A/N: Holy cow so that's WAY more reviews and follows and favorites than I ever thought I'd get with this story, thank you guys so much! I know this chapter is long overdue, mainly because I had to rewrite it so many times...

Anyways, I don't own Marvel or the Avengers, obviously.

Oh, and I guess warning for language, because it's the Guardians?

zaylo267: Of course he is, he's Thor. XD

KarliCM: Yeah I guess he can stay with Thor, but would he want to? Also there's the Thor back in his own timeline too...

He met Rabbit and Tree at the Benetar far sooner than he had hoped to.

Not that he had thought about meeting them at all. As their silhouettes emerged, framing the dust, Thor suddenly realized that he hadn't even considered how he was going to explain his prisoner to the rest of the Guardians. He had spent most of his energy on the way back warding off an exceptionally large amount of hostility from the common people (apparently, Loki had a bit of a reputation on this planet, which wasn't the least bit surprising) and still comprehending what had happened. Now, though, it occurred to him that he had taken for granted that this Loki would even be allowed on the Benetar. He was technically still a villain (a murderer?). How was Thor supposed to prove him not a threat to his friends, when—and his stomach twisted at the thought—he didn't even know himself? And that wasn't even considering the reactions he might get from the cursed blue Infinity Stone wedged in his armor, currently the only one in existence in this universe—

He worked at Stormbreaker's handle, fidgeting, as Rabbit's voice called out through the orange clouds.

"Jeez, what is with all of this dust? I feel like a walking sand dune!" The Rabbit swiped his paw in front of his face, grumbling, and managed to do nothing but froth up the air even more. Slowly, he sauntered into view, with Tree bringing up the rear.

The Tree had a pout firmly set upon his face, limbs folded and noticeably free of his beloved video game. "I am Groot," he huffed, and Thor was begrudgingly impressed with the amount of profanity in those three words.

"Yeah, well you've got bark for skin, of course you don't care!" Rabbit had his head down, one hand twirling his blaster and the other rummaging through his bag of stolen machine parts as he advanced. For a moment, Thor thought that maybe they hadn't noticed him yet (and he could—well, what would he even do? Run? Steal the Benetar?), before Rabbit raised his gaze and sobered his tone.

"Ignore him. One of the weirdos back there smashed his game and he's been moping about it ever since," the Rabbit explained, while Tree sulked with almost comically large eyes, the very picture of a scolded child. They both drew to a halt before Thor, and Rabbit holstered his gun with a certain finality.

"So, you got some batteries for me?" he questioned.

Well, there went the hope that Rabbit wouldn't notice. Thor grimaced at the mention of the batteries that had long escaped his mind, and replied, eloquently, "Um…"

However, Rabbit ignored his response, or just didn't care enough to comment on it. Either way, he didn't press the subject—because, predictably, his eyes had now landed on the person draped over Thor's shoulder like a limp green snakeskin.

"You got me a person, too? Well, that's a bit much, but—"

"It's my brother," Thor blurted out. For a moment—in spite of everything—he simply relished how good, how finally familiar the thought felt on his tongue.

Rabbit crossed his arms. "Wait, the dead brother?" he asked, tentatively, suspiciously. He pointed a claw at Thor's load. "That's the dead brother?"

Thor winced, but nodded nonetheless. "...Sort of?"

The Rabbit snorted. "Sort of? What exactly is that supposed to mean?"

Ironically, Thor didn't even really know himself. But he took a breath anyway and tried to relay the events from earlier. "Well, I was walking through the marketplace and I heard his voice, so I went to go check and found...a different Loki than I knew, and he stabbed me and tried to leave, so I blasted him before he could get away—" he rattled off. "And I think he might be a Loki from another place or timeline or something, so I was going to tie him up once I got him inside."

Brilliantly worded, Brother.

Thor pursed his lips and shifted his grip on Loki.

Rabbit blinked, and then shook his head. Tree had put his pouting temporarily on hold and was now staring at Loki with a renewed curiosity, like a baby watching a butterfly—though Loki was anything but a butterfly.

"...So you're kidnapping your fake-brother?" Rabbit concluded, raising an eyebrow dubiously.

"Ah...yes. To figure out how he's alive," Thor confirmed. And because he's your brother, and you would've never been able to just leave him there. And because he's the only family you have left. And because he said the sun—

He bit his lip, tasting grit and salt.

"Well, bring him in. It'll probably piss off Quill, but Quill gets pissed off with everything." Rabbit squashed a button on his belt, and a large steel entrance ramp detached itself from the belly of the Benetar. He smirked to no one in particular. "I'd say that's actually a benefit."

They began traipsing into the ship. Thor didn't realize until he was climbing in after them that he had completely neglected to mention the Tesseract.

Rabbit wasted no time in diving into the bowels of the ship, fishing out a questionable assortment of cables and wiring ("You really don't want to know what this was from!") to use as makeshift ropes. Thor heaved Loki into a passenger seat and drew back to watch as Rabbit fastened his arms to the backrest. Tree slumped into a seat next to Loki's, trading between giving Rabbit morose looks and peering curiously at their captive.

Folding his arms from across the room, Thor found himself analyzing his brother—a habit that had probably been adopted from Loki himself, Thor thought wryly, or perhaps evolved from decades of his own increasing kingly responsibilities and warfare experience. His gaze fell on Loki's clothing, studying. It wasn't quite as extravagant as his attire had been for his world-conquering mindset—there was less gold, and the infamous horned helmet was nowhere to be found—but the background patchwork of green and black, finished by polished boots and long cape, were all there.

Daggers, probably, too, Thor suddenly realized. He hadn't thought to check Loki's armor for more weapons.

He started forward, the cube-shaped lump in his own armor (that he still had yet to reveal, but he'd get to that—) causing him to shuffle a little awkwardly. Reaching the chair, he rifled through the layers of fabric on Loki's figure—and found nothing, because his little brother had a nasty tendency to stash his weapons in thin air.

His brother's lolling head bounced back and forth as though taunting him.

Do you truly trust me that little?

Thor scowled, just a fraction. He had barely been able to trust his brother in the best of times, and now that he was like this—

He backed away again and tried to ground himself, back against the cool wall, but it didn't work. His head was swimming.

"What've you got there?" Rabbit's voice sounded across a landscape of empty bottles and food wrappers, like wind struggling over buildings. He stood in front of Loki's chair, but his eyes had finished carving him up like some new stolen ware and were now on Thor.

"Hmm?" Thor raised his eyebrows for a moment—and then remembered. The Tesseract was starting to beat white-hot from where it was hidden, soaking his bare chest with its own mini rays of sunlight. But every time Thor opened his mouth to tell his friends of its presence, that perfectly-edged opportunity seemed to slip away, and the words felt wrong on his tongue.

In truth, the majority of him did want to take the Tesseract and simply hurl it off into space—where it was far, far away from him and those he cared about—but there was a voice in the furrows of his mind that said to keep it. Maybe it was the knowledge that the device in his possession could somehow, with some other magic, move through time, and move people with it, too. That it could go back to where it all went wrong, and, in theory, snatch lives from their own dark timeline and out of Death's waiting hands—

He would just keep it, just in case. It couldn't hurt, could it—as long as they didn't activate the Cube itself?

"That thing. In your armor," Rabbit replied, crossing his arms and narrowing his gaze, and now Tree was looking at him too, apparently forgetting to pout. "You look like you're pregnant."

"No, nope, nothing. I've got nothing."

"I am Groot?" Tree piped up inquisitively, head tilted. Pregnant?

The Rabbit snorted. "Look, I know you went through your whole 'ice cream' phase, but you've obviously got something in your armor that ain't attached to you. I'm a thief, lightning fingers, I know when someone's hiding something."

The Cube was now threatening to burn a hole in Thor's heart, as if striving to inflict more damage than it already had, or perhaps trying to melt through his clothing and reveal itself.

He sighed, and decided, and braced himself.

"Alright, fine, it's...this."

Thor reached inside his armor and drew out the Tesseract on tingling fingertips.

Shock washed across Rabbit's face as if it was rainwater, while Tree merely blinked, watching. "That—that—is that the Tesser—Tesseran thingy? The Infinity Stone that's supposed to be destroyed?" he blurted, advancing toward Thor, a spark in his voice.

Thor nodded, trying to ignore the similar images of Loki, holding out the Tesseract in this exact same position, delicate and seemingly desperate, that were like a river current running just underneath his.

(You really are the worst, Brother.)

"Tesseract. And yeah, it—it is," Thor admitted. "I...well, Loki had it when I found him. Somehow."

"Somehow? That thing can't be here! It caused the fucking apocalypse, remember?"

Thor cringed—though at what part of the sentence, he couldn't tell. He licked his dry lips, trying to reason with Rabbit.

"I know, I get it, but I don't think this is the Tesseract that...he destroyed"—a flash of violet blood gurgled up and spattered across his mind—"or the one that the Captain took back—I think it's another one, from a different timeline—"

"So? Then it needs to go back to that timeline, or we need to destroy it, or something! I am not going through all that freaky time bullcrap again—not for that damn thing—"

"We can't destroy it though—not now, at least." He scooted the Tesseract ever so slightly out of Rabbit's reach, crouching down a little in what he hoped was a placating manner. "Listen, Rabbit, let's just keep it, ok, in case we need it, and later—"

Rabbit bit into his words with a scoff. "Keep it? It helped turn my family and half our friends into dust bunnies—courtesy of an angry purple bastard that we just now finally beat—and you want to, what, put it in a cup holder?"

Thor had no idea what to say to that.

...Yes?

Behind Rabbit, Tree had turned back toward Loki again, chocolate gaze wide and glistening as if wondering what about this new magic hostage could incite such an argument. He leaned forward, studying the trickster, and then proceeded to swat the end of a branch in Loki's face.

Rabbit wheeled around without missing a beat. "Hey, hey! Don't flick the crazy magic dude in the face! You know better than that!"

Tree glanced up and fixed Rabbit with a pouting glare, still waving a tiny leaf at his new entertainment. "I am Groot." He jammed the twig defiantly up Loki's nose.

"You have got to be—"

Then Loki's eyes snapped open like twin rubber bands.

And all three of them shrieked.

Tree ended up halfway across the room, shoved behind Rabbit, and Thor jumped back so far that he upended a table and sent food and metal bolts skittering across the floor. The rattling echoes lingered for a long moment before settling into a waiting silence, three pairs of eyes coming to rest, hesitantly, on their prisoner.

In an instant, Loki's piercing emerald gaze had roamed his surroundings, flitting from the dimly lit card table, to the littered floor, to the single pie piece of orange atmosphere visible through the windshield, and finally back to his unruly captors. He didn't move, though—just sat, and watched, and assessed, in such a fashion that was so typically Loki that Thor felt a dull warmth light in the pit of his stomach. His chest loosened with relief before he could stop it.

Rabbit, however, didn't hesitate to cock his blaster and aim it at Loki's forehead.

Thor leapt forward hastily and slapped his palm over the front of the gun, ignoring Rabbit's protests about 'being prepared.' "Ah, sorry, we're all just a little on edge," Thor cut him off. Behind him, Rabbit scoffed.

Loki opened his mouth, and Thor braced himself for more silvertongue barbs like their earlier encounter, but, surprisingly, none came. Loki seemed to have stopped himself momentarily as he scanned them—Thor, Rabbit, and finally Tree—up close. He gave no reaction, save for the slight crinkling of his eyebrows, but it was a look Thor had seen often enough—his brother's thoughts were no doubt working furiously behind that facade.

Then, after what felt like an eternity, Loki pinned him down with his gaze, and said, coolly, "You're not the Thor I know, are you?"

You're not the Thor I know at all, are you?

Thor's heart nearly choked him. The voice, those words, almost identical to the ones Mother had gently spoken to him not too long ago, with her scent of warm honey and home. Now, Loki's voice was hard and unbendable, steely as the bolts in his chair, but the connection was the same: Frigga had been raised by witches, Loki had been raised by Frigga. They had both been able to deduce a displacement in time.

Thor unglued his lips. "That...depends. Where are you from, Brother? What have you been doing?"

Loki merely gave a low, sardonic chuckle. "Oh, I have missed this. The interrogation, the suspicion." He lifted his hands at the wrists, as far as he could. "Have you ever considered that I might be more inclined to give you the answers you seek if I weren't so crudely bound?"

"Yeah, funnily enough, that never works out well." Rabbit had pulled back his blaster from Thor's grip, but his arms were crossed rigidly across his chest, Tree still hovering behind him. It seemed that he had taken all of his dislike for the Tesseract and channeled it into an—admittedly not unwarranted—mistrust for its carrier.

Loki's gaze danced across to Rabbit and Tree, and then back to Thor. "Lovely choice of companionship. I'm sure Odin is pleased that his grand prince is passing his days traversing the galaxy with a horde of woodland creatures." He grinned dryly.

Rabbit jerked his head toward Loki. "Woodland? Who're you calling woodland?"

"I am Groot," Tree corrected stiffly. Guard the galaxy, not traverse.

Loki ignored them in favor of tilting his head at Thor. "Or has the Allfather finally decided to give up his little chase?"

Allfather. It punched Thor to the core, but the rest of the sentence pulled him on. "What? Father...Father didn't send me," he replied, baffled. The other words lay, discarded and aching, in his brain: Father...is dead.

"Ah, so you so rudely interrupted my dealings of your own will. How predictable. I daresay it's becoming a habit—charging in, ruining my affairs with your mighty thunder," Loki quipped, rich silver sarcasm in full-tilt. Thor folded his arms, as though a barrier of bone and muscle would prevent the taunts from grating his nerves, or hitting his heart.

"Well, I don't care if I ruined your illegal deals, Loki. I stopped you because you had this"—Thor raised the Tesseract to eye level again, feeling as though his fingernails should be nothing but blackened crisps by now—"and because I need to know how you're—how you're here." How you're alive. The words from the past were starting to lodge like glue in his throat. He cleared it, fruitlessly.

Loki laughed sarcastically. "Yes, I missed you too."

"How, Loki?" Thor repeated insistently. Every crafty word, every distraction was a moment wasted, and his spine was itching with impatience. "We won't keep you longer than necessary if you just—"

"Cooperate?" Loki deadpanned, his tone making the word more a statement than a question. He scrunched his brow in mock thought—sarcasm, again. "Have we done this before?"

Thor uncurled one fist—though he hadn't even remembered clenching it—and held it, fingers outstretched in the scratching air. Stormbreaker heeded his call with an electrifying swish and a satisfying smack against his palm, instantly pulsing lightning through his skin in a way that was familiar, invigorating, and threatening all at once.

Loki only rolled his eyes at the theatrics.

Thor took a breath, relishing the comfort of his now-burning blood. "Tell me, Brother. How,"—he gave the Cube a vigorous shake, when really he wished to grab Loki by the shoulders and rattle the answers out of him—"did you get this?"

Loki's eyes tracked its motion and then met his gaze stoically—silently—inches from him.

Then, suddenly, another question formed in Thor's mouth on a whim, bringing forth the tang of velvety flesh and blood, rushing up like bile. Before he could stop himself, he blurted, "Do you—do you know anything of the Statesman?"

He knew the answer, knew from the evidence sitting before him. He didn't know why he'd asked.

(The sun—)

Loki lifted an eyebrow. "I'm afraid not."

A pointless inquiry, Brother. You know the truth.

Now he had two Lokis invading his mind—the Loki sitting before him, and the ghost, the gone Loki. His Loki.

He shifted his eyes off this Loki's, abruptly unwilling to continue staring at the green when it wasn't quite the same one that had told him he was here.

...But at least Loki was alive in some aspect, right?

(He was living, breathing, in the very same room, after all.)

When Thor didn't respond, Rabbit looked at him carefully before jumping into the interrogation in his place. His eyes narrowed slightly at Loki. "What about Thanos? Big guy, kind of an asshole?" he asked.

Thor cringed automatically at the blunt name, as if some wretched instinct—and then loathed that he did so. He could feel Loki watching him—but, for once, Thor was watching his brother, too. He saw the word hit like a death sentence itself, turning Loki almost as ashy gray as the wall, though not a single muscle in his face twitched.

Loki smirked without humor—real or otherwise. "If you're searching for potential adversaries to heroically defeat, I suggest you do it elsewhere," he hummed.

"Don't do that, Loki," Thor countered immediately, words square and solid as bricks. Lies, always lies, whether to himself or someone else or nothing at all. "I know you knew him—he sent you to attack Midgard—to get the Tesseract—and you failed him."

Loki's polished pretense didn't waver. "I answer to no one, Brother—not this Thanos, not your beloved Allfather. Chaos"—he grinned again, white teeth bare against the residual dust—"has no master."

"Then how did you get the Tesseract?" Thor persisted, almost bulldozing over him. "Was it New York? Did you win that battle or something? Is that where you're from—2012?" If this Loki was truly from the past, Thor was fairly certain there must have been some sort of event or something that allowed Loki to get ahold of the Tesseract.

...Right?

He gritted his teeth. Banner—who was, of course, currently hundreds of jump points away on Earth—was the one who understood time-travel and all of its strange quirks, not him.

"So many questions, Brother. Don't you remember?" His brother actually appeared—almost—genuinely confused. But, then again, it was probably just a mask.

"I—no, I don't. Just tell me."

"Now where's the fun in that?" Loki replied, aloof and unperturbed, toying with them like puppets.

Thor growled. It was almost a relief to feel the lightning taking over, channeling everything tangled inside him into one point. He jerked the axehead threateningly toward his brother's figure, its blade dense and sizzling with heat near Loki's chest.

Answers, Loki, answers.

The scorn in Loki's gaze went sour around the edges, like a faint stain marring his own crisp green clothing. His eyes flickered to the blade, and back. Taunting.

"Go on. Kill me."

—Kill away—

"Innocent, unarmed. See how noble Asgard believes her king to be then."

He hated how Loki always played with Death. Turned it into a game, baiting the beast until it had finally had enough, until fate finally became too much.

Thor sighed, and even the air itself felt tired. "We're not going to kill you, Brother—"

Rabbit made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a groan. Loki looked vaguely intrigued at the prospect of debating his own death.

"—We're just going to talk."

His brother snorted.

Well, if Loki wouldn't give him a straight response, then there was no need for Thor to ask him questions. Instead, he forced himself to try and decipher the slightest tic, the smallest facial features like they were letters on blank paper, attempting to read Loki as Loki himself so often did to others.

"So that's it, then?" he concluded after a moment. "You're—you stole the Tesseract from 2012, and somehow ended up here."

Apparently, now his brother had wrung all of the fun out of dangling the answer over their heads. "I didn't truly steal it," Loki corrected. "Contrary to your father, I'm not a thief. The things I sought were rightfully mine."

Your father. Thor simply asked, "What do you mean?"

"The Tesseract was meant to be in hands that could control it, Brother, hands that understood the full depth of its power. Not your mortal companions who insist that everything they lay eyes upon is their own."

"Are you saying the angry cube-thing wanted to be with you?" Rabbit suddenly scoffed. "Somehow I doubt that."

Loki glared coldly at him.

Thor drew back, inspecting the unassuming Cube. It hummed idly, covered with little crystalline ocean waves that reminded him of those back on Asgard, frothy and innocent, inviting the children to dip a toe into their cool waters. He itched to pry Loki's gaze away from their blue glow.

Instead, he tore his own eyes away. "But the Tesseract was in a case, and you were in handcuffs," Thor interjected between Loki and Rabbit, remembering. "Did you move it with your mind or something?"

"No—that repulsive green beast knocked it free from its casing and right to my feet, so I left. No one was the wiser, not until I had vanished. Not even you." The contempt writ across Loki's face made it clear how ridiculously easy the escape had been.

"But that...that never happened," Thor mused. He didn't miss the way Loki's eyebrows bent together like drawn curtain strings at the words, but he brushed past it for the time being. This must be the event, then—somehow Loki had gotten the Tesseract before they had left Stark Tower in 2012, and disappeared.

And created some sort of alternate timeline?

"In the past, I eventually took you back to Asgard," he explained, and Loki wrinkled his nose slightly in that classic, childish disgust. "I remember...Banner took the stairs, got angry, but Stark had the case…"

"Unless he didn't," Rabbit's voice piped up from beside him. His nose was twitching thoughtfully, but his gaze was no longer locked on Loki like he found him as annoying as—well, as himself. He shrugged, and the little leather pouch on his hip jounced up and down as though agreeing. "Come on, we did a bunch of timey-wimey stuff, one of us was bound to screw up."

Thor nodded, feeling the pieces click together as he went back, cautiously, to that blurry time. "Stark, the small man, and the Captain all went back to 2012—"

" —and I guess they screwed up," Rabbit finished.

A morsel of silence settled into the air as they stood for a moment, digesting it all.

And then:

"...Freaky," Rabbit muttered.

Tree looked utterly baffled. "I am Groot?" What now?

Thor didn't get an opportunity to answer—not that he would have known what to say, anyhow. The walls of the Benetar had begun to shiver slightly, a mechanical buzzing now being ushered in by clouds of dusky orange air. The entrance ramp hit the ground, echoed barely a moment later by a single voice and an army of footsteps.

"Sorry gang, nothing on Gamora. Those pirates we heard about were a bunch of phonies." The disembodied voice heaved a sigh, sounding at their wits' end, and dropped into muttering. "Again."

Then Quill appeared in the doorway, sloughing off his spacesuit, face mask melting away, with Nebula, Drax, and Mantis crowding the hallway behind him. He halted at the threshold, and his eyes hit Loki.

"...Who the hell's that?"

I feel like Loki would go and figure out he's in some different timeline and then just proceed to be annoying about it. Since he's technically got all the time in the world to do whatever the heck he wants. Also, maybe it's not all that realistic to think that Thor can hide an entire cube in his armor, but it wasn't like he could just put it in a pocket dimension like Loki, so I had to do something. :P
I'm simultaneously excited and terrified to try writing the rest of the Guardians next chapter, lol. The Loki interrogation continues.
Reviews welcome! Thanks!