately thought, being formed of enchanted ice like all Jotuns) but the rest was a mutation that made him especially well-suited to conduct magic. Or, well, made them especially well-suited. That was a discovery too.
The magic of the Sanctum couldn’t keep him out any more than it would prevent another artifact from being added to the Hall.
Stephen only hesitated to upgrade their relationship to a true friendship given what had happened the first time they sparred. Loki had wiped the floor with him, physically and magically. It reminded Stephen of how the Ancient One had humbled him. And while the Time Stone and his experience with Dormammu had strengthened Stephen’s mastery of some spells past Loki’s, Loki’s creativity was unmatched.
He’d casually admitted that a few of his favorite spells he’d created on his own, making Stephen so jealous he didn’t speak to Loki for two days. Luckily Loki only seemed to find this funny.
All this to say that seeing Loki in the Sanctum was far from unusual but all of his recent visits had left Stephen concerned. They were sparring again a few weeks ago and Loki had made a hand motion then a look of confusion came over his face. He halted the movement and began another, but he looked angry for the rest of the fight.
Another visit had Loki pacing in Stephen’s library, paging through books, getting increasingly frustrated and tossing the books every which way. Wong, who was one of Loki’s favorite targets to prank, was quite upset afterwards.
Where Stephen really started to get concerned was when he found Loki in the meditation room, not fucking with the color of the carpets like usual, but actually meditating. When Stephen had made it partially into the room, Loki’s face creased, and for a second, he looked near tears. He also immediately teleported away, not even staying to acknowledge Stephen. There was a gap between visits then.
Stephen saw Loki on TV, helping with a ton of Avengers missions, even some that didn’t seem to require his expertise. Working with the Avengers may have been a condition of Loki’s stay on Earth, but he usually refused missions that didn’t interest him. When Fury got pissed Loki made several pointed comments about slavery being illegal through his lawyers and the matter was dropped.
Now Loki was in the Sanctum, Stephen could tell, and even that was unusual. Loki usually cloaked his comings and goings. Even more unusual was that Loki was in the Sanctum at the same time Tony was.
Tony was Stephen’s other most common visitor. Despite his expressed disdain and mistrust of magic, the inventor was sorely curious about Stephen’s transition from surgeon to magician and how that changed his outlook. Stephen got the feeling that every other magic user Tony had asked about magic had given him very esoteric explanations. Stephen, as a man of science himself, was able to explain things with metaphors and connections that Tony understood. It was enough that Tony had successfully created a kind of magic shielding for his armor that repelled most low-level spells. Given the kind of people the Avengers fought, it wasn’t a failsafe, but it prevented Tony from being distracted by those he labeled “minions.”
Stephen also enjoyed Tony’s company. It was nice to talk with someone of equivalent intellect, even in a different field, and it was somewhat freeing to have someone near him who was also a bit of an asshole.
Tony, especially when he got going on an idea, didn’t acknowledge the people around him, dismissed their suggestions sharply, and barreled onward without concern for sleep or food. He always apologized afterwards, sincerity dependent upon who had been trying to get his attention, but during those binges he was too locked in to care. This was very familiar to Stephen, both from his own binges, but also from the medical community in general. Surgeons were not known for their bedside manner, and many were quite arrogant. They didn’t interact with conscious patients often and to them the body was a list of medical conditions rather than a person.
Did it make Stephen a bad person to enjoy this quality of Tony’s? Maybe, but enjoy it he did.
Tony’s sense of humor also reminded Stephen of his own, and, surprisingly, of Loki’s. The alien and the inventor were more similar than either of them would admit, both at the top of their fields, both morally grey, both arrogant to a fault. This was why Stephen had been all the more shocked to realize on day that they were never in the Sanctum at the same time.
According to his sources within Avengers Tower, Loki and Tony avoided each other. Whether this was leftover feelings from the invasion or simple mistrust, they were standoffish with others but straight up noncommunicative with each other. Tony dropping by usually coincided with Loki being on a mission and Loki never dropped by when Tony was there. For Loki to be both in the Sanctum without hiding his presence and there at the same time as Tony, something must be wrong.
Leaving Tony to the gargantuan sandwich he was trying to stuff into his face in the Sanctum kitchen, Stephen portalled to the room he sensed Loki in. He found Loki in one of the inner sparring rooms. The reinforced walls and floor were scorched, Loki sitting in the middle of the blast area, his hands lightly smoking. He was facing away from Stephen.
“Loki!” He called out. He didn’t want to startle him.
Loki went completely still, not even breathing. “Go away sorcerer.”
Stephen blinked. Loki hadn’t called him that since a visit when he had informed Stephen that “Sorcerer” was considered an insult to magic users.
“Loki?”
“Leave me, Dr. Strange.”
Stephen stepped forward cautiously. “I would, but you seem to be up to something and that’s never a good sign.”
Loki didn’t react to the joke as he usually would. “I am not up to anything.” There was a note of anger in his voice. But it wasn’t directed at Stephen.
“But you wish you were?”
Loki exploded. He jumped to his feet and whirled on Stephen, furious eyes flashing at him. “I cannot be up to anything! I cannot!”
Stephen got a sinking suspicion. “Did someone try to bind your powers? Were you attacked?”
Loki laughed cruelly. “If only that were true. No, the attack is coming from here!” He jabbed a finger into his own temple.
“Loki, you’re not making sense. Just tell me what’s wrong.” Loki muttered something under his breath that Stephen only caught a few words of but quickly determined was a string of nonsensical swear words. “You’ve seen me in plenty of awful situations, I’m not gonna flinch away now.”
Loki seemed to deflate. He sank back down to a seated position, shoulders hunched. “It’s gone.” He forestalled Stephen’s next question of what? “The information. I’ve forgotten it. And I’m never getting it back.”
“You forgot some spells?”
“Only four thus far, but that is bad enough.”
Stephen knew the question was stupid before he asked it. “Can you not relearn them? You’re over 1000 years old, you’re going to forget things.”
Loki sneered. “No Strange, I cannot simply ‘relearn’ them. The spells were only written down in the library of Asgard.” And with that Stephen knew what the problem was.
Before Loki had returned to Earth, he and Thor had mounted a risky rescue mission to Asgard upon hearing that it was being attacked by their sister. They managed to defeat her and rescue many citizens, but Asgard was destroyed in the process. And with it, their libraries. A great sense of sorrow came over Stephen. He could only imagine how Loki felt.
“I’m-I’m sorry Loki.”
Loki’s scoff was wet this time. “There’s nothing to be sorry for. I knew this would happen when I put Surtur’s crown in the Eternal Flame. It’s my own fault.”
“Well, it’s not like there were any other options for defeating Hela.”
“But what if there were? I didn’t think, I didn’t come up with my own strategy. I just listened to Thor like one of his hapless friends.”
Stephen wasn’t well-suited to emotional conversations, but he thought Loki was being a bit too hard on himself. “Well, fighting Hela was obviously priority one. I get the impression things happened rather quickly.”
Loki slammed a fist on the floor. “I’ve been in battles like that all my life! It should have been nothing for me to come up with a new strategy!”
Privately, Stephen thought that maybe Loki’s thousand years of battlefield violence may be less of an asset than Loki saw it as. He had heard the story from a drunken Thor; Hela was like nothing they had ever seen and both brothers were reeling from the realization that their parents had lied to them yet again and kept a sister from them.
For Thor this was a true shattering of his rose-colored glasses for his father, and he was watching his friends and subjects be murdered before his eyes. For Loki, the situation probably brought back a lot of memories of his own discovery of his identity and, frankly, Stephen was shocked all Asgardians weren’t catatonic with PTSD given their lifestyle.
Loki would never ever admit it, but Hela scared him. It was no surprise that he defaulted to taking orders as any soldier would and didn’t have the mental energy for forethinking. But Loki wouldn’t want to hear that.
“I doubt you could have done anything else,” Tony’s voice cut in. He had entered the room when Stephen wasn’t paying attention, brushing crumbs out of his beard.
“And is that not typical of you, warmonger?”
Tony snorted at Loki’s comment and sank down to sit next to them, making a small oof noise as his knees creaked. “You’re right, that used to be my go-to: blow everything up and run. But I’ve talked to Big, Blonde, and Beautiful. Hela got her power from Asgard, right?” Loki nodded. “Then destroying Asgard was the only way to cut that power off. And she was only growing stronger as time went on, wasn’t she?” Again, Loki nodded. “Someone like that doesn’t just stop. Imagine how many lives you saved by not taking a second to hesitate.”
“That doesn’t change the fact that the knowledge of Asgard is gone. The Realm Eternal was infamously protective of its knowledge. Very few copies of their literature exist on other realms and even fewer mages knew their contents. That knowledge will never be recovered.”
Tony sighed. “Plenty of knowledge can never be recovered. I will never know what potential my company’s bombs destroyed. Maybe somebody had the cure to cancer in the areas my bombs were deployed, maybe some of my enemies had vital breakthroughs on their servers. I’ll never know, I’m responsible for that, and I can’t change the past. It’s a heavy weight, destroying knowledge, but it has to be borne.”
“And why must it be borne?”
Tony met Loki’s eyes. For a second Stephen saw an eternal darkness in both their gazes. It was startling to see, both in his friends, and in the mirror every morning. “Because we have to go on. Something is gone, it’s not coming back, there is nothing we can do about it. Those are absolute truths, painful, but absolute, nonetheless. If we dwell on them absolutely nothing will come of it. Oh, maybe some soft-hearts may say that simply feeling guilt is just punishment for what we’ve destroyed and that feeling guilt is what prevents us from being monsters but I don’t believe it. No punishment is enough and being a monster is in our nature. All that thinking about it will do is mire us in it. We’ll stop. And stopping is truly giving up.”
“Giving up on what?” Stephen’s voice dropped to a whisper.
“On life, on living, on maybe, just maybe, doing enough to make up for our mistakes.”