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Thor narrowly dodges two screaming children racing down the hallway as he walks toward Loki’s apartment. He’s fairly sure that’s a new development. Odd that Loki hasn’t mentioned it, but maybe the children aren’t usually this loud.
He would know, if he visited more often, but—there isn’t really a need, is there? According to the terms of their agreements with SHIELD and a few other governing bodies, Loki has to maintain his residence here for the time being, so he sleeps at the Tower every night, but he worldwalks to New Asgard from within his apartment and spends at least a few hours there helping Thor almost every day, which SHIELD technically did not forbid him from doing. They won’t like it if they find out, probably, but that’s a problem for later. Right now SHIELD is satisfied that they can keep an eye on Loki, and Loki is still in New Asgard regularly enough to help run the place. It’s not a bad arrangement for the time being, even if Thor would much prefer having his brother properly living nearby again. He’s here now because he had business in New York and figured he might as well check in with how things are going.
The screaming children streak past him again, running in the opposite direction this time, and Thor winces. He definitely doesn’t remember so much noise when he lived here. Or neighbors to speak of at all, for that matter—now that he thinks of it, he’d wondered a little why he never saw any neighbors in the halls but just sort of figured nobody was ever out at the right moment. It’s only now occurring to him that he and Loki might have been the only residents in the whole complex at the time.
That would actually make a lot of sense, in terms of keeping the Asgardians’ presence quiet, and no one in charge of the Tower needed the rent money. But it would also mean that at some point after SHIELD fully took over here, and Thor started living in New Asgard full time, someone actively decided it was a reasonable idea to move a bunch of Midgardians—including at least two small children—immediately next door to the God of Mischief.
So that’s…a little strange.
Loki’s door looks the same as all the others except for the NO SOLICITING sign, which wasn’t there the last time Thor was here (whenever that was, and he really can’t remember). That, and what looks like a scorch mark around the doorbell. Thor looks at it for a moment and knocks on the door instead.
He half expects the door to shock him or something anyway, considering the many times in their youth Loki put spells of some kind on his door to enforce the privacy he wanted or to protect some particularly delicate component of his research. (In fairness, Thor actually had wrecked some of Loki’s belongings multiple times, usually but not always by accident, and there was a period of some decades in which Thor couldn’t seem to control his own strength or his gangly, growing limbs and conveniently forgot every time he wanted to bother Loki that his brother had told him to stay out before Loki finally and comprehensively lost his patience. The next time Thor kept knocking after Loki told him to go away, an explosive spell lit his clothes on fire and flung him across the corridor, and from there it was nearly a century before he saw the inside of Loki’s rooms again. By then he’d gotten much better at not damaging other people’s things, at least not by accident.) But the door continues to be an ordinary Midgardian door, at least by outward appearances. The lock clicks, and Thor takes that for the invitation it is and lets himself in.
The apartment seems smaller than he remembers, possibly because every open wall is smothered in blankets. By this point Thor has mostly given up trying to figure out why Loki does anything because it’s usually quicker and easier to ask. Loki himself is nowhere to be seen, but there’s a very faint shimmer that Thor is pretty sure he recognizes. Acting on a hunch, he closes the door behind himself and says, “It’s still just me.”
The illusion dissipates to reveal Loki seated cross-legged in the middle of the living room, surrounded by…well, by chaos. Some kind of cloth covers a sizable portion of the living room floor, with a complicated, multicolored arcane circle painted on it, and Loki in the center. Thor mostly knows it’s paint because of the painting supplies shoved into a corner. Boxes, jars, and notebooks lie strewn everywhere, some within the circle and some pushed aside. A tiny blue flame burns quietly in a shallow basin next to Loki’s left knee, and a palmful of water seems to be perpetually stirring itself in a second basin at his right knee. Jormungand, the little tentacled bloblike being that accompanied Loki back from an involuntary trip to another dimension, perches in its usual spot on Loki’s shoulder, peering down at a sheaf of papers spread out on the floor that look like…architectural designs? No, blueprints.
“If you need me for something,” Loki says, “I’m afraid this is the type of working that can’t be interrupted until it’s finished.”
“If you really thought I was going to interrupt you, you wouldn’t have let me in,” Thor points out.
“Just setting some expectations. I don’t actually know how long this will take.”
Thor glances around at the books, instruments, and bottles of ingredients piled on every available surface. “If I move something so I can sit down, will you be upset?”
“Yes,” Loki says, rolling his eyes, but he waves one hand and a pile of items obediently shuffles away from one end of the sofa.
Thor sits down. “I could’ve done that.”
“This way I still know where everything is and nothing is broken, thank you.”
“Do I want to ask what you’re doing?”
“That depends,” Loki says without looking up from…whatever it is that he’s doing. At the moment he simply seems to be holding his hands over the basins of fire and water. “How much do you care about plausible deniability?”
“That depends,” Thor repeats back to him. “I can’t possibly answer that without knowing what you’re doing.”
“Nothing nefarious. Annoying? Yes, but only for those who deserve it. I am in fact encouraging considerate, neighborly behavior.”
Thor pointedly looks around at the mess and back at Loki. “I might need a little more context than that.” He does already have some context: it’s fairly obvious Loki is working some kind of complex magic.
Compared to Loki, Thor doesn’t know a lot about magic; he’s never studied it, beyond the little their tutors required, and his mastery of lightning relies much more on instinct than on knowledge or careful planning. But he knows a bit, just from having grown up with Loki, even if he didn’t pay anywhere near as much attention as he should have until very recently.
He knows, for instance, that there are different types of magic, requiring different approaches to one degree or another. Much of what Loki does, he can do quickly, with no need for potions, incantations, or time for preparation. If a working is particularly complex or intended to last a long time, however, such things are often necessary.
“What do you call a garage band that practices out of something other than a garage?” Loki asks.
“I don’t know. What?”
“No, I’m genuinely asking. Is there a term for that, aside from unavoidably obnoxious and disruptive if done in poorly soundproofed communal housing? They’re quite terrible, at any rate. You’ll hear them if you stay long enough.”
“What?” Thor says again. “Why are we suddenly talking about—”
“I am not changing the subject,” Loki says. “Some of my neighbors have formed what in other contexts would be called a garage band. I am not at all sure what the correct term is when the near-constant noisemaking sessions occur in shared housing rather than in the garage of a single-family dwelling. For that matter, is it still a house concert if it takes place in an apartment rather than a house?”
“I have no idea,” Thor says.
“Well. That is one disruption that’s been happening with some regularity.”
“I couldn’t help noticing some screaming children running through the hallway outside.”
“That is another one, yes. At times the people screaming are adults. I also mentioned poor soundproofing. Sometimes I can actually hear it when my neighbors flush their toilets, which I recognize is no one’s fault but the imbeciles who built this apartment complex, but it is certainly not restful. Am I beginning to paint a picture of the situation?”
“I thought you soundproofed your apartment pretty thoroughly already.”
“Keeping sound from going out is different from keeping sound from coming in. Actually alleviating the problem would require gaining access to every single apartment in this complex, which is not something I can realistically do, and even then I don’t think I would be able to fix things entirely.”
Thor considers. “Are you wearing a glamor?” he asks finally.
Loki leans back, frowning. “That’s your question? Why would I feel a need to glamor myself in my own apartment?”
“I don’t know,” Thor says, now surer than ever, because that wasn’t a denial. “Are you?”
Jor nudges Loki’s ear with what Thor supposes must be affection, or possibly concern, and Loki rolls his eyes. “I still fail to see the point of the question.”
“So that’s a yes then,” Thor says.
Loki’s brows draw together. He just looks at Thor, silent.
Thor shrugs and leans over to look at the drawings he spotted earlier. “These look like blueprints,” he says.
“Yes, I suppose they do,” Loki says.
“Of…” Thor tilts his head. “This floor? No. The entire housing area?”
“Congratulations, I didn’t know you knew anything about architectural notation.”
“I don’t, I was just guessing,” Thor says. “Why do you have blueprints of the housing area? Follow-up question: does it have anything to do with all of…this?”
Loki gives him a sort of sideways look. “Would you believe me if I said it didn’t?”
Thor thinks better of his first response, then his second, and finally says, “Probably not, to be honest, but I think we’re at a point where I’d decide it’s none of my business if you don’t want to tell me. Although I’d still be really, really curious.”
Loki blinks at him, his expression suggesting he just walked face-first into a wall. “Why, brother,” he says, recovering quickly, “that almost sounded like a declaration of trust.”
“Almost? Damn, here I thought I was being pretty clear. Yes, I do trust you, at least that you won’t do anything that would get New Asgard in trouble.”
“Wait, hold on,” Loki says, “you interrogated me about wearing a glamor inside my own front rooms, but you find me doing complicated magic by the detailed plans to this whole housing complex—which even a charitable interpretation would have to consider a little strange—and you decide that part is none of your business?”
Thor shrugs. “Honestly, Loki, I think it’s my right as a big brother to worry about you a little, and when it looks like you’re wearing a glamor I start wondering if you’re hiding something that would make me worry more, but aside from that type of thing it’s been a quite a while since you’ve done anything I’ve really had to worry about, you know? I mean—do you really not realize how much you’ve helped me with running things in New Asgard? Or even before that, on the Statesman?”
Loki drops his hands to his lap, staring, and Thor thinks guiltily of what a difference he could have made in their lives if he’d only thought to say something like this years ago. Nothing for it now, of course.
It’s Loki who breaks first, shifting his gaze away and clearing his throat. “Clearly I’m losing my touch and I need to put worms in your bed or something,” he says. He flicks his hand, dropping the glamor. There’s no dramatic change, but he’s paler, and there are dark smudges under his eyes.
Thor folds his arms. “See, now I feel like I was right to be concerned.”
Loki sighs. “It’s fine. I’m not sleeping well because my neighbors make too much noise, but I’m dealing with it.” He floats a medium-sized bowl away from one of his piles and settles it in front of himself. “What you see here is me dealing with it.”
Thor looks around again at the mess. “…really?”
“Let me tell you a story,” Loki says. “About two months ago I became aware of an intermittent beeping noise in my bedroom—not loud exactly, but loud enough to be extremely annoying during the day and keep me awake at night. I could muffle it, but not completely and not forever, so the only true solution was to make it stop. I eventually determined that the noise was a low-battery alert on my next-door neighbor’s bedroom smoke detector, which I found baffling, because I have heard these alerts myself and they are impossible to ignore—and yet my neighbor had done so for two full days and nights at this point. So I knocked on my neighbor’s door and asked him to please change the battery. He told me to fuck off. I informed property management—about the battery and the noise, not the rudeness—and they said it was not their problem, because tenants are responsible for maintaining their smoke detectors. I am actually not sure if that is true under New York City law, but at that point I was very tired of asking other people to fix things, so what do you suppose I did next?”
Thor squints at him. “That feels like a trick question.”
Loki sighs again. “What do you suppose, broadly speaking, I did about the problem?”
“You took matters into your own hands, although I’m a little afraid to ask how.”
“Exactly. Thank you. It was very simple and almost certainly not as diabolical as you’re thinking. You’re at least mildly familiar with the general properties of electrical systems on Midgard, I assume? Enough to know that they exist within the walls of most buildings?”
Thor rolls his eyes. “I’ve spent more time on Midgard than you have.” He doesn’t add that he’s accidentally destroyed quite a few electronic devices simply by virtue of having the powers of the storm, because Loki probably knows that.
“Debatable, actually, but I’ll accept it. My seidr is compatible with such systems on a very basic level, without requiring a great deal of knowledge on my part. So my seidr reached across the tiny gap between our walls and into my neighbor’s electrical grid, and I set a simple spell that made all the lights and electronics in his apartment dramatically flicker every time the smoke detector beeped. He fixed it within the hour.”
“And…he didn’t suspect you?”
“Of course he did, but he couldn’t prove anything, and what would he complain about? That he was forced to put a new battery in a device intended to save not just his life and home but those of the people living around him?”
“Right,” Thor says. “And the conclusion you drew from this encounter was that the most effective way to deal with unneighborly neighbors was to…what, make sure that whenever they’re obnoxious, something happens to annoy them as much as you’re annoyed, with the hope that their obnoxious behavior will stop?”
Loki’s smile shines with perfect innocence. “One might say I am enforcing consequences for anti-social behavior.”
“After asking them to stop, I imagine.”
“I mean, I’ve tried that a few times, but it never works.”
“So it’s a spell, right?” Thor says. “To make everyone’s lights flicker when they annoy you, or something?”
“It’s a little more elaborate than that,” Loki says.
“Enlighten me.”
A loud, rhythmic thumping begins directly overhead. Loki sighs. “At least it’s during the day this time.”
“Is that…a basketball?”
“Most likely. I admit I didn’t actually check, but it sounds that way, doesn’t it?” Loki shakes some herbs out of a bottle and begins methodically crushing them between his fingers. “So. This is the situation. I’m not sure if you were aware, but these housing levels weren’t always used for housing—I believe they used to be offices, although that’s not terribly relevant given that very little remains of the original infrastructure. At some point before we moved in, the idea was raised to turn these floors into very basic apartments. Tony Stark, because he cannot leave well enough alone, used the conversion project as a testing ground for some new ultra-lightweight soundproofing in the building materials and then, evidently, forgot he’d done so when he sold the building to SHIELD. So what you have is an incredibly expensive, cutting-edge skyscraper with absolutely abysmal soundproofing in one very specific area, which didn’t matter when we were the only ones living in it but began to matter very much as soon as SHIELD packed it full of rookie agents and, in several cases, their families.
“Now, I should note for the sake of fairness that Asgardians have better hearing than humans do and therefore need somewhat sturdier construction to keep the noises of their neighbors at bay, but I did some research into acceptable decibel levels of various activities in communal living spaces and I am comfortable saying the problem is not my overly sensitive hearing, at least not the majority of the time. Certainly it doesn’t help, but I fully believe a human in my situation would be equally frustrated. Or at least one might suppose a human to be frustrated at unusually high levels of noise, and understand from this experience the importance of attempting to keep all activity at a reasonable volume, but evidently one would be wrong. I suppose some people think the best solution is to produce enough noise in their own right to drown out everything else, and I suspect others do not think at all.”
“You’ve thought about this a lot, clearly,” Thor says.
Loki snaps off the tip of another plant and sprinkles all the bits into the bowl. “What else should I think about when I can’t concentrate on anything? Half the time I can barely hear myself think.” Thump, thump, thump goes the probable basketball. He plucks three petals from another bottle and arranges them in a star shape at the bottom of the bowl; in the middle goes a pinch of tiny black crystals. “And yes, before you ask, I am aware that ear plugs and noise-canceling headphones exist, but they only do so much, and one reaches a point of wanting to be more proactive.”
“By…creating consequences.”
“Just so.” Three short, stiff white hairs—or possibly whiskers—go in the bowl next, followed by a comically tiny tooth.
“Artificial consequences,” Thor points out.
“If I could rely on natural consequences, or even encourage natural consequences to materialize, I would. There are evidently no natural consequences to allowing one’s children to practice parkour in one’s apartment at three in the morning. Therefore, I am improvising.” He opens a bottle of something that looks and smells like tar and carefully pours three drops into the bowl.
“Other neighbors don’t get upset?” Thor says. “The owners don’t care?”
“Evidently not, or at least not enough to make it stop. It’s of course also possible that any complaints I make are ignored specifically because I am the one making them. Which is fair enough, I suppose, but it seems very strange to allow activities that have to damage the premises or at least irritate other residents, all for some petty revenge against someone you’re officially not fighting.” Loki begins carefully feeding ingredients into the bowl of fire: a tiny antler, a feather, a sprinkle of salt.
“Really?” Thor says. “You, of all people, are surprised by pettiness?”
“Surprised isn’t the right word.” Loki shrugs. “I actually have a theory that SHIELD deliberately packed this housing complex full of unpleasant, mostly young people for the sole purpose of tormenting me, but that seems a little conspiracy-minded even for me. On the other hand, they seem very unpleasantly determined to be bad neighbors out of general principles, to the point that it really does seem a little absurd that so many such charming people could be stuffed into one space by accident. So it’s completely possible someone made a deliberate choice in, say, the general age demographic and/or gender breakdown, knowing what would lead to a statistically significant proportion of tenants who engage in unneighborly behavior on a regular basis. And I certainly recognize that I didn’t make any friends the first time I came to this city, so I could respect anyone wanting a reckoning of me for that whole mess—”
“That’s not fair, everyone at SHIELD should know by now that you weren’t in control—”
“None of it was fair to them either, so as I said I respect it. It’s just that I can’t abide passive-aggressive behavior. And yes,” he adds when Thor says nothing but is apparently very loud about it, “there is a difference between sneaky, underhanded behavior and passive-aggressive behavior.”
“So there’s really not some kind of…no, I know there’s permanent magical soundproofing, we tested Father’s office at least twice, don’t you remember?”
“There are muffling spells that require active casting and therefore an ongoing drain on resources, yes,” Loki says. “Good for a private conversation; not as much for restful sleep. And there are enchantments that can be worked into rooms and buildings as they are being built. Much less effective with a finished room. But I’ve already done that, to the extent I could, and it wasn’t enough. I did buy some equipment to measure noise the human way because I wanted to be more or less fair, given that it isn’t anyone else’s fault I have superhuman senses—”
“Very mature of you,” Thor agrees, and to Loki’s venomous look, he protests, “I am being sincere! Mostly sincere? I…do realize that sounded sarcastic and unkind. It wasn’t how I meant it.”
“Bit patronizing, then,” Loki says, but he sounds like his hackles are down again, so Thor lets it go. “I am trying not to cause trouble without very good reason, you know. I’m well aware New Asgard can’t afford it and my tolerances are even narrower. But I also have limits, and one of them has to do with people being…”
OH MY GOD YOU SUCK GET OUT OF MY ROOM comes blaring through the wall at top volume. Thor winces. “Like that?”
“…un-neighborly. Yes.”
“You remember what we were like as children, though, don’t you? It’s only our good luck there was no one around to bother half the time and the palace was built for such things.”
“That was an adult.”
Thor blinks. “…are you sure?”
“A young adult, admittedly, but past the age of majority in all parts of Midgard, I believe, and speaking to a fellow legal adult. The screaming children, at least when they aren’t racing through the halls, typically come from the opposite direction. And no, I primarily blame their parents. I’m sure more normal buildings have excuses, but this one has recreational facilities. Good ones. Free ones, even. They don’t need to be, as far as I can tell,” he points to the left, “playing parkour off the walls and furniture—” he points up— “or playing basketball at 2 a.m., and they may not be mature enough to know better, but their parents are. The band, regrettably, is also composed entirely of legal adults.”
“What kinds of consequences are you creating, then?” Thor asks.
“Well, I thought about competing with my own barrage of sound, something conveyed directly into the mind of whichever person is causing an excess of noise so as not to exacerbate the problem for anyone else, but it occurred to me that in some cases the type of people who surround themselves with constant noise might not care about another layer of it, and others might respond counterproductively by increasing the volume of their own noise. So that idea had some appeal, but it seemed unlikely to work out.” He holds up a finger to Jormungand, who sort of presses its mouthparts to Loki’s knuckle and leaves behind a glob of…ooze. “Thank you.” Loki wipes the ooze into the middle bowl.
Thor decides he doesn’t want to know. “Won’t you run into a similar problem no matter what you do, if it’s anything along those lines?”
“Well, yes, there may be some trial and error involved,” Loki allows, “but at the very least I think I’ll enjoy experimenting with this method.”
“Which is what, exactly?”
“My next thought was extremely bad smells, again produced directly in the brain so there will be no effect on anyone not being unduly loud, and no possibility of getting used to the stench. Rotting garbage, dead fish, sewage, that sort of thing. The magic would have a bit of a personalized aspect to it, in case a particular scent isn’t upsetting enough to a particular person.” He taps a few different powders into the bowl and mixes them together with his finger. “Ideally, the noise stops because the culprit wants to find out what smells so bad, which they never will, but with enough repetition they should begin to associate their own production of unreasonably loud noise with a different assault on their own senses.”
“Or they might just get very loudly frustrated and tear apart their flat looking for the source of the smell.”
“Yes, but at least that would be funny.”
Well, Thor can’t argue with that.
“Anyway, I decided on something of a layered system, and one that will let me make adjustments. Flickering lights should work for most disruptions, but where they don’t, the spell will escalate to terrible smells—which, yes, may be counterproductive, but that is why this is an experiment. Rather than interact with the electrical system, the flickering lights will be produced directly in the offender’s brain, just as the smells will be if they reach that point. And there will be…built-in feedback of various kinds. I’ll be able to monitor what triggers the spell and how people respond, to some extent.”
“By spying on them.”
“If you want to put it that way. I don’t actually care enough to want details, so ideally the spell will provide just enough feedback to tell me what is and isn’t effective. It’s all a work in progress, as I keep saying.”
“Mm,” Thor says. “I can’t believe you’re literally planning to gaslight your neighbors into better behavior. Well, I can, that’s very you, but it’s very on the nose even for you, you know?”
“Well, if it works…” Loki shrugs. “Bit of a deep cut for you though, isn’t it? The origin of gaslighting?”
“Me? You’re the one who thinks Midgardian culture is silly.”
Loki writes something on a little curl of paper and drops it in the bowl of fire. “Not entirely true. I like knowing trivia about any subject so I can be pedantic about something at a moment’s notice. Anyway I’m not trying to convince people they’re insane, I’m just trying to irritate them into changing their behavior, so I’m actually not sure that does fit the literal definition of gaslighting.”
“But if they think they’re insane when they complain about flickering lights in front of a quiet person who is having no such difficulty, you wouldn’t exactly mind.”
“Well.” Loki smiles. “Yes, one might call that a side benefit. I suppose it still isn’t completely literal, given that we’re talking about electric lights rather than gas lamps, but I take your point.”
“You’re such a nerd,” Thor says, and Loki laughs out loud.
“Anyway, the spell has very specific parameters, you understand,” Loki says, adding a few drops of something that looks and smells like sour milk to his primary mixture. “The spell will activate only in the presence of intentional, sustained noise past a specific decibel level. I don’t want to be a bad neighbor.”
“So…the screaming children in the hallway, for instance,” Thor says. “How would your spell respond to that?”
Loki sighs. “It depends on multiple factors. Some children are simply too young to understand that their behavior affects others, for instance, and some are not readily controllable. But this is the former Stark Tower, for heaven’s sake. As I said, it has free recreational facilities only a few floors away. There is no excuse for the parents not to take their offspring there to burn off energy. So if the children are old enough to understand they are bothering other people, the spell will affect them and their parents. If they truly do not understand, it will only affect their parents.”
“So it works off intent?” Thor says. “And then that means there’s no collateral damage, right?”
“That is exactly the point, yes. Not that collateral damage is quite the phrase I would use for flickering lights and potentially bad smells—”
“Well, if it applies—”
“—but I am trying to influence behavior, so yes. Only the people engaging in the undesirable behavior will experience the negative consequences. Magic is handy like that.”
“But there’s a telepathic element, is what I mean.”
“Well,” Loki says, “I suppose. Very mildly. Not—mm. I don’t know if I would go as far as calling it telepathic. It stimulates the brain directly, yes, and it functions on basic intentions, but those aren’t conscious thoughts. I don’t think anyone on Asgard would consider this aspect a privacy concern, if you’re wondering that.”
“Well, I did wonder, yes—”
“Of course, no one on Asgard seems to consider Heimdall’s Sight a privacy concern either, so that may not be the most effective metric. But I did think about it, if that makes you feel any better. And I’m probably the only person on Asgard who independently considered Heimdall’s Sight to be a privacy concern in the first place.”
That is…probably true, for whatever that’s worth, if not particularly relevant at the moment. Honestly, Thor doesn’t care as much as he probably should, but he can guess SHIELD would care—which is also a little hypocritical, given that SHIELD surveillance would almost certainly extend at least as far as basic telepathic monitoring if they had the capability.
He does say, “You know that argument won’t go anywhere with SHIELD.”
“And I won’t use it on them. The idea is for them not to know in the first place. With enough repetition, even a very stupid human is likely to realize the unpleasant consequences only occur when they are behaving badly—objectively badly—and it’s rare that people want to admit to that. That, or they won’t complain about it at all for fear of sounding mad. Because it does sound mad, doesn’t it, to say that your apartment is haunted by terrible smalls but only when you happen to be making sustained noise above a specific decibel level?”
“Not that anyone except you is actually measuring decibels.”
“Yes, but I think most people have something of an innate grasp of such things.”
Thor looks at him sideways. “…of decibel levels?”
“As expressed in terms of tolerably loud and way too fucking loud, yes. That sort of thing is intuitive.”
“It seems like a great deal of effort that could go toward improving the insulation instead.”
Loki makes a displeased noise. “I told you, that doesn’t work. Well, there are things I could do, in theory, but I would need to cut holes in my walls and fill the space in between with…substances, which would be impossible to hide if anyone happened to go looking, and it would only be marginally effective at this point. Also, an argument could be made that by modifying behavior, I am benefitting anyone who might happen to live near these people in the future.”
“That’s very altruistic of you,” Thor says.
Loki rolls his eyes. “And I’m focusing on the option that allows me to punish some of the people making me miserable here. Give me a little credit for self-awareness. But the honest truth is that inconsiderate Midgardians and their shitty construction are too much for the kind of magical soundproofing I could do at this point. I really did try the other way first. I’m well aware trying to modify others’ behavior may be an exercise in futility. But the situation leaves me with one method for potential change, and even if it’s unsuccessful, it should at least be entertaining.”
“I suppose I can’t argue with that.”
“You really shouldn’t.”
“Are the other residents allowed to have parties?”
Loki’s eyes narrow. “You’re making fun of me. Are people in New Asgard allowed to have parties at all hours right outside your house?”
“…no.”
“Well then, it’s not that different, is it? Yes, people are allowed to have parties, within reason. I recognize some levels of noise and annoyance are inevitable in communal living spaces. Exceptionally loud or exceptionally late parties are not reasonable, and therefore they will trigger the spell. And yes, I recognize the other major difference, which is that you’re in charge in New Asgard and I am very much not in charge here, but there actually are quiet hours no one enforces, and I want to fucking sleep.”
Thor winces. “That’s…understandable. This doesn’t only run at night, though, correct?”
“Some activities and noise levels are unreasonable in apartments at any time of day or night. Possibly no one else is bothered, or, more likely, no one else can do anything about it. I can at least try to do something, or at any rate spread my frustration around, so I am going to.”
“And does the spell stick with the building or the inhabitants?”
For the first time, Loki looks a little shifty. “Possibly some of both.”
“That also seems vaguely unethical.”
“Well, the smell aspect relies on a bit of…customized illusion, which doesn’t require pulling anything from the subject’s mind exactly but does rely on a sort of aura they create with the spillover of repeated or surface thoughts. So things can get a tiny bit tangled. But I don’t think it’s a bad thing if obnoxious people end up carrying with them a reminder of some kind to be less obnoxious. And again, the spell is entirely based on intent and context.”
“Thoughtlessness implies lack of intent.”
“Lack of consideration. If a person is somehow genuinely unaware that others exist, the spell won’t activate. Any halfway-reasonable person could surmise that blasting drum circles past midnight in a housing complex with bad soundproofing will keep other occupants from sleeping. To continue doing so implies this theoretical person simply does not care. The spell responds accordingly. On the other hand, a small child in full meltdown is not aware of others to the same degree, or not yet capable of understanding why others could be upset, so the spell doesn’t activate against the child…but it might encourage the nearest responsible adult to take action.”
Something crashes into the near wall with enough force to shake the whole room, followed by a rush of thundering footsteps and another thud. Loki frowns down at his bowls, but when nothing spills from the shaking, he carries on mixing ingredients.
“Are they…literally bouncing off the walls?” Thor asks finally.
“And repeatedly climbing on and then jumping from tall pieces of furniture? It sounds that way, doesn’t it? I’ve never figured it out, so I’ve decided the children are attempting parkour, as I said. They will probably keep this up for another hour or so.” Another floor-shuddering bang.
“At night, too?”
“Oh, sometimes. They’re inconsistent.” Loki sprinkles some white powder into the mix. “When they’re not doing that, the adults like to turn the TV on very very loud.” He is interrupted by a different type of rattling bang, as if someone nearby has just slammed a door. “Or a lot of that.” The banging continues, perhaps 30 seconds apart, as if someone is repeatedly slamming a door for reasons Thor cannot begin to guess. He counts 15 slams before the noise finally stops.
“Did you ask SHIELD if there was anywhere else you could live?” he asks.
“Of course I did. There wasn’t. Or at least, there was nowhere else they were willing to offer me.”
“But—you staying in New York for now was supposed to be fine,” Thor says.
“It is fine. Thor, honestly, it is. This is a minor issue and I’m handling it. If they really wanted to make my life miserable, they could do a lot worse without breaching the terms of the agreement, believe me.”
“That doesn’t actually make me feel better!”
“Thor, my conspiracy theories aside, this isn’t anything organized. It’s not necessarily even deliberate, just a few assholes being bad neighbors, and I happen to be uniquely qualified at teaching them to regret their thoughtlessness, which can only benefit anyone who might live near them in the future. Also, I get to maintain plausible deniability, and so do they, if they want to. It’s a perfectly reasonable solution.”
“Right,” Thor says, “but how long has it taken to get to this point?”
Loki sighs. “A while.”
Thor rubs at his beard, making a conscious and truly heroic effort to swallow most of what he wants to say, which he recognizes would be largely unhelpful because it would come across as scolding Loki for something he can’t change now and acting like he can’t take care of himself in the first place. He does say, a little plaintively, “A long while?”
Loki looks at him sidelong. “Do you want to know the answer so you can be upset with me for not telling you or with yourself for not noticing?”
“Would it help if I promised to try really hard not to do either of those?”
“That means one or the other was still your first instinct, so...no, that’s not very comforting.” Loki shrugs. “Listen, Thor, I know what I did. I know what I signed. I’m not going to make things more difficult for you, or put you in the position of wanting to jeopardize the agreements we have because of a temporary inconvenience I was perfectly capable of handling. And very shortly it should be handled, in a plausibly deniable way, so it doesn’t matter anymore regardless.”
“And if it’s not handled?” Thor says, then raises his hands, wincing, because Loki’s answering glare isn’t quite fast enough to cover a flicker of resigned hurt. “No, I promise I’m not asking because I’m trying to poke holes in your plan or anything. I’m asking because I know you’ve thought about it.”
“I actually think I believe you,” Loki says after a moment. “As I said, I’m maintaining plausible deniability, more or less. If someone escalates—honestly, no, I don’t have a plan. Either I’ll improvise or I’ll put up with it because this is temporary.”
“I could start spending some nights here again and make a fuss about the noise level,” Thor says. “That’s plausible, right?”
“It might be,” Loki allows, although Thor’s pretty sure he won’t actually say anything if the problem continues, so he resolves to visit more anyway and find out. “I suppose I really don’t know how the construction quality compares to what other buildings use for the same purpose, beyond what I’ve been told, and I certainly wouldn’t mind being a little obnoxious to SHIELD in general if it meant an upgrade they should have provided already. But I would also rather take care of this on my own. You understand that, right?”
“No, I do,” Thor says. “But you understand that as a big brother, I have to do what I can to take care of my little brother at least once in a while, right?”
Loki rolls his eyes, but he doesn’t actually look upset, so Thor counts it as a win. “I suppose that’s all right occasionally.”
“That being said, I do think I have to point something out,” Thor says, because he can’t resist. “Normally, when people have an interpersonal problem, the only thing they can change is their own behavior.”
“Oh, please,” Loki says. “You’re a king. You grew up in a palace. You know that’s not true. Given enough wealth or power, anyone can force others to change their behavior. This is just a little more direct. Or indirect, I suppose, given that I’m not signing my name to it.”
“Could you convince the other residents to join you in demanding better housing?”
“What, a tenants’ union? I would actually love to make SHIELD’s life miserable until they upgrade the insulation, but no, I tried that too. It seems I have a slight credibility problem.” Loki blows out the fire and pours the resulting ashes into his central mixture of ingredients.
“...oh,” Thor says. “Well. You couldn’t...disguise yourself?”
“Not if I want to follow the terms of the lease. Have you really forgotten?”
Thor rubs at his forehead. “I’m sorry, Loki, it’s clear I really have been neglecting...everything to do with this situation. I actually did forget, I suppose because you were careful to keep it from becoming a problem before.”
Loki shrugs. “They left enough loopholes that I can keep to myself, mostly, and hide myself when I leave. Not enough to look like someone I’m not while interacting with anyone inside the building. I did try putting notes under a few doors, but that was either ignored or went poorly as soon as the residents realized who was asking. So—” He spreads his hands. “Sneaky, underhanded consequences.”
“It does seem like you’ve put a lot of thought into this,” Thor admits.
“Don’t pretend you’re surprised.” Loki finally seems to judge the mixture complete, although Thor can’t imagine what brings him to that conclusion. He pulls a small blue flame out of thin air and drops it above the bowl. The mixture heats up, parts of it melting and running together. It also starts to smell like hot plastic.
“Um,” Thor says, “is that safe to breathe?”
“No,” Loki says, closing his hand and extinguishing the flame, “which is why I’m not burning it.”
“You definitely heated it enough to release fumes.”
“Only a little.” Loki sticks his finger directly in the nasty mixture and stirs. “Don’t touch it, by the way.” Bits of it cling to his skin in a way that doesn’t look quite…right.
“Wasn’t planning to.”
Loki pulls a brush from somewhere, dips it in his potion, and begins making little marks on the blueprints at the doors and windows of each apartment, plus a careful thumbprint inside his own apartment. Finally, he spreads his hands over the blueprints and speaks a series of words in no language Thor recognizes, words that seem to come from very far away, as if his voice is reaching across a great distance. The markings on the blueprints all flare up in a bright green glow for a few seconds before subsiding.
“So that’s good, right?” Thor says.
Loki rolls his eyes. “I actually do know what I’m doing, yes.” He calls a funnel and a small glass bottle to his hand and puts away the potion remaining in the bowl.
“I know,” Thor says. “I’m only teasing. So will you have to do this all over again if you need to modify the spell?”
“Certainly not.” Loki rolls up the blueprints into a rubber band and makes the paper disappear. “I reopen the file, so to speak, with a new dot of ink on the blueprints, and the rest is mostly concentrating on the desired outcome. If the blueprints were destroyed, that would break the spell, but I still wouldn’t have to start over entirely because I have leftover ink.” He holds up the bottle and makes that vanish too. “I will admit this whole process may take some trial and error, but I don’t have a lot else to do with my time when I’m on this side of the Atlantic. I’ve been thinking about trying some other projects along similar lines, actually. It’s a good creative exercise.”
“Speaking strictly hypothetically, I’m sure,” Thor says, “given that you did seem to want to allow me some plausible deniability as well…?”
Loki waves a hand. “Of course. Purely theoretical. They really are just ideas at this point, anyway. Making them work is the tricky part.”
“Speaking hypothetically, I have to admit I’m interested in what kinds of ideas you might have.”
Loki brightens. “Well, littering is a plague in this city, and I’m sure there are a lot of theories for how to reduce it, but efforts at enforcement really tend to target the wrong people without making much of a dent in the problem. But if every careless litterbug found their garbage following them home—”
Thor barks out a laugh. “Seriously?”
“I’m certain it could be done. It would just take some time and effort to determine how to implement that sort of spell at scale. I’d start with a few neighborhoods, perhaps. Experiment with…varying levels of subtlety. In particular, I have some fun plans for people who regularly fail to pick up after their dogs. It’s civic-minded and entertaining. If I put up good enough numbers, SHIELD might even count it as community service. That presupposes there’s a way to quantify a reduction in littering, but I imagine I could think of something, if no one has already. Probably they have.”
“And…all of this,” Thor says, “you don’t think you’re…playing god a little too much? You know, in the way that’s unhealthy even for us?”
“If management were doing their job, I wouldn’t have to. It’s not my fault I have access to interventions others don’t. Although if you have a better idea, go ahead.”
“I suppose I don’t,” Thor admits. “What if people don’t get the hint, though? They just keep being loud while trying to figure out what smells so terrible and why the lights won’t stop flickering even after they change the lightbulbs?”
“It’s an unfortunate possibility, but at least then I won’t be the only one suffering.”
“That doesn’t actually improve your situation.”
“No, but it makes me feel better.”
Well, that’s fair, and Loki has certainly found less productive ways of making himself feel better in the past. So has Thor, if he’s actually being honest here. “They could trace this back to you, though,” he says. “SHIELD might not know much about magic, but they can guess easily enough even if they can’t prove anything. Plus they have contacts now who do know magic, and Dr. Strange already isn’t very fond of you.”
“Oh,” Loki says. “Yes, about that. You remember the time he overreacted to me pointing out some flaws in his security on the Time Stone and dropped me into the maw of a ravening eldritch horror from another dimension?”
“Little hard to forget,” Thor says, choosing not to argue with Loki’s generous characterization of his actions in the first half of that story, in part because his description of the second part isn’t even an exaggeration.
“Right, well, I gave him a new hairstyle as a bit of petty revenge, mostly just to make the point that I could—”
(Tentacles. The “new hairstyle” was tentacles. Thor remembers that part very clearly too. He had, more or less, managed not to laugh.)
“—and it would have worn off on its own eventually, but he got impatient and paid me a visit.”
Thor straightens. “Wait, I didn’t know about this. It would have been when I was still living here, right?”
“And it was fine,” Loki says, rolling his eyes. “He was mostly polite, so I said I’d fix his hair if he paid me back for the acid damage to the bathtub, and he agreed.”
“You only paid for half of that and it was my bathtub!”
“Yes, and the bruises and acid burns were on my body, and I couldn’t easily put a price on the physical injury or the experience of being eaten so I didn’t bother trying. The bathtub damage was concrete and humanizing. I think I was well within my rights to keep the whole payment as recompense for everything else.”
Thor raises his hands in surrender. “Fair enough.”
“Anyway, he hated that he hadn’t figured out how to undo it, and I was feeling a little more charitable because he’d paid me and also implied in a very sideways sort of way that I might have had a point about the Time Stone needing better security, so I showed him how I’d done that trick on his hair instead of just fixing it. He picked it up pretty quickly then. I said he should come ask for my advice next time he encountered a magical problem he couldn’t solve, mostly just to be a prick, but he said he might, probably just to call my bluff. And then he did, a while later, after you were gone most of the time—”
“Dr. Strange came all the way over here to visit you just to talk about magic? Loki. Did you make a friend?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. He arrived during ‘band practice’ and expressed sympathies. Evidently it’s been quite some time since he’s been in a similar living situation but he remembers a great deal from his younger years, and he hinted that he might not be completely responsible with his magic now if he were to find himself in such a situation again. So I rather think he wouldn’t be eager to cause me trouble on that account at least.”
“Right,” Thor says. “Have you…compared notes on magic since then, or anything?”
“Certainly not here.”
“Wait, does that mean you’ve visited the Sanctum again? Like, with an invitation and everything?”
Loki looks at him sideways, as if sure he is being mocked but not certain how. “Once or twice.”
“You are making a friend!” Thor says, unable to hold back his smile.
Loki scowls at him. “I occasionally tolerate his existence and he occasionally tolerates mine.”
“By your standards that is friendship.” Honestly, Thor doesn’t know why he’s surprised. Most of the warriors he knows became friends by—not despite—beating the stuffing out of each other, so maybe it’s only natural for something like this to have the same effect for the magically inclined, even if Loki was always more the type to hold grudges. Then again, he could be very pragmatic about his alliances when he chose to be.
“Well, it’s not relevant,” Loki says, still glaring, which means he doesn’t have an argument in return.
“Okay.”
“What,” Loki says suspiciously.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You’re smiling at me for no reason.”
Thor shakes his head, not bothering to suppress his fond grin. “I’ve just missed you.” He doesn’t say that he thought for years this version of Loki was dead and gone, stripped away by decades of bitterness and loneliness, hardened by everything he’d suffered since he fell from the Bifrost. Somehow, unexpectedly, Thor’s found him again all at once—angry at his neighbors, yes, but he’s being dramatic and creative and sort of pro-social about it, even connecting with others, not falling into a destructive spiral. Making mischief, not mayhem.
“You see me almost every day.”
“And I deeply appreciate your help running New Asgard, but—as much as I’ll deny it if you tell anyone—I’ve missed you taking the most complicated possible route to being a mischievous little shit too.”
“Oh,” Loki says innocently, “should I take that as permission to begin making life more interesting in New Asgard too?”
Thor pats his shoulder. “Please try to contain yourself at least a little, because Val actually will kill you.”