"Okay, seriously, Loki, what do you think you're doing?"
"I don't know!" Loki says defensively. "I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing!"
"You know what you're supposed to be doing?" Tony asks. "Anything but this!"
Bruce sighs and pauses their game. "Okay, Loki, what do you not understand?"
"The controls," Loki says. "I know how they work, but only if I take the time to think about it, and there is not enough time to think about it." He doesn't understand how everyone has every single button memorized, like it's just instinct to hit them when they need them. They made this look so easy.
"Loki, these are the most basic controls the video game world has ever known," Tony tells him.
"Well, to be fair," Bruce says, "I don't think he's ever played a video game before."
"Thank you," Loki says indignantly. At least somebody understands.
"Do we want to go back to the first level again?" Bruce asks.
"We just did the first level," Tony whines.
"Yes, and then we skipped a few dozen more," Loki reminds him. "I would very much like to return to the first level, preferably before I lose all of Romanoff's lives."
Tony snorts. "Yeah, she's gonna be pissed when she gets back."
Bruce sighs. He slips the Wii remote strap off of his wrist and holds it out to him. "Would you like to play mine instead? I have more than enough lives for the both of us."
"Oh, don't do that," Tony says. "I want to see her reaction when she gets back and realizes she's almost out of lives."
"Yeah, I don't want to see that," Bruce says. "Loki, take my remote. You can be Toad now."
They trade remotes, and it's uncomfortably warm in his hand. He does his best to ignore that. Tony returns to level one so they can start fresh, but before they do, JARVIS cuts in.
"Sir, you have a text message from Agent Romanoff."
"Aw, how cute," Tony coos. "She's thinking of me while she's on her mission."
Loki rolls his eyes.
"What'd she say?" Tony asks.
"She said, 'Nick Fury is dead.'"
There's a sharp shift in the atmosphere while the three of them process that.
He's... dead?
Nicholas Fury is dead?
He's almost inclined not to believe it. Nick Fury doesn't die. He can't die. Hell, Loki had been convinced he would outlive all of the Avengers, Thor excluded for obvious reasons. He's too smart; too resourceful. To go out so suddenly like that? He almost doesn't buy it.
Tony seems to be having the same thought. "Is this a joke? Or a dare of something?"
"I have no reason to believe it is anything but truthful," JARVIS says.
Tony lets out a long breath. "Wow." He puts his remote down on his lap and clasps his hands together. "That's..."
"Unreal," Bruce finishes for him.
"Do you think it was work-related?" Tony asks. "I mean, I know SHIELD has no shortage of enemies, but..."
"I don't know," Bruce admits. "I mean, if Nat told us, maybe her mission, you know..."
Tony sucks in a breath through his teeth. "You think she was there?"
"I don't know, maybe," Bruce says. "Obviously I hope not, but..."
Loki isn't overly concerned about whether Natasha watched Fury die. She's a strong woman. She's a soldier. She'll be fine. But it does leave him wondering whether Steve had anything to do with it. Does Steve know? Was he there, too?
Loki's not an idiot; he knows that Steve will be just fine, and that Loki's presence wouldn't be much of a comforting force. But curiosity gets the best of him, and he decides he has to see how the Captain is doing.
Loki closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, centering himself before he projects his consciousness outward.
He'd been hoping to find Steve, but instead, the first thing his eyes find is Fury's lifeless body lying limp on a table. He shudders at the sight. So she wasn't lying. Nicholas Fury really is dead.
Natasha stands by his side, her arms folded over her chest as she looks down at his body. Her eyes are damp with tears, and her face contorts with a not-so-subtle effort to stop more silent sobs. Steve stands back against the wall, and though he seems less torn up about it, he's watching her sympathetically.
Hidden from view, Loki just stands there for a few moments, his gaze flickering between Fury's body and the heartbroken assassin above it. He hadn't expected this. He really hadn't expected it.
"Loki, what the hell are you doing?"
Loki blinks, and he's back in the man cave. Tony's staring at him like he has four heads, which feels like a very disproportionate response to something that should really only have looked mildly weird.
"I cannot speak on what happened, but he does appear to be dead," Loki says. "Both she and Rogers are with him now and they both look unharmed, so I do question whether this was related to their respective missions."
Tony blinks at that. "Right. Magic weirdo doing weird magic. Got it."
Loki rolls his eyes.
"So they're okay?" Bruce asks. "Steve and Nat?"
"As okay as one can be, standing mere feet from a coworker's rotting corpse," Loki says. "Admittedly, I am far more interested in that than this ridiculous game, so you two are welcome to continue playing, but I am going to do some snooping."
Tony sighs. "You can't just snoop—"
"Watch me."
Loki teleports to his room, landing on his bed with a satisfying bounce. He closes his eyes, and he projects his consciousness back to Steve and Natasha's sides.
This time, they're not there alone. There's another woman in the room; one he recognizes, perhaps a bit belatedly, as Maria Hill. He's only seen her once, and that was during his rush to escape SHIELD headquarters with the Tesseract, so it shouldn't be as jarring to see her tear-filled eyes as it is. He'd never pictured her as an emotional person, though he would have said the same for Natasha, too. Fury must have been important to them.
"I need to take him," Hill says quietly.
Steve glances at her, then slowly approaches his redheaded friend, standing by her side without saying a word.
She slowly reaches a hand out, resting it on Fury's forehead. She swallows hard and pulls it back, blinking a few times repeatedly before her tears can fall. Steve puts an arm around her shoulder, and Natasha leans into him, resting her head on his shoulder.
Loki is uncomfortably aware of the fact that he's intruding right now. He'd decided to eavesdrop because he'd wanted some insider information that he's sure he wouldn't have gotten from them directly. So far, all he's gathered is that he should have a great deal of sympathy for Natasha Romanoff.
A light tap on Loki's thigh gets his attention, and he opens his finds to find Snowflake sitting next to him on his mattress, one paw raised just above his leg and ready to tap him again.
Loki scratches behind her ear, and Snowflake leans into his hand so far that she nearly falls over. She stumbles to catch her balance, then presses her ear into his hand again so he can continue petting her. As he does, she slowly walks across the bed, incapable of staying in one place for more than thirty seconds at a time. Loki's hand follows her as she does, never ending those ear scratches.
Finally, content with the attention she's received, Snowflake plops down on the end of the bed, out of reach but close enough that he can hear her purr. It provides a nice soundtrack as he returns to Steve and Natasha's side.
He barely catches a glimpse of Hill before she's out the door, presumably with Fury's body ahead of her because it's nowhere to be seen in the room. Steve and Natasha haven't moved, though that changes a few seconds after Hill leaves when Natasha slips out from under his arm and steps in front of him. She wipes her eyes with her sleeve and looks up at him.
"Steve," Natasha says, almost cautious as she speaks, "why was Fury in your apartment?"
Steve spreads his arms in an awkward (and unconvincing) show of uncertainty. "I don't know."
"You're a terrible liar," she tells him. "Why was Fury in your apartment?"
"I don't know!" Steve insists. "He—"
"Cap." A man pokes his head in the doorway. "They want you back at SHIELD."
Steve glances over his shoulder. "Yeah, give me a second."
"They want you now."
Steve just looks at him for a moment with a look of utter exasperation on his face, but his tone is mostly polite when he says, "Okay."
The man ducks out of the room, and the conversation resumes in his absence.
"Steve," Natasha says, "what's with the secrets? We don't do that, okay?"
"Apparently, we do," Steve says.
Loki cocks an eyebrow. Ooh, shit's going down in the Romanogers section of SHIELD. He's sorry he missed it.
Natasha juts her jaw out, frustrated. "I was just following orders."
Steve huffs a sarcastic laugh. "'Just following orders.' Mm." He shakes his head to himself. "Look, I don't know why Fury was in my apartment. He was speaking in code. He said there were ears everywhere."
Natasha raises her brows. "Whose ears?"
Steve shakes his head. "I don't know," he says. "He just told me not to trust anybody."
Natasha frowns. "But you can trust me."
Steve is silent, his gaze flickering down to the floor.
Natasha takes a step closer to him so he can't look away. "But you can trust me, right?"
Steve hesitates, then nods, plastering a questionably sincere smile on his face. "Of course," he says. "Of course I trust you. But I don't have anything for you. I don't know what happened. And if that changes, I'll let you know, but right now, I have to get to SHIELD, okay? I'll talk to you later."
Natasha crosses her arms, looking up at him with a frown. "Fine. Yeah. I'll talk to you later." She walks out of the room.
Steve just stands there for a few moments. He runs his hand through his hair and lets out a long breath. He just stands there for a few moments, then sighs and walks out.
Loki follows behind him. It's only because he's watching the Captain so closely that he notices him fiddling with something in his pocket, and it's not a nervous tick that Loki's picked up from him before. He raised an eyebrow. What's he doing?
Steve's gaze strays to an open vending machine just in front of the door. An employee is hard at work stocking it with snacks, and Steve"s fidgeting stops for a few moments while he watches before returning with a vigor. He glances around the hallway, and though it's teeming with people, nobody pays him any mind.
Knock knock knock.
"Hey, Loki, open the door!"
Loki groans as he pulls himself out of the hospital and back to the tower. The door swings open with a bit of magic to reveal, unsurprisingly, Tony on the other side. Loki raises a brow, looking at him expectantly.
"Are you stalking Steve and Nat?" Tony asks.
"No," Loki says, "at the moment, I am talking to you."
Tony rolls his eyes. "Were you stalking Steve and Nat?"
"Perhaps," Loki says. "And it has been very interesting. Rogers knows more about Fury's death than he lets on. He won't even tell Romanoff."
Tony snorts. "Mm-hmm, I'm sure that's it," he says sarcastically. "You know what? I think he killed Fury himself." He shakes his head, exaggerating his disappointment. "It's always the nice ones that turn out to be stone-cold killers."
Loki huffs a laugh. Now that would be an interesting ending to an interesting day.
"No, seriously, though," Tony says. "Come on. Leave them alone."
"I am leaving them alone," Loki says. "They haven't the slightest idea I was there."
"That's worse, actually," Tony says. "'Cause now you're stalking them and they don't even know that you're stalking them."
"Well, I imagine they would rather not know," Loki says. "And I imagine I would not learn Rogers' secret if he knew I were there, and that is something I am very excited for. Who doesn't love a good murder mystery?"
Tony leans against the doorway and crosses his arms. "Would it kill you to not treat the death of our friend like a TV show?"
"No, but it would bore me immensely," Loki says.
Tony rolls his eyes. "Look, just leave them alone, okay? Come on, the game's still running. We can play level one again."
"No, I would actually like to never play that game again," Loki says. He's a god. He was not cut out for these ridiculous human games.
"Yeah, well, I'm not gonna leave you in here to go harass Steve and Nat, so come on," Tony insists. "You can just sit on the floor and eat ice cream or something. I don't care."
"I'm not hungry," Loki says, like that's ever stopped him from eating ice cream before. "I have no interest in playing your game again, but if you truly do not want me to do follow them, I will just stay here and listen to my music." He uses his powers to turn his boombox on, and Taylor Swift's Fearless album begins playing. As annoying as Tony is, he has great taste in Christmas gifts.
"Yeah, no, I really don't trust you to do that," Tony tells him.
"You haven't the slightest idea how exhausting it is to keep this up for a long period of time," Loki tells him. "I will not subject myself to that just for you to interrupt me every five minutes to tell me off for it."
Tony eyes him skeptically for a few moments, then pushes himself away from the doorframe. "I'm holding you to that."
"I assumed you would," Loki says.
Tony closes the door, leaving Loki and Snowflake alone again. He waits until he hears the retreating footsteps fade into the distance, then closes his eyes.
And he's back.
Steve is in the midst of walking away, and Loki wants to follow him. First, though, he wants to check the vending machine. He crouches down in front of it, eyes scanning every row. That looks disgusting; that must be horrible; he can't even imagine how dry that is... ah, there it is.
There's a flashdrive hidden behind the row of bubble gum.
That must be what Steve was hiding.
Hmm.
He'd planned to follow Steve and see what he was up to—or even to follow Natasha for the same reason—but now he's not only curious; he's a bit wary. If this really is what Steve was hiding, then he's hiding it not only from SHIELD, but from Natasha, and that means it must be important, but out in the open like this, anybody could take it.
So he won't follow Steve, and he won't follow Natasha. He'll wait around here for a while and see if anyone comes back for it—and when they do, he sincerely hopes it will be Steve, or they're going to have a small problem on their hands.