A beat of silence. Steve had time to tighten his arms and feel the way she still shook in his embrace, as though the slight body could not fully contain her spirit, so rage and fear and exaltation were leaking out of her pores. Then Thor righted a chair and sat heavily down, Tony, Natasha and Bruce all began speaking at once, and Loki brushed her hands together, like a craftsman straightening up after finishing a tricky piece of work. She pushed Steve's encircling arms apart and stepped away from him, turning just enough so she could give him the same bright and breezy smile he'd used in Alfheim to cover up his apprehension, when he was waiting for Steve to punish him for stealing the crown.

"Right, then. You should be safe enough for me to leave you for a while. One more little thing to see to and then we can relax." She turned the fake cheer on the rest of the room, gave them all a wave. "Don't wait up."

With a twist of green light she was gone. Steve stood looking at the thin air into which she'd vanished, and the protests of his colleagues, both calm and shouted, bounced off him as if from his shield. No, he was not liking this. He knew Loki enough to believe that the less she told him the more he wouldn't like what he found out. The happier she looked, the more miserable she felt. And that any situation she called a "little thing" probably involved the opening of the gates of Hell and a whole massive bundle of hurt pouring out.

"... and you know Fury's going to go—"

"Shit!" Steve said, shocking them all into silence, like they'd never heard a soldier swear before. "How do I find out where she's gone?"

"Geez," Clint poured himself the remainder of the coffee, "you two really are joined at the hip, right? Like since when did we start worrying over whether Loki could take care of himself?"

Steve glared. "Since she was obviously planning something big. And if I know her, which I do—"

"Yeah, a little too close for comfort if you ask—"

"...then it's something that needs stopping. Tony? Thor? That teleportation thing she does, can it be followed?"

"Pft. I've had JARVIS running the algorithms for years. Nothing yet."

"Another sorcerer might—" Thor still sounded subdued, as though defeat had knocked some of the stuffing out of him. Steve tucked away a little feeling of satisfaction about that to be appreciated later, if there was still world or time to do it in.

"OK. Tony, get Strange on the phone, ask him to come over here and do his thing. I'm going to..." Steve wasn't a vain man, but under the yammer of panic it was still good to feel the others pick up his urgency and move to it. This marriage might have them all atwitter on the surface, but underneath they were still solid. They were still his team.

He put his hands on his hips in a hero pose he'd unconsciously adopted from his movie-star days, and belatedly realised he was commanding the troops in nothing more than a pair of blue stripy threadbare pajama trousers. So much for ego. "I'm going to go get dressed."

"I anticipated your call," Strange sat on the scuffed couch cross-legged, as if it was a pillar in the desert and he a holy man, remote and untouchable. But he had come at once, and he'd brought a sheaf of papers written over in two different hands. One, in ink that looked like blood, was cursive and copperplate. The other, in blue biro, was the spiky handwriting of somebody more used to runes.

"Indeed I might have sought you out myself, for Loki has just departed from my house. Where, I may say, I thought she could not enter. She requested my help with this," he spread the papers on the coffee table, showing page after page of closely written diagrams that made Tony's schematics look simple.

"It is a not-unchallenging spell of interdimensional transport, designed to take her not only to a different realm, but also to a different time."

Steve looked at the tight packed symbols and then up at Strange's saturnine face. He was a man of painful dignity from the streaks of silver in his dark hair to the perfect fall of the folds in his ridiculous cloak, but there was something about him – a little ozone tang, a spark of something wild in his dark eyes – that spoke of the way magic twisted its devotees to its own use and reminded him of Loki. 'Not unchallenging' for Strange meant 'would make a normal person bleed from the ears' but still...

"Loki wouldn't need help with something like that."

"My thoughts exactly," Strange smiled. "And when I contemplated this, it seemed to me that her only reason for asking for it would be so that someone would know where she had gone."

"Or could follow her?"

"Perhaps." A gracious nod as if to humour a child who had finally managed to tie its own shoelaces, and Steve guessed that 'incurable smartarse' was also something that came with the territory.

OK, so Loki wanted him to know where she'd gone, but not enough to outright tell him. Loki wanted him to spend time figuring it out so that when he did arrive it would be too late to stop her. She wanted him to know because she was afraid she was walking into a situation that was too big for her to handle alone. But she didn't want him to know because whatever it was she was doing was something not even she could argue him into approving.

He got an inkling of it then, like getting a bucket of ice water emptied over his head, pulled down his hood, picked up his shield and stood. "Can you send me there?"

"I can."

"Do it. Do it now, please."

It started with magic circles on the floor of the Avengers' common room and ended with the fabric of space and time being cracked open and Steve threaded through it like a skein of violet thread. His mind arrived first, conscious of golden sunlight on golden towers, everything huge, metallic, pristine, crushing with its grandeur. His artist's sensibilities saw at once where Loki got his elegance, where Thor got his brutal simplicity. Tony would love it - everything he saw was machined to perfection, bright, bold, open and on display.

No wonder shadowy Loki, closed, secret and subtle, had decided it was worth risking death by wormhole just to get away.

And now she'd come back willingly. Steve's body caught up with him, knitting together in an indescribable rush. He hit the golden floor running, burst around a golden corner and caught the flick of a forest green cloak as it turned into the huge, ornately carved doorway to Steve's left. Someone was speaking in there, a low, gloating rumble, like the sound of glaciers in the evening when they take another inch of land.

"...you will die by the hand of Laufey."

Loki's voice, as polished as the pillars around them "and you will die by the hand of—"

"No!"

A burst of speed to carry him through the wide entrance hall, and Steve skidded to a halt in the room itself, taking stock: A woman on the floor, unconscious amid the bodies of monsters, a massive sledge-like bed surrounded by golden light on which slumbered a white bearded man with one eye.

Stooping over him, the most forbidding of all the monsters, red eyed and crowned with horns, had just stilled in astonishment. Caught in the act of murder, his fist was encased in a dagger of ice poised above the sleeping man's throat, but he and Steve had both frozen, caught up in the struggle on the other side of the dais, where a furious younger version of Loki was trying to wrench his golden spear out of the hands of Steve's wife.

"What are you doing? Let me go! He will kill Father."

Oh, Steve's heart thought, instantly and wordlessly, when he looked at the boy. Steve was used to a Loki who had survived trial by the cosmos, relived a thousand lives, been shattered and put together again dark, mad, funny and maybe just a little bit at peace with his own nature. This boy had all that to come, and – to Steve's educated eyes – he was raw and desperate and terribly, terribly alone.

It didn't seem fair for him to have to fight himself too, but, "Let him," Steve's wife said, her lips pulled back from her teeth and her eyes narrowed. "Let him kill the old bastard for us."

"No!" But Loki in male form was stronger. He pushed her back, her feet slipping on the shiny gilded floor as she clung on tight and swore. "This is the plan. How can you be getting in the way of the plan? You must know—"

"I know it fails. I know he breaks your heart again. I know there's no point in trying, and I know that five years in the future you'll be me and you'll want him dead."

The creature Steve had thought of as a monster, bigger than three men, indigo and fearsome, still held a hand almost gently on the sleeping god's throat, but his eyes, crimson and clever, followed the argument closely. Not a monster after all, but a person – a cautious one, if he had his enemy in his grip and still waited to find out what game he was enmeshed in before he struck.

There was something about his face, the wedge-like shape of it, the pointed chin, the clever, calculating look, even the little smile that said he was finding all of this quite fascinating...

Over by the wall, the younger Loki faltered. "Why?"

"Because we're married again. I know you haven't forgotten what happened to Ingjaldr, what happened to our children. We can avenge them now, and we can make sure the same thing doesn't happen again. If he dies, we are free to be happy. We will be loved and our children will live. Don't choose our kidnapper over that."

Young Loki looked over her shoulder to where Laufey knelt, weapon in hand, watching him, and their expressions were identical. Laufey, Steve thought, struck dumb by the family resemblance. Loki Laufeyjarson. How had Asgard not managed to see it earlier when it was written over both their faces in capital letters a mile high?

"Just let him kill Odin first and then you can kill him afterwards, in glorious and entirely justified revenge."

Oh honey, your mind.

Laufey chuckled with a sound like a small avalanche, looked at Steve as if sharing the joke, and then clearly decided that if he was going down, his enemy was too. The blade in his hand lengthened and fined down. He pulled his hand back and went in for the killing blow.

Steve hurled himself forward, rammed the giant in the armpit the way he had taken on Thor, making his swing go wild. Cold struck through his costume and turned the breath to snow in his mouth as he pushed with all his super strength. The huge man slid a foot away from the bier, surprised as Steve would have been if the mosquito he'd tried to swat turned out to have tactical nukes aboard.

"No!" Steve yelled, coughing out ice. "Loki, you are not going to kill either of your fathers today. Not if I've got anything—"

"Either father?" Even their voices were similar. Laufey pushed Steve away by the shield – the padding on its straps shattering and flaking away – and looked over to where both Lokis had turned in an instant truce and were levelling the long wicked pointed spear between them. "He stole my child as well as my casket? You... You are...?"

A searing blaze of light from the spear. Laufey held up a hand and a wall of ice came down between him and the rest of the room, the bolt reflecting off it and blasting a hole in the ceiling.

"I had anticipated some form of treachery, he said, twisting at a band of cold blackened metal on one of his bracers, "But not this." The universe drew apart where he was as if it was an oil painting being torn down the middle, and then it healed itself and he was gone.

Steve's Loki cursed in a long fluent flyting of obscenities and then raised her hands and made a cutting gesture, like a conductor silencing her orchestra. She stepped away from her younger self, leaving the look of crestfallen bewilderment frozen on his face. The running feet outside the doorway stopped. The recovering queen halted in her struggle to rise.

Loki looked up at Steve with beseeching eyes, a faint tremble of tears, a vulnerability that only he could soothe. An expression he'd have had to have a heart of stone to resist. It was a work of art, and Steve appreciated it as such. He sighed.

"I'm not angry with you, alright? So you can put that away."

The sorrow vanished, tucked away with all the other concealed weapons. "I have the right to avenge one husband's death and protect the life of another."

"Yeah," Steve remembered the story, thought he should have realised long before now that that was what all this was about. "My father kept me in the house while the servant murdered my husband and children... I convinced myself I was grateful to him... After that I swore I would not sleep with anyone I would not as soon see dead."

And then she broke her vow, with him, and had been running scared, desperate to keep him safe ever since. "Yeah, you do. Are you angry with me for stopping you?"

She smiled without her usual level of bullshit challenge. It was a fond smile, but it was also worryingly tired. "Why would I, when it was I who gave you the opportunity?"

OK, sometimes she did make his head hurt, but that was true. She'd laid the trail of breadcrumbs, he'd only followed it. "You... worked me into your plan not because you needed help, but because you knew I would stop you?"

"I wanted to give you the chance," she said and trailed a hand through the dome of golden sparks and smoke that drifted protectively over her father's head. "What good is it to acquire a conscience if you never let it speak?"

He pulled her close and she came gently, like all the fight had gone out of her, like she just wanted to go home, except she didn't have a home to go to that wasn't him. It was strange, touching his lips to hers to feel them neither teasing nor greedy, simply resigned. "But you're sad," he murmured in apology. "You're still sad."

"I hope it's enough," she said. "Death would have been surer."

And then she let out a high pitched, terrified squeal, and tried to recoil as the golden light atop the bier bulged and spilled. But Odin Allfather grabbed her wrist in a grasp that turned the skin white, opened one terrible blue eye and said, "Oh, you nasty little pervert. Not again."