Rise (Loki Fanfiction)

Chapter 10

They practiced for a few more hours before calling it a day. From what they understood, and what Thanos had quietly explained to Loki, she could manipulate gravity just enough to float and use the gravitational pull of other things to move, just the way in which an asteroid swung around a planet. Her ability to stabilize things allowed her to keep her gravitational disruption from affecting anything else. With a better understanding, they went home and to bed.

Loki's woke to the click of Terra's nails on her keyboard. He stretched slowly and shuffled to her side of the bed. "Morning." He yawned.

She sipped her coffee and wrote something down, frowning deeply at the computer screen. Her hand dropped the pen to rest lightly on his head. He closed his eyes and sighed.

"Job applications?"

"Stumbled on something weird." She slid her notebook onto his head and tapped it. "Look at this."

Glaring at the notebook, Loki pushed it off. "Tired. Read it."

"It's about SHIELD." She tried. He didn't move. Sighing, she picked it up. "So I'm on Newsroom and there's always those crappy looking articles at the bottom, right? There's this one that's like 'the big secret Obama's keeping from you' and I'm not a huge fan of the man. So whatever, I clicked." She clicked around for a moment.

"It talks about there being like a secret organization operating under the front of one with the same name. Public SHIELD is like a subgroup of the CIA that actually does the investigating and apprehending of criminals. Private SHIELD is practically Area 51 and global threats central. So I looked around a bit. Guess who started SHIELD?"

"Hm?"

"Howard Stark! Tony Stark's dad!" Loki looked up at her, his brows raised. "Tony Stark? The billionaire? Iron man?"

"I don't have cable or internet."

"Oh my god." She typed something quickly and then turned the screen to face him. "Stark Tower."

"Oh I saw that in New York."

"Jeez. Anyway, he started SHIELD after World War Two when this splinter Nazi group formed called Hydra? They were crazier than Hitler supposedly, doubt it but whatever, and had this artifact called - dun dun dun - the Tesseract!"

"I see." Loki sat up, rubbing the sleep from his eyes and peering curiously at the computer. "Now you have my interest."

"Finally! This is all in the era of Steve Rogers." She made sure he understood that. He nodded.

"I went to the museum."

"I love him so much. They're fighting Hydra and Hitler and then Steve went down because he was trying to get the Tesseract away from them and stop them from killing everyone but he was lost and the Tesseract dropped into the ocean. Howard Stark found it. And guess who has it?"

"SHIELD." Loki murmured, glancing down at her notebook. "What's this?"

"Just notes. There's loads of theories about where they have it but most say it's in New York, in a NASA testing facility. Other than Goddard, there's none in New York but Goddard is too well known to be it. So it's gotta be a quiet, tiny research base right? There's a blog where someone is like all into this stuff and they went to this facility they found? Never heard from again. The blog's been taken down but people copied it. And we have a basic area."

He raised his brows, surprised by her dedication. "Why did you do all this work?"

"I was just sorta curious but one thing led to another and then I just didn't feel like stopping." She shrugged.