Work Text:
Thor’s Asgardian friends are a security nightmare.
Lady Sif, Fandral the Dashing, Volstagg the Valiant, and Hogun the Grim fill out their long-term visitor forms more or less willingly, but after one look Happy realizes he can’t send off the paperwork to the background check service. What’s anyone supposed to do with ‘Place of Birth: Vanaheim’?
At least they have their stories straight; all four of them write down the same list of quests and battles for their employment history, and list Thor as their employer.
Thor vouches for them, but Thor also vouches for his brother, who famously killed a bunch of people while trying to take over the world, so Happy’s not inclined to trust his judgment.
He watches them closely whenever he gets the chance, through security cameras when he can’t watch them in person. Sif is a hot, dangerous woman with a chip on her shoulder, like a meaner version of Natasha (who is already more than mean enough for Happy’s taste). Fandral would have fit right in with the partygoing hangers-on that Tony has mostly stopped collecting and indulging these days. Volstagg is the butt of so many fat jokes that Happy would feel bad for him, except that he seems to play the whole thing up for laughs himself. One of those two would be the best vector for a social engineering attack, he thinks, so he makes a point of watching them closely, but he doesn’t see anything particularly suspicious.
Thor makes a big deal out of the idea that Happy is a happier version of Hogun. It’s a new variation on the jokes about his nickname that Happy hears every day, but that doesn’t make it a good one. Happy irrationally resents Hogun for that at first, but after a while he lets it go. Hogun can’t be blamed for Thor’s actions any more than Happy can for Tony’s. Hogun is the quiet one, the outsider, the one who’s part of the group but never the center of attention. Maybe they do have something in common besides the name.
1.
Happy has finally managed to get Tony to sit down with him for five minutes to talk through some event logistics while he has lunch in the cafeteria. Of course that’s when the Asgardians walk in and take over the table next to them. Despite Happy’s best efforts, his and Tony’s conversation immediately dies down in favor of listening to Thor explain very seriously that smashing empty cups on the ground is “not customary on Midgard.”
“What if the cup is already cracked?” asks Volstagg, holding up one of the hard plastic cafeteria cups, which Happy suspects was not cracked before Volstagg got his hands on it.
Thor says, “Uh, well,” and that’s apparently enough hesitation for Volstagg, who raises it above his head to spike it like a volleyball while yelling “ANOTHER!”
The cup bounces toward Tony, who catches it and hands it back. “Cafeteria’s self-service,” he informs them. “But if you want to smash something—hang on a minute.”
Happy’s already standing up, taking the second half of his burger with him, before he hears Tony on the phone asking if they still have the pallet of misprinted coffee mugs that say “Stork Industries.” He’s pretty sure they do, which means Tony is about to unleash some serious chaos in the cafeteria.
He tracks down the head of Custodial to give her a heads-up. She blames him for coming to warn her instead of stopping the whole thing, as if he has any chance of stopping Tony from doing what he wants. It’s a while before he can get away from her ranting, and she insists on shoving a push broom into his hands as he leaves. Sweeping is her job, not his, but he takes the broom with him to shut her up. Anyway, he’s been cleaning up after Tony Stark for a long time, and there’s no good reason to quit now.
He does wonder if Tony could just build some robots to keep the building clean instead of hiring grouchy humans, though.
When he gets back to the cafeteria, it’s as much of a mess as he expected. Tony and the Asgardians obviously got everyone who was in there to join in on the chaos, and the floor is completely covered in ceramic fragments. Employees are leaving with bags stuffed to the brim with mugs. The mugs were quarantined so that they wouldn’t show up on eBay, but Happy doesn’t feel like he can say anything when Tony is shoving them in people’s hands and winking at them. That one is Pepper’s problem to sort out.
Happy will stick to his own problem, which at the moment is the state of the floor. He starts in the far corner and shoves a table to the side to get at the ceramic shards underneath. It’s slow work, even when one of the cafeteria workers comes out and starts stacking chairs, and he hasn’t gotten very far when the room starts clearing out.
Tony and the Asgardians are the last ones out, and Hogun looks backward as his friends are filing out the door, meeting Happy’s eyes. Then he stops and turns around. Without a word, he walks to the next table Happy was about to move and lifts the whole thing with no apparent effort. Happy hurries to sweep underneath it.
2.
With Hogun’s help, cleaning up the cafeteria goes ten times faster than it would have if Happy had had to do it alone. The floor is going to need to be waxed again, but Happy’s not going to let anyone make that his problem.
Happy dumps the last of the shards into the trash can and leans on the broom, satisfied. “Thanks, man.”
Hogun nods. After a short pause, he says, “We are going to be sparring with the Avengers tomorrow morning.”
“Okay,” says Happy, not sure why Hogun is telling him this.
“The Lady Natasha has challenged the Lady Sif to a duel.”
“Okay,” says Happy again. Then his brain catches up with what Hogun just told him. “Oh!”
Later he’ll worry that his staring has been too obvious and try to tone it down, because he’s already on thin ice with Natasha and Sif seems like she has even more of a hair trigger. But that’s not going to stop him from going to the gym to watch the show tomorrow morning.
3.
“Unauthorized entrance to the secure lab corridor on the 27th floor,” says Pitts, the senior guard who’s in the control room with Happy today.
Happy switches his screens to show the cameras on the door and inside the corridor. Then he gets on the radio to relay the information to Delgado, the nearest roving guard.
He can hear Delgado’s eyeroll in her voice. “Copy that, boss. Got an ETA on Maintenance fixing that door yet?”
“The part’s backordered. It’ll be at least two more weeks.”
“Ugh. Got an ETA on teaching scientists to check that the door latches behind them?”
Vuong, who is stationed at the loading dock and making no secret of the fact that he’s bored, jumps in. “That’ll be never. Cheer up, it might not be the latch. Maybe Jeff jimmied the lock because he forgot his keycard again.”
If Happy were in charge, Jeff would have been fired after the second incident, but apparently he’s a brilliant engineer who is singlehandedly revolutionizing medical devices, or something.
Delgado says, “If it’s Jeff, I’m making him buy us all beers. Who’s free on Friday?”
“Secure the corridor now, plan your social life later,” instructs Happy.
“Copy that.”
He watches on the camera as Delgado approaches the door, badges herself in, and closes the door behind her. He can see the intruder walking down the hall away from the camera. He thinks he recognizes him as someone who works on that floor, but you can never be too careful, especially since Pepper is taking some VIP investors on a tour through those labs this afternoon.
Delgado approaches the man to ask to see his badge. It’s all looking very routine until the man whirls around and lunges at her. Happy doesn’t have a good angle on him, but he’s moving like he has a knife.
Pitts sees it too, and he’s calling for backup, so Happy is out of his chair and running for the door before he can think twice. He’s closer than any of the other roving guards at the moment. He takes the stairs two and three at a time and badges into the corridor at a run.
Delgado’s not looking too hot, but she’s obviously doing her best to hold her own as a trained but unarmed person against someone with a knife. She’s bleeding in a couple of places, including a pretty hairy-looking gash on her upper arm, but she’s still fighting.
Happy tags in by getting the guy with an uppercut to the jaw. “Get behind that door and lock it down behind you,” he tells her.
He spends a fair amount of training time telling his guards never to go into the labs, but he’s willing to throw out that rule in an emergency, especially since there are a couple of MDs who work in biomedical engineering on this floor. With any luck one of them will be around to help patch her up.
He’s even more worried when she obeys without even giving him any lip, but he doesn’t have time to think about it because he’s now the one who’s unarmed in a fight with a guy with a knife. His only hope is to hold on until armed backup arrives.
He hears the door open behind him as he’s dodging a wild slash with the knife. That’s a faster response time than they’d planned for, he’s thinking, as something smashes into the attacker’s shoulder with enough force to send him flying. He hits his head on the wall and slumps to the floor, knocked out.
Happy turns around, breathing hard. Hogun is standing behind him, holding that spiky ball weapon that looks like it comes out of some kind of cartoon. “Thanks, man,” Happy says. He’s about to add How did you get in here when he realizes: he didn’t take the time to latch the door behind him. He’s not sorry, considering the shape that Delgado was in when he got here, but Pitts is never going to let him live it down.
Hogun nods impassively at him.
Happy glances at the unconscious attacker. “Can you keep an eye on him while I check on my guard?” He gestures at the door that’s smeared with some of Delgado’s blood.
Hogun nods again and kneels down next to the guy while Happy knocks on the lab door and reassures himself that Delgado is hanging in there. She’s sitting on the floor at the far end of the room, looking pale and shaky. None of the MDs are there, but there are a couple of lab techs with a first aid kit. One of them is wrapping up the bad slash that Happy noticed on her arm, and the other one is cleaning up a cut on her other hand.
Happy pitches in to help hand them supplies and bring the trash can closer— “No, not the regular trash, this should go in the biohazardous waste,” says one of the techs. Happy eyes the red can with suspicion and kicks it over with his foot, to the obvious amusement of the techs. But he’s not ashamed—he doesn’t know what’s in there, and there’s a reason he tells his guards not to go in the labs.
The first responders come in a minute later, led into the corridor by Vuong. Happy interrogates him to make sure he convinced one of the rovers to take over his post instead of just abandoning the dock. At least he’s not complaining about being bored anymore.
The EMTs take Delgado away, some of the cops arrest the attacker, and some other cops set up shop in conference rooms to interview Happy, Hogun, and the lab techs about what happened.
In the end, it turns out that the guy was mad about being passed over for a promotion and decided to take revenge. The signs were all there; it’s a scenario straight out of the workplace violence training videos that Happy makes all Stark employees watch. Somehow he doesn’t think this will make them take their mandatory trainings more seriously, though. They’re all just lucky that Happy’s security protocols make it hard to smuggle unauthorized guns into the building.
Pepper’s tour is canceled, but she gives hugs to both Happy and Hogun and says the VIPs will understand.
Happy and Hogun end up in the same elevator when everything is over, and Happy takes the opportunity to ask the question he’s been wondering about ever since Hogun showed up. “How’d you know to come down here, anyway?”
“I heard it on Thor’s radio.”
That makes an annoying amount of sense. Tony gave security radios to all the Avengers, in case of emergency, and Happy supposes they never told them not to share the radios with their friends. It’s hard to be too mad when Hogun saved him from a trip to the ER with Delgado, though. Happy decides to let it go, although he does rewrite the protocol for distributing security radios.
4.
Things settle down after that. Thor and his friends go back to Asgard, and some of the Avengers decide to move down to DC to be closer to SHIELD headquarters. They all drop in now and again, but they’re not around on a regular basis.
Tony decides he wants to go back to Malibu, and Happy goes with him. He’s got things running smoothly in the new building now, so it’s time to check back in with the West Coast headquarters. Anyway, he’s never going to complain about spending the winter in California instead of New York.
He’s at the top of the stairs down into the workshop when he hears, “You don’t want to go down there.”
He turns around and sees Hogun sitting on the couch. “Hey, I didn’t know you were back on the planet.” He takes half a second to boggle at the fact that it’s normal in his life to say things like that before he adds, “Why not?”
“Your boss is down there getting acquainted with my prince.” The sneer on his face makes it clear that he’s not talking about Thor.
“Getting acquainted?” asks Happy, with a sinking feeling that he knows what Hogun means.
“Intimately.”
Happy sinks down on the couch and puts his face in his hands. “You know,” he says through his fingers, “for a while there it really looked like he was going to make it work with Pepper.”
He hears Hogun’s footsteps walking away from him toward the kitchen, then the sound of the fridge opening and closing. He lifts his head in time to see Hogun offering him a beer. He hesitates for a moment, because he’s supposedly on the clock, but fuck it, his boss is downstairs getting it on with an evil wannabe dictator. He takes the beer, opens it and takes a big swig.
Hogun sits down on the other end of the couch with his own beer and they drink in silence for a few minutes. Happy’s thinking about Loki, and how little he actually knows about him. Sure, Tony has historically made the worst possible decisions when it comes to sex and romance, but Happy thought the ill-advised one-night stands with people he has to keep dealing with afterwards pretty much ended after Afghanistan. Is he just falling back into bad habits, or is there more to it this time?
With that in mind, he asks, “You were friends with him for a long time before he went crazy, right? Do you think the boss is going to be okay?”
The length of time that Hogun takes to consider the question is not reassuring, but eventually he says, “I’ve never known the prince to deliberately hurt a bedmate who didn’t hurt him first.”
“Tony doesn’t have a great history of not hurting people first,” Happy points out.
Hogun shrugs and finishes his beer.
5.
After that, it seems like Loki is always around, smirking at people and making sarcastic remarks. Life goes on, though, and Happy still has to do his job. So when some shifty character is hanging out in HQ with a creep who’s meeting with Pepper and giving off some serious bad vibes, Happy decides to tail the guy.
They end up at the Chinese Theatre, where the guy is meeting up with another shady character. Shifty Guy #2 looks like a junkie, and the whole thing could just be a drug deal, but Happy’s pretty sure there’s more to it than that. He takes the opportunity to knock into the guy and get his hands on whatever’s in the case, and that’s when things get weird. Yeah, heroin doesn’t make your face light up orange like you could roast a marshmallow over it.
Happy palms one of the things that was in the case, because he can keep his eyes on the prize, but he misses Shifty Guy #1 coming at him. Well, if the guy’s going to get aggressive, Happy knows how to deal with that. He throws the first punch.
That turns out to be a mistake. He can take a punch, sure, but it’s harder to take being thrown across the courtyard by a guy who can heal a broken nose in a few seconds with that campfire glow. Damn it, he thinks. He’d thought this was the kind of human-scale thing that a good security specialist could handle. If he’d known this was some superpower shit, he would have asked Hogun to come with him for backup.
And then Shifty Guy #2 explodes. Happy manages to duck behind a booth to avoid the worst of it, but he knows it’s going to be bad.
Awareness comes in snatches after that.
Those dog tags—if he could just get hold of them, see the name, but he can’t reach.
Shifty Guy #1 is getting up and walking away from the explosion, healing as he goes. Happy needs to tell Tony what’s happening, let him and Pepper know that these people are probably targeting Stark Industries.
A voice he doesn’t recognize. “Hey, this guy’s alive over here!”
He’s being moved around a bunch. He can tell they’re trying to be gentle, but he thinks he probably has some broken ribs, and they keep jostling him. He hears someone say “morphine drip” and he tries to protest, despite the pain, because he has to stay awake to tell Tony what he knows.
Tony’s voice, “…just hang in there until Loki can get…” No, thinks Happy, I don’t trust Loki. There was something he needed to tell Tony, but he can’t even open his eyes to see if they’re alone, if it’s safe to talk.
Someone gently rotates his wrist and reads his name and an ID number off his wristband. Another voice responds, a little further away.
“You cannot imagine that we would allow you to prevent this happening,” says the Dowager Countess, and Happy perks up, or tries to. Is this the new episode? Is it Sunday already? He can’t tell what’s going on. How much has he missed? His whole face feels swollen and his eyes won’t open. Despite his best efforts, he drifts back to sleep to the sound of Maggie Smith’s voice.
Someone’s in his room emptying the garbage can. He can’t see their badge, can’t tell if they really work for the hospital. His attempt to say “Badge” comes out as an unintelligible croak, but the person looks up at him. He tries to lift his hand to tap his chest where his badge should be, but the effort exhausts him and he falls back asleep.
He opens his eyes, and then reflexively blinks as some kind of dust gets in them. The swelling has gone down, he realizes, and blinking is easier than it had been.
“Don’t move your head,” says Hogun’s voice. Happy catches himself before he reflexively turns his head to look. As he does so, he realizes that the pain in his neck is gone too.
Once he can see again, he notes that the dust is coming out of Hogun’s fist, which is now above Happy’s ribcage. Hogun is holding his other hand just above Happy’s skin. “What is that stuff?” asks Happy.
“It’s a healing stone. Are you feeling better?” Hogun takes his hands away and gestures to indicate that Happy can turn his head now.
“Yeah, actually I am. Thanks. That’s from Asgard?” he can’t help but ask, even though the question is inane.
Hogun nods. “The prince went back to get them when he heard you’d been injured.”
Happy groans. “Great, now I owe Loki one.”
“Don’t thank him too soon.” Hogun presses his lips together. “I’ve only healed the worst of your injuries. We brought back enough to heal you completely, but when we got here, the house had been destroyed and your boss was missing. The prince was not happy—” in combination with Hogun’s expression, Happy takes that to mean that Loki completely lost his shit— “and he took most of the stones and went to find him.”
“Did you say the house got destroyed?”
As Hogun catches him up on current events, Happy wishes he’d been able to tell Tony what he saw right before the blast. He can only hope that Tony saw the dog tags and figured it out anyway. He wouldn’t believe it of anyone else, but Happy knows better by now than to underestimate Tony.
He can only hope that Loki can help get him out of whatever mess he’s gotten himself into, and that Tony doesn’t end up needing too many of the remaining healing stones.
+1.
Happy can’t believe he’s rooting for Loki to come back to Earth, but he’s been gone for several weeks and it’s become incredibly obvious that Tony is on edge without him around. The other Asgardians are gone too, so there’s not any news. Tony’s spending all his time trying to build a communications device that can reach Asgard, Pepper is frustrated that he’s not working on company priorities, and Happy is just sick of hearing about it all.
Tony waves him over, and Happy falls into step behind him. When they get into the elevator and Tony sends it to the garage, Happy considers making him get his actual driver instead, but he decides not to push it. They just had to hire a new driver, who seems a little nervous, and Tony has been complaining that he’s a stickler for speed limits. Happy’s pretty sure he’ll learn, but Tony’s current stress level doesn’t make for a good learning environment. It’s easiest if Happy just drives today.
“How many survivors?” asks Tony on the phone. Happy frowns; shouldn’t Tony be using his suit instead of getting Happy to drive him to some kind of rescue situation? But then Tony says, “Okay, how big a spaceship are we talking? Can we put it down in the fields behind the Compound? Yeah, well, if you didn’t want the grounds crew to hate you then you should’ve been more careful about the Bifrost landing site.”
That raises a lot of questions, but it answers the most pressing one for Happy, which is where he’s supposed to be driving to. He pulls out of the Tower garage and heads for the highway.
“Hap,” says Tony from the back seat, “call the hospital and have them send some people to meet us at the Compound. Tell them we’ve got a spaceship full of refugees coming in from Asgard, lots of casualties. They’ll be hungry, too—JARVIS, arrange some catering for them.”
Sure, fine, a spaceship full of refugees. When they get to the Compound, Happy takes charge of setting things up and making sure the catering and medical crews don’t get in each other’s way. He drops everything to watch when the spaceship comes in for a landing. It squashes some fences and a bunch of trees, but it’s still a pretty neat landing for an enormous spaceship.
After a moment, a hatch opens. Thor, Loki, Bruce Banner for some reason, and a hot woman that Happy doesn’t recognize come out. Tony makes a beeline for Loki.
Happy doesn’t really want to watch them suck face any more than he has to, so he heads for the woman, in hopes that she’ll be the right person to talk logistics with. When he’s about halfway there, she pulls a dagger out and starts flipping it around in her hand while making deliberate eye contact. He gets the message and pivots to head for Thor instead.
Thor fills him in on the situation, with some help from Banner: the spaceship is full of Asgardian refugees, all that’s left of their civilization after the planet blew up in a fight with Thor and Loki’s sister. Happy decides that he doesn’t want to get too close to any Asgardian women, no matter how hot they all are.
Loki detaches himself from Tony to contradict something that Thor just said, and Tony takes the opportunity to start explaining what they’ve got set up so far. There’s a lot to coordinate, and Happy finds himself in the middle of it.
He’s on the ship, having just finished delivering a message to Tony from Banner, when Loki catches his eye and jerks his head toward one particular door.
Happy resents being told what to do so casually by anyone except Tony and Pepper, but especially Loki. Instead of taking the implicit order, he heads outside to check on the caterer. The vegetarian sandwiches are going faster than he expected given the dietary habits of the Asgardians he knows, but not so fast that he thinks he needs to order more.
Then he heads back to the ship and approaches the door that Loki indicated. As he opens it, he hears a child’s voice whining, “Uuuuuuulf, it’s not your tuuuuuuuurn!” and thinks he fell for a prank. But the motion of the door opening has already caught the attention of a different child, who meets Happy’s eyes and shushes his companion.
He can’t exactly back out at this point, so he comes all the way into the room. Three children are sitting around the floor around what appears to be a game of some sort. If these were regular human kids, he would guess they range from maybe four years old to eight or nine.
Sitting on a bench behind the kids is Hogun. He’s got a wide-eyed toddler on his lap, and he looks exhausted. His armor, which was pristine every time Happy saw him before, is dirty and scuffed, and his hair is loose and tangled. He looks up and gives Happy a nod.
“There’s food outside if you want it,” says Happy.
Hogun nods and sets the toddler down on the ground next to the other kids, moving stiffly like his back is hurting. The kid looks like he’s about to start screaming, but the oldest kid goes over and picks him up, soothing him.
As Happy leads the group out to where they’ve got the sandwich line set up, the second-oldest kid peppers him with questions. “Is this really Midgard? Are you a mortal? Are we close to where the battle with the Frost Giants was? Have you ever seen a Frost Giant?”
Happy puts up with it, and ignores Loki smirking at him from the other side of the field, but he’s grateful when the kids’ attention turns to the sandwich line. Someone greets them by name and lets them cut in front of her, leaving Hogun with Happy at the back of the line. Happy raises a questioning eyebrow, and Hogun says, “They’re Volstagg’s. His wife asked me to watch them while she helps in the healing rooms.”
“Is Volstagg…?”
“He and Fandral were both grievously injured. He is recovering, but he hasn’t woken up yet.”
Happy stares at him, thinking about his own experience in the hospital. “The healing stones didn’t help?”
“We didn’t have enough for everyone. And the quarry that they came from was destroyed.”
That, more than anything, drives home for Happy the horror of what happened. It wasn’t just all these people losing their homes, as horrible as that is, or his friends being injured in a battle (while his boss’s terrible hookup came out apparently unscathed). It’s the destruction of a whole planet and everything on it. He can’t think of anything to say to it all except “Shit.”
Hogun nods and steps forward to take a plate and napkin.
One of the caterers pulls Happy aside at that point to tell him someone was looking for him, so he spends some helping with the medical logistics. When he’s done, he checks in with Tony and ends up making some calls to try to arrange housing. While Tony and Thor are brainstorming massive, arc reactor-powered building projects, Happy gets on the phone with Pepper to arrange shorter-term solutions. The options for this many people at the last minute are not great, but between the Tower, the Compound, and the spaceship, which at least some of the people are willing to stay on for a while, they don’t need too much additional space. Pepper says she’ll call the CEO of a hotel chain that she knows, and Happy leaves her to it.
He finds Hogun again, now relieved of his babysitting duties. Hogun says he doesn’t need any medical help, despite the way he’s moving, and Happy gets it so he lets it go. He briefly explains the housing situation, and Hogun nods stoically.
“You can obviously stay in your old rooms in the Tower if you want, but we’re going to have to cram a lot more people in there. But I’ve got a spare room at my place. It’s not much, but it would be more private.”
Even as he says it, he feels stupid. Of course Hogun is going to want to be Volstagg’s family, with all these people he has ties to that Happy doesn’t even know about. But Hogun nods. “I wouldn’t be in your way?”
Happy doesn’t say that he’s got room in his life. He doesn’t say that he can’t aspire to Tony’s billionaire bachelor lifestyle, but his work means he can’t really settle down into something more conventional either. He doesn’t say that he could use a friend that he doesn’t have to explain those things to. He doesn’t even remind Hogun of all the times he’s helped Happy, even saved his life. He just says, “Nah, I’ve got space.”