The voices.

They were seldom quiet, and they never ceased. They came to Loki by day, when he paced his cell, and by night, when he sought to capture a few desperate moments of sleep before they started again.

He wondered if it was part of the punishment his once-father had set him, Odin and all the others who had stood in council to sentence him. Sometimes, to quiet the voices, he remembered the day he had been condemned, and wondered what he had missed in the setting of his punishment. Like tonight, when the low and high and crying and wailing and pleading voices left him with nothing but a handful of concrete memories to give him some hold on sanity.

If he had ever been sane.

He had been defiant when Thor had taken him back to Asgard, clinging to the rags of his pride, unable to conceal his hatred and resentment and contempt for the mortal warriors who thought themselves his equals. If they had defeated him, it was because he had failed to plan carefully enough. Because he had been too cautious. Too cowardly to grasp what he deserved with both hands and never let go.

And this was what his caution and cowardice had bought him. This cell, where time had no meaning but what he made for himself, where the last words he had heard were his brother's: "Farewell. For now."

Because Thor believed his brother—his adopted, jotun brother-could somehow redeem himself and one day be free. There were times, like today, when Loki could only laugh scornfully, berate himself for admitting, just before the cell door closed, that he loved his brother in return. Puling, childish sentiment.

He sat at his desk, turning the immense book to the next page. A Complete History of Midgard, by some obscure Asgardian scholar or other. Loki had never studied much of Earth's history, and that had been another serious error. He and Thor had received instruction on the dominant cultures in each of the Realms, but Midgard had merited scant attention. It was, after all, a primitive place, with little to recommend its inhabitants, who were very fond of slaughtering each other in droves, and no possible threat to Asgard.

Asgard had suffered its own internecine conflicts involving the deaths of thousands, but not since mankind had first developed brains complex enough to make weapons sufficient to bring down a slow-moving beast. For thousands of years, all Asgardian warfare had been with other Realms or threats from beyond.

Loki had made too many assumptions about Midgardians, vastly underestimating how stubbornly and courageously they could fight when they were threatened. Not only the so-called Avengers, but others of no great power. Like Agent Coulson of S.H.I.E.L.D..

"You lack conviction," Coulson had said as he lay dying, just before he'd blasted Loki with a weapon of unanticipated efficacy. Had that been Loki's problem, then? Lack of conviction? That he could not truly see himself on a throne at the heart of Midgard, with all mankind on its knees before him?

Strange that he had only been able to recognize now, in retrospect, that Coulson had truly been a worthy foe in his own right. That he might have had some wisdom that Loki himself ….

Loki closed his eyes. Once the picture had been so clear. Now it was blurred, like the faint images that appeared on the frosted wall of his prison when Thor came to deliver Loki's monthly quota of food, drink and "entertainment." It had been his decision to saddle Loki with the Complete History, but Loki had been too desperate for mental stimulation to reject it. The simple knowledge that Thor had chosen it and brought it himself was its own comfort, even if it was his way of rubbing Loki's nose in the events on Midgard, of teaching a naughty child a lesson, somewhat less severe than being exiled powerless to Midgard, as Odin's son had been.

Or was it?

The voices started again, and Loki nearly crushed his skull between the palms of his hands. It did no good. The voices did not come from outside himself. They continued to beg and plead and cry for mercy. Mercy he no longer had the power to grant them.

"Kneel," he had commanded. And they had knelt, the sheep, until the one had stood and defied him. For a few seconds.

"Not to men like you."

Loki dropped his hands and rested his forehead against the desk. Men like him. He'd had a notion, then, of what the old man had referred to—memories of the old lessons-but the words had meant nothing to him. Human dictators were as nothing, their actions unimportant and long past in terms of mortal history.

Loki had thought himself long past any real feeling for the suffering of others, particularly a lesser race like the inhabitants of Earth. He had hardly considered the subject at all, once he had been shown for what he was. Shown again, and again, and again.

But this book ….

A mortal called Elie Wiesel had written of the deaths of millions in camps run by the mortal monster Captain America had spoken of when he had shielded the old man in Stuttgart. Asgard had ever been a monarchy, no stranger to absolute rule. But this Hitler …

"I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation," Wiesel had written. "We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented."

The old man in Stuttgart had not spoken those words, but that had been his meaning. "Men like you." He'd had this courage, not to be silent. To take a side against the tormentor.

Loki slammed his fist on the book, cracking the spine. But his keepers would not give him another soon, so he pushed it aside and gave way to the voices that would not be silenced.

#

"Why?"

The man was not nearly as large as Volstagg, but he had something of that warrior's character in his expression, as if he had spent a great deal of time jesting and laughing and partaking of more than his share of meals and mead. He wore what mortals referred to as "coveralls", smudged with stains of grease and other unknown substances, and his face was unshaven.

"I worked hard," the man said. "Every day. Got up at five. At work by six-thirty. Beth … that's my wife … she always had breakfast ready for me, even when I told her I could take care of it myself. And my little girl …" His eyes filled with pride. "My little Amy. Such a fighter, like her Ma. Wouldn't back down to nobody, even when she was six." The man's smile faded. "But I was in one of them buildings those aliens attacked, fixing some pipes. Roof came down on my head. Never saw it coming." He scratched his short, graying hair. "Why'd you do that? I never did nothing to you. I tried to be a good Pa, a good husband. You took that away. Why?"

Loki beat his head against the desk, and the man, and his voice, vanished. Blood dripped on the slick, hard surface. Loki let it fall unheeded.

Blood. How much had he caused to be shed?

Only mortal blood, he told himself, for the hundredth time. For the thousandth. It is of no importance. How much Jotun blood had Odin shed? And Thor, who had slain as many foes as his father? Asgard dominated all the Realms save Midgard. Why not one more?

"Why?" came a softer voice, a mortal girl's, childish and yet unafraid. Angry. "Why did you kill my Daddy?"

Shivering, though the cell itself was neither cold nor warm, Loki stalked to his comfortless bed and lay down on his back, his arm thrown over his eyes. For a while the voices went away. The pain in his head was slight, but it distracted him. From the words he had read. From the pleas and sorrow, so much worse than the hatred.

Hatred he could accept. He could laugh at it.

But not this.

Not when he heard in that child's voice the echo of his own.

He slept for a while, or so he thought. But then came the dreams. The dreams of destruction, of fire and smoke and great ships segmented like some grotesque offspring of insect and serpent, spitting out savages Loki had despised even as he had used them. Used them to kill, unaware and uncaring of their actions as long as they did his bidding while he dealt with the unexpected and unwelcome threat of the Avengers and their ridiculous flying fortress.

Natasha Romanov. He'd seen himself reflected in her eyes for a few moments during their exchange on the helicarrier. A ledger dripping with red. Cold, calculating, her purpose set.

Until it had seemed he'd broken her, revealed a vulnerability he could turn against her. And yet it was she who exposed him, and laughed at him for being so easily tricked.

He saw her now, in the dream, beautiful and flame-haired, her full lips curved up in mocking satisfaction. He saw himself walking through the transparent walls of his temporary prison, catching her by the arm, nearly twisting it from its socket.

"Do you dare to mock me?" he asked.

She resisted, eyes ablaze, but even her skill was no match for his jotun strength.

"As a matter of fact, I do," she said, ceasing her struggles. "I'm not like Tony when it comes to witty repartee, but you're so over-the-top it's like talking to a cartoon villain. It's just too easy."

He twisted her arm with a little more force, just short of breaking it. "As easy as it was to kill at the behest of others, for the scant reward of wealth? Or the thrill of taking a life? A hundred lives?"

She smiled with those enticing lips. "But it stops being thrilling, doesn't it?" she said. "You get your throne, everybody falls on their knees, and … then what? I know what you are. You'll get bored very fast. Bringing the whole world under your heel, issuing edicts, sending these Chitauri to enforce your will … where do you go from there, an egotist like you, who has to have his finger in every pie?" She stretched toward him, though the movement must have given her more pain. "Fury thinks you kill for fun. But I don't think that's true. It's not the kill. It's this sucking need in you, to know you hold the power of life and death over creatures so inferior to yourself." She cocked her head. "But it's really you who feels inferior, isn't it? What made you that way, I wonder? What made you feel so small inside that you had to prove you could be the boot to the ant?"

And then she kissed him, hard, biting into his lower lip with enough force to draw blood. And he'd kissed her with equal violence, because everything she said was true, because they both had those bloody ledgers they could never erase. And his would become far bloodier than hers before it was finished.

"Think," she said, pulling back, panting and flushed. "Maybe you can keep a few pages of that ledger clean."