Lucius was interested in Asgardians.
That interest had nothing to do with reverence. He wanted answers. What, exactly, made an Aesir different from a human, mutant or not, or from an Eternal? Where did the divine theatrics end and the useful mechanics begin? Was it merely longevity, energy density, magical adaptation, an alien biology wearing myth as a hat, or some more irritating combination of all three?
Those were the available categories for now: human, mutant, Eternal, and Aesir. He intended to understand the lot of them eventually, preferably by methods that would surely not be approved by anyone bound by the Hippocratic Oath.
Which meant New Mexico was no longer optional.
Thor Odinson had fallen to Earth. A god with daddy issues and a hammer problem. There was no universe in which Lucius was going to ignore that.
First, though, he needed to move.
His new mansion was finally ready for occupancy, and if SHIELD had been generous enough to compensate him with prime waterfront property, he intended to enjoy it properly. From there, New Mexico would be a trip rather than a campaign, and he preferred his divine investigations to begin from a good sofa.
So he went down to reception to settle his bill.
The receptionist saw him crossing the lobby and felt the dread. Mr Noctis was smiling. Smiling was bad. Smiling meant he wanted something. When he wanted something, policies bent, staff developed headaches, and management started speaking in the tone usually used for royalty and bomb disposal.
Lucius stopped at the desk and rested one hand lightly on the marble.
"I would like my bill, please. Also, fetch me your manager. I have a modest proposal."
The receptionist's professional smile held, though only because years of training and fear kept the muscles obedient.
"Of course, Mr Noctis."
Inside, she was already praying the proposal did not involve the kitchen, the ballroom, the Army, or any of the categories of request that had previously turned the week into a staff support crisis.
She printed the bill, called upstairs, and asked the manager to come down in the special voice staff used when discretion and mild panic had become the same thing.
Lucius signed without looking too closely at the total. He had long since stopped reading hotel bills with moral seriousness. The place had earned its money. It had housed him, even given him Sebastien, which was a considerable contribution to civilisation.
The manager arrived fast enough to prove she had jogged at some point. Patricia Lowell was one of those women who had spent years mastering the art of expensive calm, but she still slowed for half a second when she saw Lucius's expression.
That smile again told her he was about to ask for something grotesque.
She knew it. The receptionist knew it. Even the guests in the lobby who had learned who he was knew it.
"Mr Noctis." Patricia offered her hand. "I trust your stay has been satisfactory."
Lucius shook it and looked almost offended.
"Satisfactory? Patricia, please. Your establishment has housed me through a transformative period of my life. I leave richer, stronger, and with a higher opinion of the minibar than I had upon arrival."
Patricia did not know what to do with that, so she chose the oldest managerial response in the world.
"Thank you."
He nodded graciously, then cut straight to the crime.
"I want your butler."
The receptionist's stomach fell clean through the floor.
Patricia kept her face still through nothing short of professional heroism.
"I'm sorry?"
"Sebastien." Lucius waved a hand. "The man is wasted on your payroll. I am moving to my new mansion, and I require continuity. I would like the hotel to release him to me. Failing that, I am prepared to discuss a long lease."
Patricia stared at him for one controlled second.
He had not asked for a car, a private ballroom, for the kitchen staff, the wine cellar, or to buy a floor of the hotel outright. He had asked for an employee.
She shifted into the delicate corporate language used whenever something insane threatened to become profitable.
"Mr Noctis, our staff are not generally transferred as part of a room package."
Lucius blinked.
"Then consider this an upgrade to your service model."
The receptionist stared determinedly at the desk screen in front of her and pretended not to hear anything. She was already picturing the poor butler, whose real name she privately knew, being dragged to a waterfront property by a mutant lunatic who had somehow made the Army queue outside a hotel look normal.
Patricia, meanwhile, was calculating.
Sebastien had wanted a promotion for years. He was excellent, reliable, elegant and unflappable. The sort of staff member luxury hotels grew by accident, perhaps twice a decade. Losing him would hurt.
On the other hand, Mr Noctis paid bills like weather, tipped like a man trying to embarrass the currency, and had just proposed a yearly lease as if he were discussing a piano.
That sort of sentence had numbers hiding in it.
"What sort of arrangement did you have in mind?"
Lucius smiled like a shark seeing a sensible fish.
"A full year to begin with. Renewable. He keeps his salary here, I'll pay and match it personally, and you may tell yourselves this is a strategic partnership between hospitality tiers."
Patricia hated how much that sounded like money.
"He would need accommodation."
Lucius spread his hands.
"He is not sleeping in the garden, Patricia. There are standards. He will live at the mansion."
The receptionist almost admired the sentence. Almost.
Patricia considered one last line of defence.
"There is also the issue of his consent."
Lucius's expression turned puzzled in a way that made everyone nearby more afraid instead of less.
"My dear woman. I am not proposing marriage. I am offering improved employment."
He leaned in just enough to turn the next line into a private sin.
"Also, tell him I can rejuvenate him if he stays in my service. People respond very well to youth."
Patricia froze.
There it was. The impossible line. The line no luxury manager training manual prepared anyone for. Offer one of your employees to a strange mutant businessman in exchange for money, continuity, and implied anti-ageing treatment.
She looked at the receptionist. The receptionist looked at her screen. Neither of them wanted to be the first person to say yes to that out loud.
Patricia eventually did what management always did when disaster came with premium pricing.
-
Sebastien, or rather Benjamin Carter, was in the staff lodging upstairs, celebrating the end of a nightmare.
He had taken off his jacket, loosened his collar, put on music far too loud for the room, and was dancing with the kind of vigorous private joy usually reserved for lottery wins, successful divorces, and medical remissions.
"Free," he told the ceiling as he pointed both fingers upward like a man receiving divine confirmation. "I am free of that psychopath."
He spun once. He nearly kicked a chair. He did not care. Tomorrow, he would go back to ordinary rich lunatics. Men who wanted a mistress hidden, women who wanted jewels found, hedge fund princes who mistook shouting for charisma. Real problems. Familiar problems. Human problems.
Then his phone rang.
He looked down and saw the manager's name.
The music stopped.
He answered in a voice already preparing for bereavement.
"Ma'am?"
Patricia spoke with the careful brightness of someone delivering excellent news to a man she strongly suspected would rather be shot.
"Mr Carter, after review, the hotel has agreed to lease your services to Mr Noctis for an initial term of twelve months, renewable yearly. In addition to your current salary from the St. Regis, Mr Noctis will pay you an equal amount privately, and you will be housed at his mansion."
Benjamin sat down on the edge of the bed before his knees decided for him.
His face emptied by degrees.
Patricia continued because pausing would have implied mercy.
"We trust you will reflect the perfection and values of the St. Regis in this elevated assignment, Mr Carter."
Benjamin made a sound no adult man should ever have to make into a telephone.
"Ma'am."
"Yes?"
"Have I done something wrong?"
There was the faintest silence on the line.
"No, Mr Carter. On the contrary. You have done your job very, very well."
That somehow made it worse.
Benjamin put one hand over his mouth. He could feel the tears arriving with the grim steadiness of a train that had left the station on time.
Patricia, guessing the despair, pressed on with full corporate murder.
"Mr Noctis also made certain remarks regarding your long-term vitality, which I took to mean he values your continued service."
Benjamin closed his eyes.
The tears started.
"Ma'am," he whispered. "He calls me Sebastien."
"I am aware."
"He knows that is not my name."
"I am also aware of that."
Benjamin took the phone away from his ear and stared at it like it had become a venomous animal. Then he put it back.
"When do I leave?"
"Immediately would be best. He is in the lobby."
Benjamin began to sob.
With the tired, deep conviction of a man packing for a sentence.
He opened the wardrobe, dragged out a suitcase, and started folding shirts with the helpless precision of the damned. Every pair of socks felt like betrayal. Every cufflink looked like it now belonged to another life. The music stayed off. The room was full of the sound of zips, cloth, and a dignified breakdown in progress.
-
Lucius waited in the lobby with the cheerful patience of a man who had purchased exactly the absurdity he wanted.
When Sebastien arrived, dragging his suitcase and what remained of his soul, Lucius brightened at once.
"Sebastien. Wonderful. I was beginning to think you had fled the country."
Benjamin's face achieved the particular blankness of a servant trying not to die in public.
Patricia appeared a moment later with the final papers, which Lucius signed with one flourish and no visible sense of shame.
He assured her again that Benjamin would be a happy man as long as he remained in service, which somehow made the entire staff more alarmed rather than reassured.
Then he turned and walked towards the doors.
Sebastien followed because, at that point, not following would merely have turned the scene from tragic to farcical.
The moment the doors shut behind them, the manager, receptionist, staff, and several guests in the lobby all let out the breath they had been holding.
Not one of them envied Benjamin Carter his new assignment.
The receptionist actually crossed herself despite not being Catholic.
Patricia stood very still and wondered whether she had just sold a valued employee into a year-long arrangement with the polished end of chaos.
Then she straightened and told herself it was an executive placement.
That sounded more expensive and therefore safer.
-
Lucius tossed Benjamin the keys to one of Tony's cars and took the passenger seat with proprietary satisfaction.
It was a 1965 Shelby Cobra 427, brutal and beautiful in the old way, all long nose, short temper, and too much engine for moral moderation. Lucius loved every single wheel Tony had unwillingly contributed to his happiness. The other six still sat in the St. Regis garage, and the manager had promised they would be delivered to the mansion within two days.
They headed out of the city and up towards Sands Point on the North Shore of Long Island, far enough from Manhattan to feel private, close enough that civilisation could still be reached in roughly forty minutes if traffic behaved or was threatened.
The gates appeared first, tall and wrought in black iron, set into a high wall that respected privacy more than beauty. Beyond them sat the mansion SHIELD had purchased in the name of apology and extortion management.
Benjamin slowed.
"Do you have a remote, sir?"
Lucius clicked his tongue.
"That one-eyed old parasite did not send me the remote."
He used telekinesis instead.
The gates opened inward without a sound loud enough to satisfy him.
The drive curved through clipped grounds and winter garden beds towards the house itself, a renewed Victorian waterfront mansion with three storeys, pale stone, dark slate roofing, long windows, and enough decorative restraint to avoid looking like a duke had developed a gambling debt. Somebody had renovated it properly. The bones remained old. The plumbing, wiring, heating, and garage access very clearly did not.
At the back sat a wide terrace, a proper swimming pool, lawns running down towards a private beach, and below the structure an underground garage large enough for twenty cars.
He stepped out of the Cobra and looked past the pool to the water.
The beach pleased him.
Then it annoyed him.
He clicked his tongue.
"I should have asked for a yacht as well."
Sebastien, who had just accepted his fate, wisely said nothing.
Lucius stood there thinking.
It was too late to add the yacht now, or at least too late until SHIELD needed him again or committed some fresh stupidity worthy of structured punishment. That thought cheered him considerably.
He chuckled and walked towards the house.
His butler followed with the suitcase and the hopeless tread of a man entering a prison with a better coastline.
-
At the Triskelion, Fury was reading Coulson's report on the New Mexico anomaly when he shivered for no reason.
His eye moved over the relevant lines again, taking in the hammer in the desert, the unmovable object, the small town response, the weird claimant, and the man insisting his name was Thor Odinson.
Fury leaned back in the chair very slowly.
He did not believe in coincidence in principle.
He also did not enjoy mysterious hammers, self-proclaimed gods, or the feeling that somewhere out there Lucius Noctis had just thought of something new.
The shiver came again.