Disclaimer: I own nothing but the OCs. This is all unbeta'd, so read at your own risk.


Kate was dreaming about her wedding day.

"You sure I look OK?" Kate anxiously tucked a lock of hair behind her ears – exasperated, Jane flipped it back out again.

"You look perfect. Stop undoing everything I did to you. You are beautiful." Easy for Jane to say. Jane looked like she went to the Oscars on a regular basis.

But, Kate reflected at her reflection, she did clean up pretty good. Frigga had offered to lend her a tiara, but Kate had refused, opting to wear the comb that Loki had given her. Crowned by love, she'd crooned sappily, batting her eyelashes before bursting into laughter. Frigga had rolled her eyes, but she couldn't help the upward twitch of her mouth.

"You're going to be a princess," Darcy crowed, bouncing up and down on the bed. "Oh, my god, isn't this surreal? You're like a hotter Kate Middleton!"

Kate wouldn't really go as far as to say that she was hotter than Kate Middleton, because, really. How would you compare an apple and an orange?

Then the first part of Darcy's exclamation hit her.

"Oh shit," she gasped, going pale. "I'm going to be a princess. Oh, fuck."

Nat raised her eyebrows. "You did know that you were marrying Prince Loki of Asgard, God of Lies, Mischief, and Chaos, right?"

Kate tugged nervously at her lacy mandarin collar. "Yeah, but I hadn't really registered that I'd become a princess, with state duties and shit. What if they make me shake hands and open airports? I don't like shaking hands! You never know what other people have touched! Like, what if they scratched their balls in the toilet like fifteen minutes ago and didn't wash their hands? Gross!"

"Wow. You really didn't think this through," Pepper sniggered, toying with her bracelet.

"What if I'm a terrible princess? What if the court hates me? What if the people get all revolutionary and I accidentally tell someone to eat cake because I love cake and like bam my head's separated from my body and tossed into a basket?" Kate was building up into full freak-out mode; Jane grabbed her shoulders before she could slide into total panic.

"You are one of the strongest and smartest people I know," Jane told her firmly, "and I know a lot of smart people, and my boyfriend is pretty strong. Chill. Y'know, you'll pick it up. You have Loki to guide you, and you're pretty savvy. You just have to stop swearing at people, and I'm sure that you can restrain yourself. Right? I've seen you do it. You can do it."

Kate nodded shakily, trying to pull herself together. "OK," she whispered, curling a lock of hair around her finger – Jane slapped her hand away – "OK."

Then they heard the boys, and Darcy was up like a shot. Kate took one last look in the mirror – yes, she was gorgeous – and then turned to face the door. Loki was behind that door. She could hear Darcy deliberately being difficult, and couldn't help the giggle that bubbled up in her throat.

It was going to be a beautiful day.

Finally, the door burst open and Loki barged in – Kate leapt up to greet him – and he stopped short, staring, mouth agape.

The rest of the wedding party tumbled in behind him, smirking. Thor wore the biggest smirk of all as he moved forward to shut his brother's mouth.

But it was as if that touch was magic, or poison – instead of closing the gap between them and kissing her, like Kate knew that he had done on their wedding day, Loki shut his mouth, looked up at Thor, swallowed, and then looked back at her. The light was gone from his eyes – it was all hard hate and malice. Kate took a step back as dread unfolded in her chest.

Loki reached up and peeled his face away to reveal grey, scarred skin and too many teeth. Thor did the same, as did her friends behind them. They ripped the silks and leathers and lace from their bodies to reveal armour and weaponry; before, there hadn't been enough space between Darcy's painted-on sheath dress for a piece of tissue paper, and now there was a holster with an alien rifle resting on the hip of the monster who'd been hiding in her skin. Kate backed up against the window as the room filled with grinning chiaturi.

She knew that she should do something, anything; scream, attack, wake up, but she couldn't seem to draw enough oxygen into her body to think properly. The chiaturi filed out, grim and warlike, without a glance backward.

The bedroom was empty. The palace was dead.

Kate didn't know how long she stood there, but before she knew it, darkness was bleeding out of the shadows. Her lungs were slowly starting to work again, and she'd just mustered up a breath when the night was split by a desperate scream.


Loki was dreaming about having sex with Kate. Depressingly, he knew that it had to be a dream, because the way things were going, he'd never have sex with Kate again.

But it was so real.

His hands traced a line up her thighs and over her ass before settling on the flare of her hips as she straddled him and cupped his face in her hands. I love you.

And then she was braced on her forearms above him, her breasts pressed flat against his chest as she kissed him senseless. There was nothing quite like Kate's kisses: they were hungry, teasing, as ripe as a golden mango and just as juicy.

He slipped a hand between their bodies, brushing against her – she bucked involuntarily against him and he couldn't quite help the groan that the jar of her hips elicited – and slid himself inside her heat with a gasp that could have been a prayer.

He rolled them over, caging her between his arms as his lips fell greedily to her neck, and thrust.

Kate screamed. Spurred on by the sound, he suckled at her neck harder, but when she screamed again, it ended in a strangled gurgle that had him recoiling from her in horror.

Kate was frostbitten and withered, patches of corrosive blue eating through her skin and flesh like a spreading cancer. Within seconds, he was kneeling astride a scattering of cold, cold bones.

Loki scrambled over to the side of the bed and vomited, retching until he wasn't sure if he had a stomach any more. When he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, he felt his heart stop beating.

Blue.

A low snigger sounded from the thick shadows in a corner of his room as he traced the clan markings on his face with a trembling finger.

You kill everything you love, O God of Chaos. Does it matter whose son you are when your very being is corrupt and poisoned?

Loki fought the urge to clap his hands over his ears as the Other taunted him from his perch. Fear demon, he realised, reaching wildly for the daggers that he kept in a drawer in his bedside table. He didn't know if the Other was actually in the room, or if he was merely a construct of the fear demons, but his main priority had to be leaving the nightmare. If he woke up, the Other, whether he was real or not, would not be able to follow him. Right?

Blocking out the taunts of the other, Loki clenched his fists tightly around the hilt of his daggers for comfort and shut his eyes, fighting to clear his mind.

He let his magic loose, seeking out weak points in the dream. It was as if a glass dome separated the waking world from him, but he hadn't been lauded as the most powerful magic-user that Asgard had ever seen for no reason.

Loki slammed the weight of his will against the dome, satisfied at the cracks of light that radiated from the point of impact. He reared back and struck again.

The nightmare broke on the third try, and he could hear the Other's howl of pain as the spell collapsed, propelling him back into his conscious body.


Loki bolted up, a dagger in his left hand raised to throw. The one that had been in his right was already embedded, quivering, in the wall opposite his bed from where he'd flung it upon breaking through into wakefulness.

Kicking his sheets away, he padded over to retrieve it, straining to hear something, anything that proved that he wasn't the only living thing in the building.

"Jarvis?"

The AI did not answer. For the first time, the tower was entirely silent, the air oppressive and suffocating.

Loki knew then that something was very, very wrong.

Throwing on his leathers and armour, he sheathed his daggers and sent out doubles to check on the other occupants of the residence, racing to Kate's room himself. He teleported through the locked door to find her thrashing in bed, mouth fixed in an agonised O of pain. Loki's palms broke out in sweat. Fuck.

He crossed the room in three long-legged strides to try and shake her awake, but she only shrank from his touch, tears streaming down her cheeks, as she lay trapped in her nightmare. As a last resort, he grabbed her face and tried to ease into her mind, but found that it was wrapped in a viscous darkness that clung to the edges of his own as he tried to slip through it, making him nauseous. He couldn't risk punching through the barrier – doing so might accidentally cause irreparable damage to her mind. Getting into the head of another person was much more complicated than getting out of the prison of his own.

Loki smoothed his fingers, slick with her tears and their mingled sweat, across the knives of his wife's cheekbones. Kate was now openly sobbing: great, wracking heaves threatened to choke her in her sleep. The sound of her distress galvanised her husband into action.

He'd failed to save her once before. He wouldn't let it happen again.

Changing tactics, he placed his thumb in the middle of her forehead and rummaged around her energy, checking for interference.

He smelled it before he found it. A thick, cloying enchantment sat heavily on her sleep, chaining her to her dreams and whatever demons awaited her in them.

There was only one other magic user in this world that could sustain an enchantment of such strength.

As his doubles reported that all the other occupants of the tower – Ian, Thor, Jane, Pepper, and Stark – were troubled in sleep, he was already rushing up to the terrace, where he'd only just set up the protection charm that morning. Instead of recalling his doubles to him, he sent them to wake the other members of the Avengers who weren't living in the Tower – from what he could sense, the rest of New York was, as of yet, unaffected by poisoned sleep. He didn't even stop to slide the glass doors open, choosing to teleport right through them to the easel, only to bounce back as he hit a protection barrier that hadn't been there hours before. Stumbling back, he whirled around at the sound of an exhilarated laugh.

Sigyn was leaning against the balcony out on the terrace, obviously immensely satisfied with herself as she appraised her work proudly. The reflecting mirror had been turned inwards and warped, the web of the dreamcatcher woven through with silk threads dipped in fresh tar.

She smiled at him as he threw an immobilisation spell at her, deflecting it with an easy flick of her wrist. "You've gotten rusty, Loki," she chided, sidling along the length of the railing.

He eyed her warily, palming a blade in his hand. Sigyn was too clever to engage in trash talk, and the only way he'd get anything out of her was if he caught her alive and applied the right amount of pressure.

At least, that would have been true two centuries ago. For all of her self-possession, there was a wild gleam in her eyes that he'd never noticed before. He reinforced the magicked steel of the dagger in his hand and let it fly at the bastardised protection charm – but with a shriek of laughter, Sigyn clapped her hands and the dagger shattered in mid flight.

She definitely couldn't have done that two centuries ago.

"Isn't it beautiful?" She pointed gleefully at her mirror, which was reflecting a chaotic smudge of shifting shadows pierced with a metallic blue that was bright enough to make his teeth hurt. "Is this the rush that men feel on the battlefield? The glory of magic and power?"

Refusing to indulge her, he continued looking for an opening as she cleverly threw shield after shield up in response to his silent telepathic probing.

Then, a flash of gold in the mirror caught his eye, and he glanced over at the roiling mess. The chaos of darkness had given way to a blurry image of Kate in her wedding dress, collapsed against a wall and weeping with her head in her hands.

Distracted, he almost missed the shard of glass that Sigyn spelled at him. He threw up a shield just in time, but it was shaky and disintegrated upon the projectile's impact, letting it through to slice him in the arm as he spun away.

He circled back to face Sigyn, defences up and heart pounding. Noting the way her eyes avidly followed the spread of blood through his sleeve, he felt sick to his stomach: how had no one noticed her descent into madness?

Deciding that perhaps it was time to break out an old trick, Loki created a multitude of doubles, taking advantage of her split second of confusion to teleport behind her and turn Jötunn. Sigyn's forte was illusion magic, so she could see through this sort of trickery in a heartbeat, but she hadn't been expecting him to grab her hands with his blue ones and hold. The agony of frostbite drove her to her knees. He stepped around her as she held her ruined hands to her chest, and the shock of his Jötunn form gave him the opening to casually drive a dagger through her belly.

Sigyn fell, head snapping back as her blood slowly pooled around her on the terrace. Unfazed by the gore, Loki knelt by her side and twisted the knife buried in her abdomen to get her attention as her eyes began to glaze. It was time for interrogation, and Loki was very, very good at interrogation.

"What did you do?"

Sigyn chuckled, blood bubbling to her lips. "Still so ignorant, Highness," she rasped. "So weak that your own wife left you to rot in your incompetence."

It was a real struggle to refrain from killing her then and there. Gritting his teeth, he shoved his rage aside in light of the more pressing issue at hand.

"What did you do?"

Sigyn gurgled and spat a wad of blood at him. It landed on his cheek, but he didn't move to wipe it away, opting to break her right elbow instead. To her credit, she only shuddered at the snap. "You're too late," she whispered. "The chiaturi are coming from their nightmares. The Other is coming for you. You should have recognised power when you had it. Love has made you weak."

And with that, she made a violent gesture with her left hand, despite the fact that her fingers were brittle and mottled with frostbite. Caught by surprise, Loki was tossed backward by a wave of magic. Sigyn staggered to her feet, wrenched the knife from her body and lunged towards him –

– Only to fall forward with a quiet sigh as a blue bolt from a chiaturi rifle hit her in the back.

Loki lurched forward to catch her on instinct, but had to throw both himself and the dead weight that was Sigyn to the side to avoid a second shot from the monster racing at them on a skiff.

He fell awkwardly, and as he was struggling to shift the wounded woman aside so that he could get a clear shot at the new threat, a single shot ran out, loud and clear. The chiaturi toppled off the skiff, and Loki ducked as it skimmed over his head and crashed over the side of the building.

The Black Widow stood just outside the sliding doors, barely looking winded from what must have been a frantic dash across the city to get to the tower ASAP.

A soft grunt brought his attention back to the dying woman in his arms. Rolling her over, he tried to wipe some blood off her face, but only succeeded in smearing it more liberally across her forehead. Bright sparks of magic wove from wound to wound, trying desperately to knit sinew and muscle back together, but there was too much damage to heal. It was a powerful reminder that even magic had its limits; even immortality was no match for brutality.

Inexplicably, as she opened her eyes to gaze tiredly at him for the last time, he felt a wave of sadness crash through him. He'd loved this woman, once upon a time, and she'd loved him back. He'd probably never know why she'd done this; why she'd allied with monsters, why she'd callously put the lives of others in danger, why she'd set herself on a path that she'd known might end in his death if all went well.

"I wanted more," she sighed, as if she'd read his mind. "… Worth little as woman. Worth nothing as non-warrior. Why… not?"

And then she was gone. Loki gently closed her eyes and lay her on the ground, carefully arranging her hands to rest peacefully on her bloodied stomach as a mark of respect for the Sigyn he had known. Then he rose, wincing as the mirror emitted a loud keening before shattering, sending tiny bits of glass everywhere. Thankfully, it was on the other side of the terrace, missing him and Nat.

The Widow had tramped over his side and was glaring at the rest of the city as chiaturi skiffs winked into being. "We're in shit," she announced optimistically. "I don't know where they're coming from, but we've got to stop them from coming. Cap's evacuating every civilian within a ten block radius with the help of the police, and Clint's got a nest somewhere nearby. Banner hulked out when we got here; I imagine that he's doing some damage already. But we need more people if we're going to get them all. Where are Stark and Thor?"

He filled her in as he stomped over to the ruined protection charm and studied its remains, trying to figure out how Sigyn had adapted it to suit her needs as he absently healed the superficial cut that she had inflicted with her glass missile. A brief examination of the component parts of the broken dreamcatcher showed that she'd managed to draw together an abundance of negative energy generated by fear demons to form a kind of portal. It would remain open for as long as the sleepers remained asleep, so she'd cast an enchantment over the occupants of the tower and turned the mirror inwards to amplify its stability. She'd only had enough power to focus the attention of the demons on the tower, but the collective dreams of six people would be enough to transport an army of chiaturi to Midgard if the portal remained open for long enough – in other words, if the sleepers remained unconscious for long enough. The sleep-spell would have lifted with Sigyn's death, but by now, the fear demons would have been able to use the terror generated by the nightmares of the tower's residents to trap them in their dreams.

He'd have to head to the astral plane himself to break the hold of the demons in order to wake the sleepers and close the portals.

Gritting his teeth, he called his doubles to him. Nat twitched as a dozen Lokis burst into being beside her, but in classic Black Widow fashion, she took it in her stride. "Defend the city with the remaining Avengers and take your orders from them," he told them tersely. "Ensure that the residential floors remain unmolested. I will attempt to close the portals, but our physical bodies must remain whole and undamaged whilst our minds are on the astral plane. I relinquish your command to the Widow. Serve me well."

Nat acknowledged the transfer in authority of his doubles over to her with a determined nod. "Godspeed, Loki."

They gripped arms in a gesture of comradeship before he teleported away.

He was still wary of bashing through the naturally defended consciousness of the regular person, but there was one person here who was predisposed to a wandering mind that could pull him into the plane. If Ian had months or years of training, perhaps his mental walls would be more difficult to breach. However, given that Loki had only begun teaching him properly less than six hours ago, it was unlikely that his mind would be fully closed, even now.

Loki materialised in Ian's room, placed his hands on the boy's fevered head, and opened his mind.


A/N: I'm sorry that this took a while; the weekend has been mad. Updates might come a little more slowly, because the next few weeks are going to be incredibly busy for me (and I'll be travelling a lot; gotta enjoy the last vestiges of summer before I start on my final year of law school!). BUT; the good news is that there are only a couple of chapters left.

Let me know what you think about this chapter! IDK about you, but I always feel really motivated to write after receiving reviews (lulz).