Chapter Text
Thor poured himself a bowl of Cheerios and slopped some milk over them early on a Friday morning. Steve Rogers leaned against the kitchen counter with a glass of orange juice, already dressed for a morning jog but still groggy. It was a day like any other. Doctor Banner was at a conference in Chicago and would not be back until Sunday night at the earliest, but Clint and Natasha would be back from their mission in the afternoon. Jane Foster was in her lab, and aside from bodily removing her from science when Darcy gave the signal, Thor had no plans for the day. The Captain drained his juice and shambled for the elevator with a mumbled “Good morning.” The Thunderer nodded mutely and watched him go, at ease with the peace in the kitchen. There were no urgent threats in the city that needed tending to. Asgard remained as safe as it could be. All was well.
The elevator hummed shut behind Steve and carried him downward.
The only warning Thor had before his understanding of the universe and his place in it shifted was a tingle of ozone and then something in the air crackled before exploding into the shape of Loki. Thor coughed hard, trying to dislodge the soggy cereal he had inhaled when his traitorous brother appeared. “Loki!” he snarled, throat burning. “What are you…?”
“Listen to me,” the exiled prince snarled. His armor dripped with blood, the leather gouged and mangled in places, his green mantel riddled with burnt holes and still smoking slightly. He closed the distance between them in a single stride and wrapped a claw-like hand around Thor’s neck and bent his head close so their noses were nearly touching. “I require your assistance.”
“Brother, I do not think it wise to wreak havoc on Midgard and then ask a favor.”
Loki’s lips peeled away from his teeth, smeared with blood. “I haven’t time for your complaints, oaf. My safe house has been compromised and I need you to look after my most precious belongings. Just for the weekend.”
“You must be truly desperate to come to me for help.” Thor privately wondered how long before the other Avengers arrived. Surely by now JARVIS raised the alarm.
Loki gave a startled bark of laughter. “Using my own words against me? How droll! You will help me, Thor.”
“What makes you so certain?” he hedged. He toyed briefly with the idea of destroying Loki’s treasured whatevers, or at least leaving them in the shared living room with a note explaining who their owner was and letting Hawkeye destroy them for him. Loki’s wrath would be immeasurable, but it would be gratifying in the moment.
“It’s in your blood, Odinson. Time is short; I must fly.” He whirled on his heel, ruined mantle flaring dramatically in his wake and disappeared in a puff of completely unnecessary emerald smoke. Thor coughed again at about the same time the kitchen’s smoke alarm shrilled. He glowered at it and then looked back at the place where his brother had just been, where now his most precious belongings waited, small and pale and holding hands with eyes like saucers in their little faces. The bolder of the two piped up. “Uncle Thor?” The alarm beeped steadily above him while he gaped.
Tony Stark blinked owlishly at the two big blond men in front of him, then at the two miniature Lokis half hiding behind them. “What, really?” he said when the hallucinations did not disappear. He was nearing hour 72 without sleep, so the threat of seeing things that weren't actually there was very real. And then his brain kicked in and he really looked at Loki's mini-me's. Sometime, about six years ago by his reckoning, Loki had fathered fraternal twins. Thor ground his teeth.
“Yes, Stark. Really.”
Steve crossed and uncrossed his arms, watching the children with his peripheral vision nervously. The children in turn stared unblinkingly at his shield, but only after looking around the living room with something like awe. They were willowy, with deceptively delicate bone structure and inky black hair, the girl’s in a short bob and the boy’s shaggy about his ears and falling into his eyes. They wore clothes typical of Midgard’s children: little red sneakers, nearly identical black denim jeans and nondescript t-shirts—gray for the boy, dark purple for the girl. They carried backpacks on their shoulders, possibly with changes of clothes inside but they would not put it past Loki to hide powerful artefacts with his children as well. No one volunteered to investigate.
When he looked up, both Stark and Thor were waiting for him to say something. “I don’t know what to do,” he admitted, rubbing at the back of his neck. “Normally I’d lock them in a cell—don’t look at me like that, Thor—but they’re just kids.”
“Or are they?” Stark murmured. He dropped into a crouch so he could get on their level and offered his patented charming smile. “Hello, kiddies. Do you have names?”
The twins exchanged a loaded glance before the girl answered. “Yes.”
They waited for a moment. “Okay then,” Stark prompted, smile growing more strained. “What are they?”
“We’re not supposed to talk to strangers,” she replied, her eyes reproachful.
“I’m not a stranger. I’m Iron Man!” When the kids only looked skeptical he pointed at Steve. “And that’s Captain America. See his shield? And you know Thor, I’m guessing. We’re not strangers; we’re the Avengers.”
She looked doubtful still, but started to nod. “You work with our father?”
“Yes? I mean, yes we do. What’s your name, sweetie?”
“I’m Raven, and this is my brother Thadcus. Father said we would be safe here.”
“You will be safe,” Thor told her in his gentle voice, as much a reassurance for the children as a warning for the adults. “You have my word.”
“Okay,” Raven said.
Stark straightened up, knees popping. “So where are they staying?” he asked the Captain, eyebrows raised.
“They will stay on my floor in the guest suite,” Thor said, tone sharp.
Steve glanced nervously at the twins, who seemed to have taken a vested interest in the carpet. “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea. For all we know this could be a trap.”
“A trap,” Thor scoffed.
“We don’t know what Loki might be planning.”
“They are his children!”
Stark stuffed his hands in his pockets. “From your kid brother’s track record, using kids as bait doesn’t exactly strike me as beneath him.”
“You dare!”
Steve frowned. “Um, guys?”
“These are my niece and nephew, Man of Iron!” Thor boomed.
“Guys?”
“Yeah, but they’re Loki’s spawn!” Stark hissed. “There is no way this isn’t some ruse or trap or whatever!”
“I refuse to entertain the idea that Loki would use his own children—“
“Avengers!” Steve barked, 100% commanding officer and about 200% done with this conversation. Thor and Stark glared at him. “Where are the children?” Thor and Stark glared at the place where they had just been standing. “And where is my shield?”
Stark rubbed his eyes tiredly. “Goddam demon spawn. JARVIS, are the two little bundles of joy still in the building?”
“They are, sir,” JARVIS replied, unruffled as ever. “They are on Captain Rogers’ floor in his kitchen, I believe.”
The color drained from Thor’s face. “And Sergeant Barnes, JARVIS?”
“Also in the kitchen.”
Stark had never seen a Norse god and an American icon sprint for the elevator and get stuck at the door because they tried to walk through it at the same time, but today seemed to be an exceptional day.
Bucky had his good days and his bad days. Admittedly, he seemed to have more bad days than good days, but he had not had to wash blood and gravel out of the Weapon since leaving Hydra, so he counted that as a win. Sam Wilson, codename the Falcon, regularly assured him that the path to recovery was rarely straight. Sam Wilson, codename the Falcon, never needed to spackle and paint over holes he put in the walls with the Weapon. Sam Wilson, codename the Falcon, would probably remember putting holes in the wall if he put them there with the Weapon. The other day Bucky killed one of Stark’s pet Roombas because it startled him in the middle of the night, and then Steve Rogers, codename Captain America, made sad faces every time he conspicuously toed around the mess of rent wiring and crumbled plastic. At one point Steve Rogers, codename Captain America, had gotten out the dustpan and made to sweep away the dead Roomba, but Bucky growled until he left it alone. The Winter Soldier never cleaned up his own messes; Hydra had people for that. But Bucky could and he would.
Right after he was done glaring at it.
Life was strange in Avengers Tower, let alone in the twenty-first century. His routine, rigid and punitive to the civilian eye, was self-imposed and too often interrupted. Sometimes other residents in the tower tried to include him in their lives, which he found…worrisome. More often one of the scientists tried to persuade him to come to the labs so they could examine the Weapon or his body, and he would firmly decline by glaring until the scientists got flustered and wandered away. Tony Stark, codename Iron Man, seemed immune to this method, and so Bucky had taken to gently flipping furniture over until the man excused himself. Steve Rogers, codename Captain America, would frown and rebuke him after these episodes while trying not to giggle.
Today there were children in his kitchen. In the morning, JARVIS tended to inform Bucky of the date, the weather conditions and any abnormalities in his schedule for the day, but he never mentioned small children. Of course, every morning Bucky was greeted by a disembodied voice reminding him that it was the twenty-first century, so as odd as it was to see a pair of dark-haired children carrying the Captain’s iconic shield between them was, Bucky literally dealt with stranger thing every day. He bit into his toast and watched them pull open the refrigerator.
“I’m pretty sure that isn’t yours,” he said.
The girl shut the fridge and they both fixed him with identical big brown eyes. “We found it.”
“Finders keepers,” the boy said.
“Uh-huh,” Bucky replied. He rested his chin on his fist and employed that ancient and most effective interrogation technique; he let them fill the silence.
“It was just laying around,” the girl went on. She hugged the shield to her chest. “If we hadn’t come along, who knows what mighta happened to it. You’re welcome.”
Some weeks ago, Natalia Romanova, AKA Natasha Romanoff, codename the Black Widow, interrupted his lunch with a pint of soft ice cream and a spoon, saying “You need this,” and then proceeded to walk away. It almost made up for yanking Clint Barton, codename Hawkeye, out of a ceiling vent and nearly breaking both of his arms before realizing the SHIELD agent was not trying to infiltrate the tower but had simply made it a habit to travel via ceiling vent. The ice cream provided a pleasant distraction that day, but this was better.
“I’m hungry,” the little girl complained, dragging him from his reverie. “Can you make me a grilled cheese?”
He drained his coffee and got up, walked over to her and placed his flesh hand on the top of her head. “Poof. You are a grilled cheese,” he told her somberly.
She stared up at him. “You’re not very funny.”
“You’re right. I’m hilarious.”
Bucky was standing at the stove with a spatula in his hand and the frying pan sizzling nicely when half of the Avengers stormed into the kitchen. He froze, knuckles whitening around the spatula, the Weapon whirring softly as the plates settled and resettled, but he did not make to grab one of the kitchen knives Steve Rogers, codename Captain America, thought he hid too well for the Winter Soldier to find. So this is what progress looks like.
“The children?” Thor boomed, and did not make to lay his hands on Bucky. That too was progress. God of thunder and a warrior of Asgard he may be, but the first time he tried to grab Bucky, the Winter Soldier drove two knives into his forearm and had a garrote wrapped around his neck before help could come and pull them apart.
Bucky glanced at the kitchen table, where the twins had found his toast and demolished it. Steve Rogers, codename Captain America’s eyes went to the shield proudly resting on the table. The little girl, Raven, followed his gaze, picked the shield up and hid it behind her back like everyone had not just seen her do it. Bucky flipped over the sandwiches in the pan and grinned to himself. He remembered, in the time Before, that he had liked children. History says that he wan an older brother, and Steve Rogers (codename Captain America) claimed he was basically the older brother of most children on their block, with a protective streak a mile wide and an eye for mischief. Until now, those words came across as conjecture, but he now suspected that a soft spot for kids was one thing Hydra failed to dig out of him. It was too soon to tell if he still truly liked kids in general, but he liked Raven just fine, and he suspected he would like Thadcus once he opened up.
They took their time eating their sandwiches, radiating doe-eyed innocence all the time. Tony, Thor, Steve and Bucky all crowded around the table waiting for them. Steve had relieved Raven of his shield and now leaned it against his leg, one proprietary hand touching its topmost edge. “How did you even get up here?” Tony demanded.
“We walked,” Raven replied, bewildered, as if that were the most obvious thing in the world.
“You don’t have clearance for the elevator to take you to just any floor,” Tony told her, voice laden with suspicion. They just stared at him and ate their sandwiches. He sighed and flapped his hands. “I don’t know. No more jumping from floor to floor, okay? It’s bad for my blood pressure.”
“Okay,” the children replied in unison.
“We need some ground rules,” Steve told the kitchen at large. “You two need to stay on Thor’s floor. He’s in charge of you. No using the elevator unaccompanied, and the same goes for the stairs.” They nodded at him. “And leave my shield alone. No playing with weapons period, okay?” They nodded again.
“Can we watch a movie?” Raven asked. She pushed her crusts from her plate to her brother’s. Thadcus glared at her.
“Yes, fine, you can watch a movie when you get to Thor’s floor,” Steve assured her.
“Can uncle Bucky come with?”
Tony snorted. “When did you become Uncle Bucky?”
Bucky got up from his chair and gently flipped it over. Steve rubbed the back of his neck. “Raven, I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”
“How come?” Raven whined.
He winced under Bucky’s stare. “Did you want to watch a movie with Loki’s kids?” The ex-assassin nodded. “Can you refrain from damaging the furniture while you do it?” The ex- assassin squinted at him. “Could you at least try?” He nodded. “Okay. Great. One movie. Thor’s place. Move out.”
Bucky saluted, more from habit than because the situation warranted a salute. Raven and Thadcus climbed off their chairs and followed Thor and him to the elevator. Thadcus wrapped his hand around Bucky’s metal prosthetic as they stepped inside and the door slid shut. Tony raised an eyebrow at Steve. “Sure that’s safe, Cap?”
“Bucky’s been getting better,” he said, unable to keep the defensiveness out of his voice. “And this is the first time he’s voluntarily done something social since we got him back. Besides, Thor’s with them. And JARVIS will let us know if something happens, right JARVIS?”
“Of course, Captain Rogers.”
“What movie should we watch?” Thor asked, glancing hopefully at Bucky. In truth, movies were still a novelty for him and he had no idea what would be enjoyable for the young ones.
Fortunately, the twins had opinions aplenty. “We should watch Brave.”
“Cars,” Thadcus demanded.
“Brave is better. It has a princess in it.”
“Cars,” Thadcus demanded again. “Not every movie needs a princess in it.”
“No. We should see Brave.”
“Cars!”
“Brave!”
Thor did not know what to do, which left Bucky to intervene. “JARVIS, load up the Aristocats,” he drawled. He scooped Thadcus up with the Weapon and tucked Raven under his other arm and deposited them on the couch. He settled on the floor cross legged and Thor sat at the end of the couch.
“Ah,” the big blond man beamed at him. “A film from your own time, Sergeant?”
Bucky wondered how much furniture he would have to flip over if Stark learned that the Winter Soldier watched animated children’s movies during his sleepless nights. “Yes,” he decided, trusting Thor would not know that the Aristocats came out well after he was put on ice. .
At some point Raven started braiding his hair. Bucky did not say anything, only kept his eyes on the television and let his body slip into the sniper calm. When she tired of braiding and re-braiding his hair she ordered Thor to sit on the floor so she could braid his as well. The god of thunder plopped himself beside Bucky and leaned back. It was not a bad way to spend the morning.
Darcy texted Thor shortly after noon and he texted back that he was on his way. The twins slept on the couch, leaning against each other, and Bucky had closed his eyes as well, still sitting perfectly upright. They looked tranquil like this; looking at Thadcus made Thor’s heart wrench. Had Loki ever looked so at peace? He sighed to himself and made his way to the elevator.
In the lab, Jane Foster had reached stage four levels of exhaustion. He rested his hands on her shoulders and pressed a kiss to her hair. “Jane, my love, it is time for a break.”
“No!” she snapped. She flung her arms over her work table, knocking over an empty coffee mug and sending her pencil cup flying. He could conceivably carry both her and the table, but the elevator ride would be crowded and moving through the halls would be ungainly. Thor rubbed circles across her back. Darcy smirked at them from across the lab. He wondered if she had dosed Jane’s coffee with sedatives again to make this part of the day easier, but then dismissed the thought with a mental shrug. Of course she dosed Jane’s coffee—that was the most Darcy thing Darcy could do.
He dug his thumbs into her shoulders and waited until some of the white left her knuckles before he peeled her off the table and carried her away bridal style. Before he tucked her into bed he fished out three pencils and one sticky note from her hair and folded the blankets around her. She would no doubt startle awake in about twelve hours and make her way back to the lab, but until then she would be as comfortable as he could make her.
Bucky, still dozing, was alone when Thor wandered back to the living room. “Where are the children?” he asked, heart sinking.
The soldier startled awake and glanced about him, bewildered. “Nngk?”
“JARVIS?”
“It would appear Raven and Thadcus are in sir’s workshop. He is with them currently.”
Bucky squinted. “I thought they couldn’t use the elevator.”
“They did not use the elevator, Sergeant Barnes.”
“How unusual,” Thor sighed.