Revengers Unsolved

Part two in The Sun series. Crack fic inspired by Buzzfeed Unsolved, because why not, right?

“Dee-mohn? Demon.”

“Loki, shut the fuck up.”

“Demon!”

“Oh my god.”

Bruce rubs a hand over his face. Thor puts a hand on his brother’s shoulder, but he doesn’t get the message. Behind the phone, Valkyrie knocks back a redbull and snickers, which only gets her an exasperated look from Thor.

“I just want to talk to the demons,” Loki says, brushing his brother’s hand away. He takes a step forward and folds his arms behind him. 

Valkyrie tries to hold back her laughter. After all, this stream has around four million viewers and she doesn’t want to wash out the Odinsons’ voices while they’re being idiots.

“I don’t know if any of you know Captain America, but word has it he’s quite old by Midgardian years,” Loki says. “Maybe a few of you spent a night of revelry with him then.”

Bruce, who’s been holding back on commentary out of respect for Thor wanting to honor the souls of the dead, starts wheezing into his fist. 

“But he said we shouldn’t talk to you,” Loki says, and then puts a dramatic hand over his skeptic-leaning heart. “I think you guys are, what’s the word I’m looking for here to really drive the punch in - I think you guys are swell.”

“Stop talking!” Thor is waving his arms around like a bird now, but Loki’s back is turned to him.

He doesn’t stop talking. 

Instead he turns off his flashlight and sets it on the kitchen counter a few ways off from him. Valkyrie immediately moves to get a good shot of it as Loki moves away. 

“If you’re welcoming of our presence here, turn the light on,” she says, immediately picking up on the idea. The look of betrayal that flashes across Thor’s face nearly makes her break her already fragile control on the urge to let out a hearty guffaw.

The man eyes the flashlight warily for five minutes. 

“If you’re not welcoming of us, turn it on,” Loki says.

The flashlight, with no spark of energy or fanfare around it, turns on.

Thor immediately takes a step back, arms raised in a fighting stance, as he lets out a surprised noise. Loki throws his head back and laughs, which is what breaks Valkyrie’s self-control and has her shaking with her own laughter. 

The stream chat is going wild when she checks back a few minutes later. Loki is still laughing, leaning on a wall to support himself while Thor is looking horrified between him and the flashlight. 

“Can you turn it off, please?” Valkyrie calls out. “For Thor’s sake?”

Thor gives her another dirty look at that, but his attention turns back to the flashlight, which is gradually and slowly dimming.

“Try, please,” Valkyrie says, when it seems to struggle, flickering between getting brighter and dimmer. 

The flashlight turns off. 

Thor pinches the bridge of his nose. 

Loki, still wheezing, pushes himself off the wall and straightens out his jacket in an effort to make himself calm down. 

He turns to everyone else with a look on his face that says he's about to make the situation even worse than it already is. 

“I’ve read from the old website that the basement is a portal to Hel,” he says, “Or, Hell, I think there’s a distinction.”

“No,” Thor says, not to his statement, but to the whole thing in general.

Loki turns to the camera. Valkyrie obligingly zooms in.

“I think we should go downstairs.”

-

It is something that Valkyrie initially finds confounding, but eventually comes to accept as having a point, although deep in her mind, she thinks Loki has his own reasons for his opinions on things.

He does not believe in ghosts.

No, scratch that, he does not believe that fragments and remnants of a mortal soul remain in the living world after the body has perished. 

He knows what Valhalla and Hel are, believes in them, in fact, but he just doesn’t quite agree with the Midgardian take on the afterlife, being that you either go to one of these places or you get stuck in the mortal coil to ‘haunt’ people, especially if you had unfinished business or died violent deaths. If that were the case, then a whole lot of his fathers’ enemies and unjustly-slain victims would have owned the old man’s ass a long time ago.

So, yes, Valkyrie can see exactly why he thinks that, but that doesn’t mean she subscribes to that line of thinking. Loki doesn’t bother her for it like she doesn’t bother him for thinking his version of things. 

Bruce is what the Midgardians call a scientist, and in his line of work, there is science as an explanation on things, and not much else. Even the world of aliens and magic and infinity stones are all things that can be explained by science, to him; they just haven’t found a way to take everything apart and label them yet, but if there’s a system, they’ll find it, sooner or later. 

Unlike Loki, he doesn’t believe in Valhalla, or Hel, and that’s fine too. He doesn’t bother Valkyrie and Loki about their opinions and they don’t bother him with theirs.

And Thor, he believes in Valhalla, he believes in Hel, and he’s listened to humans talk about ghosts and hauntings and demons and can see why they believe in those things. It’s not outside of the realm of possibility, and who is he to say that it is not, just because he doesn’t believe in them? But he does, like how people who cautiously avoid looking at large, looming, ancient trees when passing by them, or like how people avoid fairy rings and leave out bread and milk for luck.

(Although, Valkyrie thinks, that maybe, just maybe, he thinks this on the off chance that perhaps, in a dark corner or a glimpse at a mirror, he will see a fond face he has not seen in a long time; it’s the same reason why he believes so much in the other side of death otherwise what else would he be holding on for, if he cannot even see his mother after he passes? If he cannot see even his father, flawed as he might have been?

And she gets it, she really does. Because what else does she have to hold on to if she’s not even going to see everyone she’s lost when she’s finished her run here?)

So when they realize that one of the best tourist attractions in Midgard are haunted spectacles, they pack their bags and take videos and photos to preserve the memory. For the sake of a couple of good laughs, Harley Keener, Peter Parker and Morgan Stark edit some of these and post it online, mostly because it’s Thor and Bruce and Valkyrie messing around in haunted places. 

It’s a surprising thing to learn, though, that one other thing that people on the internet love just as much as they love superheroes, are agents of chaos.

-

There is a faded mark on the basement floor. Valkyrie reads from Bruce’s phone, which he’s held up for her to catch on camera, that that used to be a spot where there was a pentagram.

Thor knows the gist of what pentagrams are, and Valkyrie’s pretty sure that what he’s heard is wrong, but she’s not very well-versed on it either so she doesn’t want to misinform him.  She just watches him take a small step back from the mark, not afraid, but not wanting to cause any altercation with any ghoul it might summon either. 

It’s fair that he’s just wary of any fights that might break out. Valkyrie motions to the black stain as she turns the camera to it. She looks up at Loki. 

“You wanna lay on the pentagram?”

Loki smiles. Thor puts his face in his hands. 

Of course he does.

“Stop encouraging him.”

Loki lays down on the pentagram. 

Thor paces a few feet away from him, looking like he’s seconds away from grabbing his brother and dragging him away from it, but is only refraining from doing so because he knows his brother does not appreciate physical contact past a certain threshold and a limited amount of time. Bruce’s eyebrows have hiked up as high as they can go, which makes for a comical sight given that he’s hunched over to fit in the basement. Valkyrie just raises her redbull and shakes it in a small cheer. 

“No!” Thor says. 

Loki throws both his hands up and points finger guns at the ceiling. “Rock and roll, buckaroo!”

Bruce slaps a hand over his mouth and laughs. “Where did you even learn that?”

“Peter,” Loki says, raising his head for a moment to throw the camera a small salute. 

“Ah.”

On the chat box, Peter Parker spams a line of waving emojis.

“You’ve lost your mind,” Thor says, pausing in his pacing. He turns to the camera and points at it, face set in a serious expression. “Do not do this if you find a pentagram.”

“Do it.”

“Loki!”

“If you want to eat my heart - ” Loki pulls out the same flashlight he’d put on the sink upstairs earlier, waves it for a moment, and sets it on his chest. It’s off. “Turn the flashlight on.”

Thor crosses his arms, disapproving. Loki’s been back for only about two years and a half, and Thor isn’t looking to lose him in any possible way for the foreseeable future, especially not to a demon in a basement. 

Loki motions a hand towards his brother. “If you want to eat Thor’s heart - ”

Thor raises an eyebrow.

“Turn the light on.”

“I fear for your safety, but at the same time, don’t rope me into your shit.”

“We’re a package deal now,” Loki says, which would be heartwarming in any other situation, but not here. Here, Thor just kicks his leg and Loki snickers. The flashlight rolls off his chest and outside of the pentagram. 

“We’re a package deal, deal with it,” Loki says, and shouts again. “Demon, if you want to eat my brother’s heart out, turn the light on.”

The light turns on.

Thor kicks the flashlight away, and it smashes into the wall in a shower of plastic fragments. Loki sits up immediately and curls over, clutching his stomach in laughter. He stands up, slowly, arms shaky from how much he’s laughing, and pats the dust off his back.

“You didn’t have to kick the flashlight. It’s a flashlight, it turns on and off, it’s what it’s made to do,” he says. 

“It did so after you asked a demon to turn it on,” Thor says. 

“The switch could have moved when it fell off me,” Loki says. He turns to Bruce. “Do we have another flashlight?”

Bruce reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small, thin cylinder. He tosses it to Loki, who immediately tests it. It works. 

“Perfect, thank you,” Loki says. “To everyone watching, I apologize for my brother being an idiot.”

“I apologize for Loki setting a poor example on how to respect the souls of the departed.”

“Ghosts aren’t real,” Loki says, “The departed are real, just not ghosts.”

“They are.”

“They’re not.”

“They are.”

“They’re not.”

“They absolutely are and you just laid on a pentagram,” Thor says. He takes a step away as he motions to the black stain that Loki is still standing on. Just to be petty, Loki remains there and puts his hands on his hips, careful not to drop the flashlight. 

“They’re not - Valkyrie, can you get everyone closer?” Loki motions for the camera, and Valkyrie obliges, handing him the phone so she can drink out from her Redbull can again.

“Listen to me,” Loki says. 

“Don’t,” Thor says.

Loki grins, so wide and mirthful that for just a second Valkyrie forgets they’re all just goofing off, because she sees Thor’s stern expression falter into one of surprise, like he’s never seen his brother be this carefree in a long, long while, and it’s hitting him like a sucker punch. 

Valkyrie doesn’t know the Odinsons that well. She only knows how they were when they met in Sakaar, and everything after that. She’s heard about their problems, but that’s about it. 

She doesn’t know how it feels to be like Thor, to see your brother be happy for the first time in millenia, but she does feel that happiness that springs up every time she sees one of her friends do well for themselves.

Loki grins at the camera, not a care in the world, and says, “Ghosts aren’t real.”

-

The videos get on the sparse and still-reviving platform of YouTube and blow up, although the four of them only know this the next time they drop by the lobby of the Avengers tower and Peter runs to them to show them the videos. 

Thor laughs, even if it's a little disapprovingly. Valkyrie and Bruce are amused. 

Loki is surprised. 

“People just like chaotic evils,” Peter says, “Not that, uh.”

“I get it, I've played,” Thor says. 

“They enjoying my galavanting around, taunting what they think are dangerous and real?” Loki asks. 

“I feel like you do that on a daily basis,” Valkyrie says. 

“He used to,” Thor says. “These days, he's still relearning.” The tone he uses is disappointed, but undeniably fond. 

Loki smiles, if only for a split second. 

“Are you planning on going anywhere else next?” Peter asks. 

“Not soon,” Thor says. “There's still the monthly report to be done, so we're not going anywhere for the next few weeks.”

“But maybe after that,” Loki says. 

Peter's eyes light up. Thor raises an eyebrow. 

The videos blow up and eventually turn from cropped, exaggerated edits to full (albeit still dramatically edited) episodes. The internet gets twice as active again (since… well, half the populace has come back to use it),  and with it, the attention to their poor choices rises. 

Every now and then, one of the kids sends them screenshotted posts. Thor laughs even if he's still disapproving. Valkyrie and Bruce are still amused but let it be, not that there’s anything they can do to really stop it.

Loki is baffled, at which no one comments on out of respect for the fact that he wouldn't like that, given how quickly he clams up when it comes to his emotions and ideas of his self worth. 

He makes accounts and follows people and checks regularly for a good laugh whenever he gets too alone in his own head. No one comments on that either. 

They let him have it. He's not universally accepted and no one expects him to be, given the New York Invasion of 2012, but there are people who are starting to accept him, whether it be from Thor, Bruce and Valkyrie vouching for him, press photos of him hanging around the Avengers Tower and just about everywhere and not destroying anything, and this new strange thing that should be done by a couple of Midgardian twenty-somethings instead of one gamma radiated scientist and three aliens. 

Loki doesn't value a lot of people's opinions, but that doesn't mean a small word of appreciation doesn't go a long way, every now and then. 

So they go around looking for ghosts and demons and record it and send it to the kids, who put it together however they want and put it up for people to laugh at. Once in a while, after they figure things out, they stream. It's a fun gig. 

-

“You may not like this, I'm going to try and agitate it,” Loki says, carefully holding up a STARK Go Pro in one hand while fiddling with the light strapped to his chest in the other. 

“Don't,” Thor says. He looks to Valkyrie, who notices that Bruce is aiming his camera at them, and who immediately breaks out a smile just to be cheeky. 

Thor sighs. 

“Okay,” Valkyrie says, motioning for Loki to take the floor. 

“Bruce,” Thor says, pleading. 

“Don't look at me, I'm just the history guy in this team,” he says. He’s the only Midgardian, do he’s the only history guy they have in this situation, really.

“Tell him to stop talking.”

Bruce snorts. “Buddy, if you can't tell him to stop talking, no one can.”

Loki just points to the camera, right as Bruce pans it to him, and winks at it, ever the theatric. Then he straightens and takes in a breath. 

“Fuck you, Goatman.”

Thor tries not to scream. 

-

The kids love it. Pepper isn't too happy with Morgan watching videos of people cursing (Loki mostly, at ghosts and demons) but there's not much she can do when Morgan really wants to watch the episodes and is willing to break through her father's firewalls for it. 

Peter and Harley aren't enabling her but they're not stopping her either. 

(“Can we really?” both boys said once, when Pepper asked them to. They had a point and she'd acknowledged it and then had them both code new measures that Morgan only saw as a challenge to take down and proceeded to do so.)

A few others watch it too. Scott loves it. Sam thinks it's absolutely batshit hilarious. Bucky finishes off a few churros to an ep on his phone sometimes. Shuri has offered to give them drones and motion sensors. The support feels nice, since they’re all effectively just mucking around not knowing what they’re doing.

It’s nice to know that some of the members of the team are fine with their contained chaos. Or, okay, maybe not The Team. Thor has been a part of the Avengers for years but he hasn't been around that much at all. In fact, he'd mostly been on Asgard when it was still around, he'd solved the Malekith problem with other people, and the only times he'd been with the team were on three missions - New York, Ultron and Thanos. 

And then he'd holed himself away in New Asgard after Thanos. That was it. 

Bruce has similarly fallen out of touch too, and if anyone asked him who his best connection in the team is, it’s Tony, who's already retired. Nat is mostly an awkward friend, these days, but that's fine. The distance is actually good for them, for now. Maybe they'll reconnect in later years, maybe they won't, but that's for later to figure out, not now. 

Valkyrie doesn't even know the Avengers. She's fought with them once but that's about it. 

Most of them hate Loki's guts, which isn't undeserved. 

If any of them have to be honest, they've bonded more with each other than with the Avengers, and not through anyone's fault (it was mostly Hela’s, the Grandmaster’s and Thanos’). They feel more like a team than the actual team, which is sad but it's not really any loss. It's not like they're on bad terms (save Loki) with the others

They're on okay terms. That's not too bad. 

Thor and Bruce go to the monthly meetings, and Valkyrie and Loki either go around New Asgard to talk to the civilians or stay home playing games with Korg.  That's okay too. 

A lot of life right now, picking up the pieces from a war that's devastated and reformed literal civilizations, is just ‘okay’ right now. Not great. Not stellar. Just okay.  

So sometimes, they attend UN meetings and make public speeches with coworkers they've fought with and go ghost hunting with friends.  It’s not always them having a linear, upward trajectory when it came to putting their lives back together and on track. Sometimes it was just them sitting around or doing stupid things like attempting to contact the dead to flip them off. And it's fun. They have fun. They're happy with what they're doing, as absolutely ridiculous it is, grown adults genuinely arguing the existence of ghosts and demons and taunting said ghosts and demons in an effort to prove one side wrong. 

But that's okay too. 

-

“I mean, we can't use the hashtag ‘Avengers’, because it's not the whole team,” Peter says one day, hunched over a laptop while organizing another streaming party. “Do you guys have a squad name?”

“Squad Asgard?” Harley suggests. 

Morgan makes a face. 

Harley acquiesces. “Yeah, tacky. And Dr. Banner isn't Asgardian, so that's unfair.”

Bruce just shrugs. 

“I think I'd be fine with most things,” Valkyrie says. “Loki?”

“I'm opting out until I have to step in,” Loki says.

“I'll name this Squad Asgard if we get nothing,” Peter says. 

“Not enough to step in on.”

“It's tacky!” Morgan says. 

“But not tacky enough to be hideous.”

The door slides open, Thor stepping in with Korg on the phone. He's just saying goodbye, giving advice on fixing the plumbing in the house. 

Morgan turns to him. 

“Uncle Thor, you guys need a team name for your stream.”

Thor pockets his phone and tilts his head in confusion. 

“We already have a team name,” he says. 

And just like that, it clicks. At least, for the four of them. Valkyrie hums thoughtfully. “Oh, we do, don’t we?”

Bruce closes his eyes. 

“Oh no.”

Loki just laughs.