Title: Bringing the Party to You

Warnings: Crack, crack, and more crack, aliens acting like immature manchildren, language, recreational use of drugs, passing reference to cruelty to animals, comedic humiliation.
Spoilers: Avengers movie.

Author's Notes:

Why do I even pretend to be a serious author any more? *facepalm*

But seriously, after last week's updates to Syrgja and Drown, I was feeling the intense need to curl up in a ball somewhere and cry. Instead, I wrote this. Take warning.

Loki fell.

It was a long, long descent, long enough for him to overcome the primal instinctive terror of falling and begin to wonder where the gravity was coming from, since there were no planets or stars or anything else to relieve the unrelenting nothingness of the void. Or perhaps the gravity had shut off after he passed from Asgard's local space, and now he was only traveling on pure momentum? Except that Asgard's gravity ought to have pulled him backtowards Asgard, not away from it -

Then again, maybe he should stop expecting the laws of classical physics to apply to a body of land that hung unsupported in the sky and yet still managed to maintain an atmosphere.

At last, though, even an endless fall must end, and Loki found himself tumbling down onto an bleak and featureless plain dotted with mountains and ravines, and slammed into the ground with such unspeakable agony that Loki had to open his mouth and speak about it.

"Oh, Norns," he gasped, since as a god it would be impolite to swear on himself but at moments like this you just had to curse by something. "-I think I fell on my keys."

Figures loomed up against the stark sky, and Loki blinked away the fuzziness to focus on them. His first view was not particularly encouraging; he was surrounded by a group of malodorous, ill-groomed humanoids with greasy gray skin and ragged clothing. Their faces leered down at him with what might, accounting for the differences in their facial features, be considered a smile.

All in all, Loki couldn't think of a less encouraging sight to open his eyes too, and that counted the time he'd bedded a horse.

"Well, well," the tallest one - leader - sneered at him. The All-tongue conveniently translated for him, despite the fact that there was really no reason why that should work. "What do we have here?"

"Looks like fresh meat to me," one of the others said in a harsh, gravelly voice. The entire group burst out into hoots and cackles.

"Well, you know what we do with fresh meat," the first one said, then jerked his whatever passed for a chin in Loki's direction. "Take him away, boys!"

Before Loki could summon the strength to protest, half a dozen multifingered hands seized him from every side and dragged him away. The jostling and uneven pace of his captors left him feeling more than a little carsick, and the nausea combined with the stunned exhaustion from his fall left him helpless to fight back against them.

His armor and clothing were shredded and torn off him with rather embarrassing ease on the part of his captor - he would have thought all those extra straps and buckles would at least have slowed them down a bit, unless of course they were entirely decorative and served no useful purpose at all.

Then a hot, viscous substance was being poured directly onto the bare skin of his legs, and Loki found his voice at last. Or possibly the voice of a ten-year-old-girl, since the shriek that came out of his mouth when the wax strips were abruptly seized and pulled off, yanking the hair with them, could not have belonged to anyone else.

At last the ordeal was over, and the aliens shoved Loki onto his stumbling feet. They dragged him by the arms across the broken terrain, his bare feet breaking painfully on the rough ground (and his newly bare legs feelingsurprisingly sensual.) A gauntlet of some sort had formed up before him, blurry in his streaming eyes, and a heavy shadow loomed up behind him to slam something painfully down on the top of his head.

"Here's your hat, fresh meat!" a jeering voice said behind him, and Loki shook his head to clear it as a trickle of sticky, viscous liquid streamed down across his face from his hairline. Loki put out a tentative tongue and gingerly touched it to the warm liquid. Oddly enough, it tasted like chicken.

"Now, fresh meat, you walk the gauntlet," the leader told him. Swaying on his feet, Loki looked up to see a wide double row of the aliens forming up before them. Each of them bore what looked like long, flexible rods in their hands, sheening with some unknown liquid, and the faces that turned towards him bore similar, disturbingly sadistic grins.

Loki had only slightly less desire to walk into that as he did to clean Asgard's latrines after a taco night, but cruelly-clawed hands gripped the top of his arms and shoved him forward. He stumbled between the first pair of aliens, and long thin strips came whistling down on him to strike his back and shoulders. They closed behind him as he blundered onwards, and there was nowhere else to go but forward.

The aliens stamped and hooted and jeered as Loki stumbled drunkenly along the gauntlet, and the cloth strips had been soaked in some foul-smelling liquid that burned like fire in the welts they left behind. Loki had never known such pain in all of his long, eventful life, and the agony brought sobbing tears to his eyes. Clearly, these sadistic aliens meant to torture him past the limits of his endurance, and then once his will was broken they would set him up as a puppet general and send him on an elaborate errand to conquer a planet for them, or something like that. There was no other possible explanation.

At last, though, he reached the end of the row and stood, panting and swaying on his feet. When no fresh torments assailed him for the moment, he reached up and fumbled the heavy, hot weight off his head. It squished somewhat under his fingers, leaving behind sticky streaks as he handled it, and Loki stared as he held up what appeared to be a naked dead chicken.

The leader alien from before appeared before him, surrounded on all sides by the others gathered with great interest to watch. Before Loki could flinch away, he reached out and laid his filthy, multi-fingered hands gently on Loki's shoulders.

"Welcome, brother," the alien solemnly intoned. "You are Fresh Meat no longer. You've passed the trial; you've a place in the Chi Tau Rho Alpha Fraternity House. That's XTRA," he seemed compelled to add, "because, like, we'rextra rad, right, and xtra hardcore. And you, bro, are now one of us."

"And..." Loki at last found his voice, and had to cough to clear his throat before he could ask. "And what happens now?"

"Now?" The Chitauri's face split into a wide grin, echoed on the faces of all the others standing in ranks behind him. "Now we party, dude!"

Over the next months, Loki quickly made himself at home among the Chi Tau Rho Alpha - or the Chitauri, as they nicknamed themselves. The days passed in a blur of drinking, bear-baiting, more drinking, cockfighting, getting high, dogfighting, competition projectile vomiting, and table tennis.

Despite being of an alien race, once he'd passed the initial trial his new brothers accepted him readily enough. Loki had never known such unconditional acceptance in all his years in Asgard, and quickly became attached to his new home, even if the chapter house of the XTRA was, to put it as diplomatically as possible, xtra squalid.

Not that anyone was in much of a mood to notice, not after a long day of buzzing the merchant shipping lanes on their symbiotic space cetacean sidecars (a practice the brothers referred to as the Full Moon.) Loki and half-a dozen of his brothers were currently sprawled in various conformations around the common room sofa (there was actually a free space on the furniture if Loki had preferred it, but the cushions were putrescent enough that the floor was actually the preferable option. (The Chitauri made a bad habit of designating any nearby available surface as an appropriate storage place for refuse, uneaten food, and dirty clothing - (or rather, dirtier clothing, since to get to a state where the brothers were unwilling to wear it the clothing had to be odiferous indeed.) ) )

On the other hand, after consuming enough of what his chapter-brothers referred to as dagga, even watching the cockroaches crawl up the opposite wall was unbelievably mesmerizing.

On the other side of the sofa, The Gobfather was moaning to his companions Carbrorator and Piss Stick (the Chitauri had introduced themselves to Loki in a series of unintelligible alien hisses and clicks, but for some reason the All-Tongue insisted on translating their names in this manner) the trials of his ongoing attempts to secure a suitable venue for the fraternity's annual Equinox getaway.

"...and now we're banned from holding the XTRA-Epic-Equinox-Entertainment Bash on Chandilar for the next fifteen hundred years," Gobfather concluded bitterly. "Just because we broke one or two of their cities last time. Fuckin a, man, those guys are such squares."

Loki and the others made appropriate noises of sympathy. Carbrorator roused himself enough to ask, "But then where are we gonna go for the bash this year, if not to Chandilar?"

"I dunno, man," Gobfather moaned. "That's the third planet to ban us this decade. We're running out of star systems that haven't blacklisted us, the fuckin' losers."

Dispirited groans all around. Seeing an opportunity to make a contribution, Loki roused himself enough to lift his head off the floor. "Why not go to Midgard, then?" he asked.

"Never heard of it, dude," Gobfather said, and "Where the hell's that?" Piss Stick wanted to know.

"A planet that calls itself Earth, in the same probability cluster as my home," Loki explained. "My family has long used it as both an escape from the tedium of ruling and as a staging area for adventures. All of the finest revelries are held on Midgard."

"Yeah, dude, but do they have booze?" Carbrorator asked.

"Prodigious amounts," Loki said. "Enough to float a space whale."

"Do they have chicks?" Piss Stick demanded. "Because we can't go to a planet that doesn't have chicks, man."

"Let me tell you about the women of Midgard," Loki said, attempting to push himself into a sitting position in order to properly relate his tale. "I have... I have lain with so many women of Midgard, let me tell you. So many. They come in a neverending variety of shapes, temperaments, and colors, and are always so happy to open their doors to the gods of Asgard."

Carbrorator made a deeply disgusted sound in the back of his throat, or one of them at least. "Get out of here, Twin Dick. You did no such thing."

"I did," Loki said, stung by the use of the rapidly-becoming-familiar nickname. He should never have showed them his old helmet. "I tell you, they have everything on Midgard. Every imaginable perversion, and then some that you would never... imagine. Why, this one time I even lay with a horse."

"Yeah, bro, she must have been pretty ugly," Piss Stick snickered.

"No, no," Loki attempted to explain, "an actual horse."

This impressed his comrades deeply enough that all three of them actually turned to look at him. "What?" he said defensively.

"You had sex with a horse?" Piss Stick asked in a deeply impressed voice. "That's wicked, Bro."

Loki let his head fall back against the carpet, staring up at the stained ceiling. "Strange..." he said in a thin voice, wondering whether the last three hours of drinking were going to repeat on him, "that is not the first time I have been called such..."

"Look, dude, forget the horse, dude," Gobfather said in a firm voice. "We gotta go somewhere for our annual retreat, dude, and if Twin-Dick here says this 'Midgard' is good for it, then 'Midgard' it is."

"Thank you," Loki said huffily.

"How we gonna get there?" Carbrorator wanted to know. "I mean, if it's not even in our probability cluster, it's not like we can just take the metro."

"I will make arrangements," Loki promised airily.

He made a great many other promises, as the evening went on, but he remembered very few of them - or, in fact, how to spell his own name - by the next morning.

"Kill me," Loki rasped out, clutching his head in both hands as he attempted to shield his eyes from the merciless harsh light of the unfiltered suns. "For the love of mercy, if you have even the slightest trace of compassion in your body, do not prolong this torment, simply put me out of my misery -"

XTRA's chief of operations, who went by the name of The Other Steve (Loki had yet to meet the original Steve,) gave him a look that was completely devoid of pity or amusement. "This was all your idea, dude," he said, as he shoved the fraternity's official scepter into his hands. "You promised to make all the arrangements for our Bash on this Midgard place. You'd better not be backing out of it now, or you'll be up in front of a panel of chapter elders for XTRA penance and trust me, that is not something you want to deal with."

"I will destroy everything you have ever loved," Loki moaned, as he stumbled to his shaking feet and clutched the scepter for dear life. The surface of the asteroid still seemed to dip and sway about him, even as the nausea of his prodigious hangover sloshed the acid around in his stomach. Never in his entire existence had he desired so much to cut his own head off, if only so that each pound of his heart would not send another throb of unrelenting agony surging through his brain. "I will rend you limb from limb, fiber from fiber, I will track down your family and put them all to death, I will set fire to that collection of vintage magazines you keep under your pillow where you think people don't know -"

"Portal's up in five, dude," The Other Steve told him unsympathetically. "Get your skinny ass down there before I kick it up to your teeth."

"All right! All right, I'm going." A bright blue light sprang up before him, driving railroad spikes into his head, and Loki squinted and shuffled his way into destiny.

A few weeks later, when a much-larger portal yawned wide over the city of New York - tourist destination for aliens from all over the galaxy - the Chitauri space whales and fliers began streaking through the air above Manhattan. As one, they let out a blood-chilling war cry in their own hideous tongue -

"WOOOOOOOHOOOOOOOO! SPRING BREEEEEEEEEAK!"

~the end.