The general stood over Natasha with the phone extended, his expression doing its best to hide the fact that he'd just been very politely threatened by an F-22.
She leaned forward as much as the ropes allowed and let him press the device to her ear.
"Come back," Coulson said. "Quickly."
Natasha blinked. "You're joking. I'm in the middle of something."
"Set it aside."
"I was interrogating," she said. "And this idiot already told me everything I needed."
The general spun toward his men. "I didn't say anything." He pointed at Natasha, then at himself, visibly confused about who exactly had been running this session. Natasha had come in tied to a chair and had apparently left with everything she came for.
She glanced at him. "You'd be surprised what people say when they're trying to sound intimidating." She shifted her weight subtly, testing the rope's tension. "Coulson, I can't walk out of here right now."
His voice dropped. "Natasha. Barton's been compromised."
She went still.
Clint Barton. She'd spent working with him — studied his file, cross-referenced it against everything she'd learned about the Red Room's reach, and eventually concluded he'd simply been an agent who followed orders without knowing what he was actually feeding into. Their relationship had thawed considerably since then. Not close. But not nothing.
"Don't hang up," she said.
She shifted her weight, levered her arms against the chair back with a precise angular pull, and the rope came loose. The guard nearest her registered the movement a half-second too late. Two kicks, economical and efficient, put him and his partner on the floor before either of them had completed a thought. A short right hand snapped the general's head back and deposited him against the wall. She caught his ankle on the way down, looped a length of chain through the base of the chair, and let gravity handle the rest.
The whole sequence took about five seconds.
She walked toward the door, heels in hand, phone back at her ear. "Where is he?"
"Still alive, as far as we know," Coulson said. "I'll give you the full picture when you're back. But first — you need to reach the other big guy."
Natasha's mind went to Stark. "Fine. I'll track down Tony."
"Not Stark. That's my problem. You find the other one. The green one."
She stopped walking for exactly one second. The Hulk. Whatever had happened at that facility, it was bad enough that Fury was pulling out Bruce Banner. "Understood," she said. "On my way."
She hung up and kept moving down the stairwell. At the bottom, she paused long enough to pull up an encrypted channel on her secondary device and send a brief, precise status report directly to Smith Doyle.
The safe house was off every S.H.I.E.L.D. grid Barton had ever had access to — a precaution he'd built into his professional life years before anyone had ever pointed a scepter at his chest. Now he sat at the table across from the man who'd done exactly that, and felt nothing about it except a low, clear certainty that he was exactly where he was supposed to be.
Loki hadn't bothered removing the Asgardian armor. He sat at the head of the table with the kind of casual authority that didn't need to announce itself, the Mind Scepter resting against the wall within easy reach. Dr. Selvig sat to his left, eyes slightly glassy but functional. Several controlled S.H.I.E.L.D. agents occupied the far end of the room, still and quiet.
"Tell me about the powerful individuals on this planet," Loki said. He'd seen the footage from the Destroyer incident — a human, who had walked up to a construct of Asgardian Uru metal and torn it apart barehanded. Earth was not as primitive as he'd first assumed. "Everything worth knowing."
Barton laid it out plainly. "Steve Rogers, Captain America — super-soldier, enhanced strength and durability. Chen Haoran, pyrokinesis. Donnie Gill, ice manipulation. Jessica Jones, enhanced strength. Beyond S.H.I.E.L.D.'s direct roster, there's the Avengers program — Smith Doyle, S.H.I.E.L.D. Inspector General. Tony Stark, Iron Man. Bruce Banner, who becomes the Hulk. Ivan Vanko, Blue Dynamo." He paused. "There's also Daredevil, Iron Fist, Black Panther, Shang-Chi, and several others operating outside government affiliation. And a new team was just announced — the Paragons."
He pulled up footage on a tablet and slid it across the table: highlights from the Paragons selection event, the fights, the power demonstrations that had trended globally for three consecutive days.
Loki watched without expression, but his eyes were active. He was calculating. Every one of these people could either be a useful soldier or a problem that needed to be solved before he opened the Tesseract portal for the Chitauri fleet.
He was about to speak when Selvig leaned forward slightly.
"There's something else you should know about. Something I heard during my research."
Loki raised an eyebrow. "Speak."
"There is an artifact," Selvig said. "Seven balls. Each marked with a different number of stars. They are called Dragon Balls."
The name was unusual enough to create a brief pause.
"When all seven are gathered," Selvig continued, "they summon a creature capable of granting wishes. Any wish the bearer desires."
Loki was quiet for a moment.
He knew the Tesseract. He understood its value in it — it was why Thanos had offered him an army in exchange for recovering it. A power source of that magnitude, a key to the architecture of space itself, was rare enough to be worth considerable negotiation. The fact that this frail astrophysicist was comparing these Dragon Balls to the Tesseract in terms of significance was either the babbling of a mind under duress, or something worth taking very seriously.
"You're certain?" Loki asked.
"I haven't witnessed a wish myself," Selvig said. "But the evidence is substantial. The objects have been the subject of a tournament on this planet. Two have already been completed. Which means, that at least two wishes have already been granted."
The implications arranged themselves in Loki's mind with the methodical efficiency of long practice.
Any wish.
He had come to Earth for a Tesseract that could open a portal for Thanos's army. That was the arrangement — the army arrived, he delivered the Cosmic Cube, the planet fell, and in exchange he received a throne of his own to compensate for the one that Asgard had never properly offered him.
But any wish changed the calculation considerably.
He could wish to become the rightful sovereign of Earth and skip the conquest entirely. He could wish for the armies themselves, rather than trading away the Tesseract to obtain them. He could wish for things that no amount of military force could achieve by other means.
And then the thought arrived, quieter than the rest, and considerably more dangerous in its honesty.
He could wish for his father to see him. Not as the spare, not as the trickster, not as the creature who had been smuggled out of Jotunheim and raised in a borrowed identity — but as someone worthy of standing beside Thor without the outcome being predetermined. A fair contest. Recognition from the one person whose recognition had never come without conditions attached.
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