Title: The Wagers of Sin

Rating: PG-13

Warnings: Execution. This is a dark fic.

Author's Note:

The title of this fic comes from something I heard once, about how in Shakespearean plays, only the protagonists leave off stage right; the villains always exit stage left. I don't think this is actually true, as that would be terribly limiting to choreography, but it was a nice enough idea that it inspired the title.

The trial of Loki ran for weeks, and held a spotlight in every major news source every day that it did. Newscasters and liveblogs reported endlessly on every minute detail of the trial, and when nothing new was forthcoming, they filled the space with endless speculation, retreads of past information, and man-on-the-street opinion columns. It was nothing less than a media circus.

At least, Bruce thought, all the unfriendly attention was off the Avengers for the duration of the trial.

He would have thought that the hardest part of the whole business would be finding a defense lawyer to represent Loki in court. Much to his surprise - to all their surprise - that turned out not to be a problem; they'd been presented with a volunteer only days after Loki's trial date had been announced.

His name was John Darrens, a high-profile criminal defense lawyer who was somewhat infamous among the court circuit for taking on difficult or spectacular cases. He'd even married one of his previous clients - a woman who was accused of murdering two men - and when he arrived in Stark Tower in response to Tony's advertisement for a lawyer willing to defend the alien who'd invaded New York, the tall and rangy man was not only willing but eager.

"Are you sure you know what you're getting into?" Steve had asked him, a concerned expression on his face. "There's a lot of strong feeling in the country right now; even if your personal safety isn't at risk, you're likely to face a lot of negative backlash for taking the case."

Darrens smiled, and it brought an oddly boyish enthusiasm to his lined and somewhat grim-looking face. "Well, you don't get far in the world of criminal defense if you care much about the opinion of the man on the street," he said. "But this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, do you see? Representing an actual, real-life extraterrestrial in an Earth court - it's unprecedented. It is literally the precedent.

"If this isn't the last of the aliens we'll be dealing with - and I think you people probably know better than I do what the likelihood of that is - then this case will be quoted in every single legal case dealing with extraterrestrials for the next century. It's not just a chance to shape history - it's a chance to shape the future."

Put like that, even the Avengers could sort of see the appeal. "Well, if you're sure," Tony said, his voice heavy with doubt. "Still sure you don't want the usual fee for your time, though? I meant it when I offered to sponsor his defense."

And that was such a Tony thing to do, Bruce thought, an aggressively contrarian action like offering his defeated enemy a drink and a chance to wash up before the SHIELD guards hauled him away. As one of the saviors of New York, Tony was probably the only one who could take on the role of sponsoring Loki's legal defense without being accused of disloyalty himself - and this way, it spared the government of New York the cost of providing legal counsel for him.

Darrens' smile faded to a thin line, leaving him looking cold and grey once more. "The thought is appreciated, Mr. Stark," he said, "and I hope this will represent the start of an amicable business relationship between us. But if it's all the same to you, I'd rather this not be something I take money for."

Bruce thought he understood that sentiment all too well.

Over the course of Loki's trial, the lawyer pulled together a dazzling array of legal arguments; Bruce was no expert in law himself, but even he recognized the brilliance that went into the defense strategy. Darrens argued a dozen positions of jurisdiction, altered states of consciousness, and apportion of responsibility between Loki himself and the other alien soldiers who had been above and below him in the chain of command. All of them, however, were either dead or out of reach; for better or worse, Loki was the only one left for the furious citizens of Earth to target their rage on.

His outlook became even more grim when a message came through from Jane Foster's research division. Thor had gone to Asgard to bring news to his father, the King; word came back from Asgard, but Thor did not. Asgard officially ceded Loki to Earth's justice; they would abide by whatever punishment Earth decided for his crimes.

It came as a surprise to no one when the verdict came back on Loki: guilty of crimes against the peace, of crimes against humanity, of crimes against Earth (a new classification that had been created purely for the occasion.) Loki's lawyer did no more than shrug in acceptance when the verdict was read out, packing his notes and leaving the courtroom without a backwards glance at Loki. Bruce didn't think that the lawyer and his inhuman client had ever actually spoken a word to one another.

Less than an hour later, the judge returned the final sentence: death.

The arguments over how the sentence was to be carried out took almost as long as the trial itself had. Loki was an alien, with a biochemistry completely unknown to modern scientists; there was absolutely no guarantee that the standard lethal injections or poison gasses would work on him at all. It was generally agreed that a publically broadcast execution was not the time to be experimenting with trial-and-error, although SHIELD's techs were nearly salivating over the chance to perform the autopsy afterwards.

The whole thing hit rather uncomfortably close to home for Bruce, leaving him with a queasy feeling. He excused himself from as much of the discussion as he could, but in the end, he wasn't able to distance himself from the procedure entirely.

It was the Federal government that had ordered the execution, but by necessity SHIELD was still tasked with keeping him under control until that was carried out. Even they could only do so with the aid of the magic-dampening shackles, which had been brought from Asgard by Thor before the battle of New York.

Even without his magic, though, the threat presented by Loki could not be ignored; he was stronger than any normal human, agile, and unbelievably fast. The security they kept him surrounded with at all times - augmented by Stark's proprietary tech - was enough to keep him in line and docile the majority of the time, but there was no telling what he might do when his back was against the wall.

And since the Other Guy was the only one with a proven track record of being able to put Loki down, Bruce pretty much had to be there.

In a cold concrete facility ten miles outside Concord, Bruce waited in a sealed elevated observation desk with one glass wall, looking down on the echoingly empty chamber below. They'd commuted the sentence to New Hampshire, in the end, because that state still had a statute on the book allowing for execution, in the event that other methods were too impractical. As alien as Loki's metabolism might be, the examining physicians had determined that his respiratory and central nervous systems were functionally the same as a human's.

Cut that off, and he would die like any mortal man.

All of the Avengers were here (except, of course, for Thor) in the event of any last-minute crises. Clint and Natasha lurked near the wall, wearing expressions of grim satisfaction and closed resolve respectively. Steve was talking quietly to Tony over near the exit; the Captain America suit was not in evidence today, but Tony was wearing the Iron Man suit (albeit with the face plate up.)

The four of them were there to lend additional weight in the event of trouble. Bruce was, as well, but officially he was present as the examining physician. He wasn't really certified for it, of course, but the unspoken thought hovering around the facility was that nobody wanted to risk the lives of defenseless civilians if Loki lashed out in his final moments.

"Dr. Banner," a quiet but firm voice spoke from behind him, and Bruce turned to face Director Fury, dressed all in solid black with a stiff leather coat draped over him like a shroud. Bruce spared him a nod and a faint smile.

"Sorry to have to involve you in this," Fury went on. "I know it wasn't your first choice of how to spend your day."

"Probably not my second or third choices, either," Bruce joked weakly, taking his glasses off to clean them in a nervous habit.

"You know your own state better than anyone else, Doctor," Fury went on. "Tell me frankly, do you expect today to go smoothly?"

He wasn't talking about Loki, Bruce knew; he'd get a better idea from asking any of the other four. He was asking whether the situation was too stressful for Bruce, whether the Hulk would be expected to make an appearance. "Don't worry about it, Director," Bruce said, sliding his glasses back on. "The Other Guy doesn't want to be here any more than I do."

Fury grumbled what sounded like vaguely disconsolate agreement, but moved on.

A warning buzz sounded from the chamber below them, and the lights changed color. Bruce looked out through the clear glass to see a trio of silhouettes appear in the doorway and advance. He recognized Loki immediately by his height and stiff-necked posture, dressed in the same elaborate, black and green leathers that he'd worn for the abortive invasion of New York.

It was not at all the usual procedure to put the accused in the same costume they'd worn while committing their crimes, but Bruce suspected it had something to do with the cameras hovering in each corner of the room, recording it all from multiple angles. It wasn't a live broadcast, exactly; they were still too cautious of something going pear-shaped at the last moment. But he knew it was meant to go public the moment the execution was over.

Public broadcast execution. The queasy feeling in the pit of Bruce's stomach increased.

The two guards flanking Loki shepherded him up the stairs onto the metal scaffolding. reinforced titanium alloy in place of wood. A black-gloved hand on each of his arms centered him over the trapdoor and jerked him around to face front, and the observers got a good look at Loki's expression for the first time.

Stone-cold, masked and expressionless, but his eyes blazed with a roiling mixture of emotion that could not be contained. Despite being bound and surrounded, he managed to keep a kingly pride in the set of his shoulders, the angle of his jaw and the tilt of his head. He looked around the bare concrete chamber, and his lip curled with disgust.

"It is now six-fifty five PM," Fury's deep and resonant voice came over the loudspeaker. "The drop is scheduled for seven o'clock. Loki of Asgard, do you have anything you'd like to say?"

Loki turned those blazing eyes up towards the observation window, flicking them over each silent silhouetted Avenger in turn. The weight of his flensing glare on Bruce made him want to melt into the background, and he wasn't even sure why. "Is this really the most spectacle you could muster?" he demanded, his voice hoarse. "Where are the crowds, the dogs, the buckets of filth? Your watching mobs will be sorely disappointed."

"We don't really go in for spectacle in our executions any more," Fury said. Bruce thought again of the watching cameras, of Loki's costume, and had to swallow carefully.

"Really." Loki's lips curled up in a wide, mad smile. "No matter how far you think you've risen, the common peasants among you are still as barbaric and thirsty for blood as they ever were. I'm glad to see that it is so; you will need that savagery in the years to come."

"Six-fifty eight," was all Fury said in reply. The two guards who had led Loki to the platform moved into position; one lifted a black bag over Loki's head and drew it closed, while the other readied the noose. Even when the black silk fell over Loki's eyes, hiding his face from view, the memory of his scorching stare still hung in the room.

The guards finished their preparations and stepped back. All that was left was the triggering of the trapdoor itself, controlled by Fury's hand in the booth above. The silence hovered, breathless, as everybody waited for the other shoe to drop, for Loki to show his hand, for the one last villainous gambit that they would be called in to counter.

Seven o'clock. The buzzer sounded, and the floor dropped away from the scaffold.

However anachronistic the method, a modern execution was supposed to be quick and clean. Both the scaffold and the line of the noose were reinforced with carbon fibers, unbreakable. The state had long, if somewhat obsolete, records to draw on when it came to ensuring a clean execution, as fast and painless as could be devised. The technicians had carefully calculated the length of the drop, compared against Loki's height and weight. The prisoner's neck was supposed to snap when he reached the end of the line, killing him instantly.

It didn't.

There was no other sound in the room as they watched the thrashing, choking figure that swung on the end of the line. Whatever his face looked like could not be seen under the hood, but they could hear the agonized, animal noises that emerged from under it, see the desperate and fruitless thrashing as he struggled for air. Heels kicked against empty air as he sought for footing - even with the slightest bit of bracing, perhaps he could have torn through his bonds, fought his way to escape. But there was none.

"This isn't right," Tony said, voice tense and stressed. "It isn't - this is disgusting. Can't we stop this - can't we do something?"

"Just let it be," Fury said, his voice iron and granite. "If we stop the execution now we're just going to have to start all over again. You think that will do him any favors?"

"This isn't what I signed up for," Tony said furiously.

"Actually, it's exactly what you signed up for," Fury snapped. "It's not pleasant, but it needs to be done. Now settle down or get out."

Tony shut his mouth, his face pale, but his eyes blazed. Without another word he turned and walked out of the booth.

Bruce wished he could have done the same - but as the attending physician, he knew he had no choice except to stay. He didn't look - he didn't want to look, but he couldn't keep from hearing the sounds that Loki made, the increasingly labored and agonized struggles to draw breath.

Is this what heroes do? he couldn't help but wonder. Is this what we lend ourselves to?

He spent most of his time watching the others, instead. Clint had started out watching the execution with a light of unholy joy in his eyes, but as five minutes turned to ten, then fifteen, the satisfaction drained out of him to leave only a ghoulish grey. Natasha gripped his hand, squeezing all the support she could offer in that grasp; but as the choked noises of suffering from under the dark hood became steadily weaker, Clint too turned his back and fled the room.

It was taking too long; Bruce knew that, from the research. Even if the victim didn't die instantly, a human being would die of strangulation within an average of eight minutes, ten at the most. The clock ticked one minute past another with relentless, agonizing precision; ten minutes. Fifteen. Twenty.

"I think it's become evident that we don't need you here for the muscle, Captain," Fury said quietly to Steve. "You don't have to stay if you don't want to."

"No, Sir," Steve said sturdily. "I'll see it through."

The thrashing died down to a few shuddering twitches, the anguished noises trailing off into a dying whine. Still no one moved; Natasha watched the whole thing with an iron-hard, unmoving expression, Fury stood stock-still with one arm crossed over his chest and the other raised to cover his mouth, running a finger compulsively over the line of his lip. Bruce wished he could be somewhere else, anywhere else, but he knew he still had a part to play; and this wouldn't be over until he did.

At last the chamber below was still. Bruce took a deep breath, and summoned up the detached, objective calmness he'd used when treating the hopeless and dying in the streets of Bahir. This was not so different, he thought. Whatever the body beyond had once been, now it was just another empty shell; another corpse he hadn't been able to save.

Bruce approached the still body, Steve now shadowing him in place of the guards. He reached out and took hold of the prisoner's hands, pulling up a sleeve to access the pulse points. The skin below was clammy and rapidly chilling, the fingers purpling and stiff with rigor mortis.

He pressed his fingers over the vein and listened for one heartbeat, two, three. He felt only silence.

Bruce released the dead god's arm with a sigh, letting it swing back against his side. He checked his watch. "Time of death, estimated seven thirty-six," he said quietly to the air.

He stepped back as the guards moved forward, moving as fast as possible out of the range of the cameras. Steve accompanied him, his hand on Brice's shoulder squeezing tight and reassuring. "It had to be done, Bruce," Steve said, his voice sorrowful but sure. "You know that people are just too dangerous to be left alive."

Bruce nodded agreement, and looked away from the super-soldier's too-blue gaze. He did know.

After all, he was one of them.

Fury called a debriefing of the Avengers, afterwards. Bruce didn't go. He told them that he needed to go somewhere quiet, calm himself down. They believed him.

Bruce knew that people made - allowances for him, more than they did for others. He could get away with a lot of things that most people couldn't, when it came to obligations and the chain of command. Arguments, frustrations, all the petty little irritations of life that adults were expected to just suck up and deal with - no one expected him to have to put up with them.

At first it had rankled, the way they treated him like a ticking bomb or like a child who couldn't be expected to handle responsibility. But time and tribulation had worn out some of the outrage, smoothed the edges of his interactions with them. They saw him as the caretaker, he realized now, of a force that none of them could help to control. They'd give him whatever space - whatever privileges - he needed to keep the Other Guy in check, and they trusted him not to abuse those privileges.

And that's why Bruce felt a little guilty for sneaking away like this, when all the other heroes were busy upstairs.

Just a little bit, though.

He made his way through the hallways towards the morgue, the lights low and the building quiet. He paused in front of the double doors, cold fluorescent lights spilling out around the cracks onto the darkened concretes, and hovered for a moment.

From beyond the doors, he heard a soft shuffling noise.

Not really the sort of thing one wanted to hear coming out of a room where everybody was supposed to be dead.

But then again, not exactly unexpected, either.

Bruce stepped forward and opened the doors a crack, quietly slipping into the room beyond. He'd been in morgues often enough before that the layout was familiar to him; the racks of bodybeds along the wall, where they could be slotted back into the wall for cold storage; the autopsy tables positioned above the drains, the tables piled high with plastic bags filled with the clothing and personal effects of the deceased.

Loki stood beside one of the evidence tables, his back to the doors as he casually shook out his coat and pulled it around his shoulders. There was a line of bruises ringing his throat, but they were already healing.

Bruce coughed softly, and Loki whirled around, falling into a defensive martial stance as he did so. Green light sparked briefly around his hands, but his eyes widened and he fell back a step as he realized just who had snuck up on him. Clearly, he still had a very vivid memory of his last encounter with the Other Guy.

He couldn't help but grin a little at that, and ducked his head to hide the grin as he pulled off his glasses. "You know, I wondered if I would find you up and about," he said easily.

Slowly Loki relaxed from his defensive stance, as it became apparent that Bruce was not going to immediately either attack him or call for the other Avengers. He fumbled for his usual composure. "Did you now?" he said with forced, false casualness. "And here I thought the world was convinced I had met my end."

"Oh, it was an excellent performance," Bruce said, smiling slightly in encouragement. "If I didn't know what I was looking for, I would have thought you were really dead. I'm very impressed."

Loki smirked, beginning to recover some of his attitude. "Yes, well, I am truly grateful for the considerate addition of the hood," he said. "It spared me the necessity of trying to keep a straight face through the entire thing." He paused for a moment, then asked casually, "How, ah, how did you guess?"

"Your skin got too cold, too fast," Bruce commented, rubbing the tail of his shirt against the lens of his glasses to try to unfog them in the chilly room. "Normally, a dead body cools one degree per hour until it reaches room temperature; that's how most coroners estimate time of death, after all. Rigor mortis doesn't set in that fast, either. And besides, I did the... the background reading, I guess you could say."

"Ooh, I do like a scholar," Loki murmured suggestively.

"So I figured, if your dad could hang for nine days from the World Tree without dying - well, somehow I didn't think thirty minutes would do it for you," Bruce concluded.

Loki chuckled. "Did I time it right, then? I wished to be long enough to make my death convincing, yet not so long that they would think to check some of their assumptions about the sturdiness of my body as compared to mortals."

"I think it probably looked very convincing to everyone else," Bruce assured him. "Anyway, nobody else decided to come check on you."

"Once they brought me down here, they were so kind as to remove the cuffs from my wrists, and my magic became accessible once more." Loki looked off to the side, absently rubbing the skin of his wrists; there were deep marks there that looked much slower to fade than the ligature around his neck. "It was easy enough to persuade the mortals attending my corpse to take themselves elsewhere, and trick the metal eyes in the ceiling to see nothing."

He glanced up at Bruce, green eyes wary behind his attitude of casualness. "You, ah, do not plan to attempt to recapture me, do you? Because now that I have command of my magic back, I can be gone from this place before even your green beast can cross the room."

Bruce shook his head. "I don't think I'm really up to a task like that. I just wanted to see if my suspicions were correct. Say," he added after a moment's thought. "If you don't mind my asking - how did you stop the pulse in your wrist? Because I know that you still had the magic-blocking cuffs on back then."

Loki grinned at him, and tossed something his way; startled, Bruce put out his hands to catch it before it occurred to him to wonder if it was a bomb or some other form of attack. He didn't think Loki would be foolish enough to attack him, though; Bruce Banner was no threat to him as he was, but the Other Guy was another question.

What landed in his hands, though, was no more than a small, hard lump of some slightly gummy substance; Bruce paused, then laughed as the connection sunk in. Held tight under the armpit against the chest, a hard ball of resin like this could stop the flow of blood to the arm. "I wouldn't have thought you were a Sherlock Holmes fan," he said. "Him being a puny mortal and all."

"I know not who this mortal is, but rest assured it is a trick that has its roots in time-honored history," Loki sniffed.

Smiling, Bruce pocketed the ball of hard gum; then the smile faded and he looked at Loki with keen seriousness. "Why?" he asked quietly. If he could arrange for this whole farce, then surely he could have escaped their custody long ago. Why go through all the trouble and discomfort of faking his own execution?

Loki shrugged again, an elegant movement that feigned a casualness that Bruce didn't think he really felt. "You mortals needed some form of closure," he said quietly. "This is the only way that the Midgardians can be free of their fear of me, put aside the scars from the invasion and move on."

Bruce thought about that, thought about all the victims from his own rampages who had never gotten any form of closure and possibly never would. Thought about how easily it could have been him in Loki's position today, could still be someday, if anyone ever figured out how to stop the Other Guy from taking matters into their own hands. Thought about how easily it could be him swinging over the gallows while all his friends watched.

He wouldn't even be able to say they were wrong, really.

"And besides," Loki added, a smirk twisting his mouth again. "It will be ever so embarrassing, for Fury's organization to have to admit that they were fooled by such a base conjurer's trick. I fully expect that they will keep the news of my survival and escape quiet, so as to avoid the public backlash; and thus my movements about this plane will be far less restricted."

"Is that it, then?" Bruce said quietly. "That's your real reason? So that you can go right back to causing havoc? Because if you do, we will stop you again, and they won't be fooled so easily a second time."

Loki pursed his lips. "I have many reasons for doing what I do, Doctor, and have done; if your planet is fortunate, you will never have need to learn what all of them are." He added after a moment's thought, "I do not think you will be so fortunate, however."

Somehow, Bruce didn't think so either.

"What about you?" Loki asked, and Bruce didn't miss the tension in his hands, in his shoulders as he fiddled with the cuffs of his sleeves. "Do you intend to just allow me to escape, then? You do not plan to alert Stark or the others?"

Well, wasn't that just the million-dollar question. "You know," Bruce said, shifting awkwardly. "There's an ongoing controversy about having doctors attend at executions. You know. To, uh, confirm the death and all. There's a lot of people who say that it violates the Hippocratic Oath - that's the one we swear to, uh, to do no harm. Because if the execution goes wrong, and the doctor tells the wardens that, and they go around a second time..."

"Then the doctor's oath will be forsworn," Loki finished for him, quietly understanding. "At least in spirit."

Bruce nodded. "The way I figure, Earth has had their shot at you," he said. "And they might get more shots in the future, who knows?"

"But not today," Loki said, and smiled. The tension in his arms and shoulders eased slightly. He tilted his head, a brief frown crossing his face. "Will they not hold you responsible, then? Or at least blame you for misjudging my death, if not for failing to stop me afterwards?"

"Yes, well," Bruce muttered, fiddling with one of the loose buttons on his shirt. "It's a possibility, I won't deny it. But on the other hand, they can't really do much about me, now can they?"

Loki turned away, his lips pursing in a thoughtful twist. "Tell me, Doctor, have you ever heard of the concept of a 'scapegoat?' " he asked.

"I know what the word means," Bruce said. "Kind of hard not to."

"Yes, but are you familiar with its origins?" Loki turned back to him long enough to flash a quicksilver smile, a glimpse of bright green eyes. "It's a very old practice, from some of the oldest Abrahamic farming communities. Once per year, a single goat would be taken from the village's supplies, and rituals would be done in the center of the town square to lay all of the community's sins upon that single animal.

"And at the end of it, the goat would be led to the village gates and then... released into the wild." Loki's arms opened wide, as if encompassing the whole wide world. "Hence the etymology, 'escape goat.' That one animal becomes the beast of burden for all the community, carrying their sins away into the wilderness, so that the villagers can live free of guilt and shame for another year."

It wasn't hard to see where Loki was going with this analogy. "So you think you're the goat? Carrying our sins away into the wilderness?" he asked.

"There must always be a devil, Doctor," Loki replied, turning away from him, long-fingered hands adjusting the lapels of his coat. "Someone upon whom you can focus your anger and hate, an outside evil that forces you to band together against the external threat. Someone upon whom you can vent your primal, bloodthirsty urges, and so keep them in check. For a little while."

Loki smiled at him, sharp as a surgeon's scalpel. "And if it is me, Doctor, then at least you know it cannot be you."

Bruce looked away, deeply unnerved. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Loki move and shift, bringing his arms up in a strangely meaningful gesture. There was a flash of light, and when Bruce looked back Loki was holding his helmet in his hands. That had not been among the clothes he'd worn to the execution, and Bruce had to wonder what kind of interdimensional storage space he'd stowed it in.

Ceremonially, Loki donned the helmet, then straightened up and faced Bruce full on. He put his right arm across his chest, his fist against his shoulder in a formal-looking gesture. "You have the gratitude of Loki of Asgard," he said formally. "If you should ever find yourself in such dire straits as I did today, I shall intervene."

"That's, um," Bruce said. "A really nice thought, but I don't think - that is, I'd rather not have you indebted to me, all things considered. Let's just call it even, for the Other Guy throwing you around a bit, all right?"

"Oh, but I always repay my benefactors," Loki said with a sly smile. "Preferably when they are least expecting it. Fare you well."

And with those unsettling words, and an eye-twisting flash of green light, Loki vanished.

~the end.

A/N: This is my first time writing extensively about Bruce. I've noticed that all my fics tend to follow the pattern "Loki + X Avenger." I've had Loki + Clint, Loki + Fury, Loki + Thor (of course,) and now Loki + Bruce. If I manage to work my way through the whole rota, maybe I'll finally feel secure enough in their voices to write an actual fic about the Avengers.